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3 - The Unity of Reason and the Diversity of Life

The Idea of a System in Kant and in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy

from I - Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2012

Allen W. Wood
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Songsuk Susan Hahn
Affiliation:
Université Concordia, Montréal, Québec
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Summary

INTRODUCTION

One of the most striking features of “continental” philosophy, and especially of the theories arising from German-speaking philosophy in the late eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century, consists in the fact that the concept of a ‘system’ plays a prominent role as a criterion for evaluating them. In almost no other age or context have the ideas of systematicity, systematic wholeness, and the form of a system been so bound up with the concept of philosophy itself. And this is true not only regarding positive evaluations but also negative ones. For some philosophers in this time the fulfillment of the criterion of systematicity was a direct and necessary condition for redeeming the claim to have provided a philosophical theory about something. Others, however, have seen the form of a system as an obstacle to any philosophical theory’s offering us any illuminating results whatever regarding any object at all.

That such controversial assessments could have arisen at all shows clearly all by itself that in this period there was a determinate spectrum of expectations regarding resorting to the concept of a system. This spectrum cannot be adequately accounted for if one is content to assume that the concept of a system, as in the eighteenth century Wolffian tradition, stands only for the idea of a certain methodical ordering of sentences (judgments, propositions) – thus for something like “being a science” (Wissenschaftlichkeit). In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the idea of a science was, to be sure, bound up with that of a system but did not exhaust it. We can see this if we attend to the fact that on the basis of a description of the interest in systematicity that relies on the concept of being scientific we cannot make sense of the fact that a conception of philosophy that does without the claim to systematicity does not automatically give up the claim to being scientific; nor on this basis can we understand how in this period the suspicion of systematicity could have arisen at all. In other words, we cannot in this way understand how a philosophy that is “only” scientific can be presented as a serious philosophical undertaking without making any claim to be systematic.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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References

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These considerations, presented in outline, are especially clear in the early critical writings of Hegel, above all in The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (1801) and in Faith and Knowledge (1802)
This Hegelian solution was not entirely without its precursors. Above all, F. W. J. Schelling had considered a similarly “holistic” concept of reason up until his writings on the philosophy of identity at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Cf. especially his most influential work, The System of Transcendental Idealism (1801)
Wolff, Christian (De differentia intellectus systematici et non systematici, 1729)
Thus in his chapter “On the System of Philosophy in General” in the second edition of his work Short Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1841)
The first part of Lotze’s unfinished System of Philosophy, which appeared under the title Logic: Three Books of Thinking, Investigating and Cognizing (1874, 2nd ed., 1880)
In the present connection, two relatively early and also very well-known writings of Jacobi are of greatest significance. These are (1) On the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Moses Mendelssohn (first published in 1785), which led to the so-called pantheism controversy and then appeared in a second edition, expanded through several supplements in 1789, and (2) David Hume on Belief, or Idealism and Realism (1787), to which was added as a very critical supplement a highly critical treatise about Kant, under the title On Transcendental Idealism
Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, Mimic-pathetic-dialectic Compilation: An Existential Contribution by Johannes Climacus (1846), eds. and trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), Kierkegaard, Sk VII
The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. R. J. Hollingdale [New York: Random House, 1968 (1967)], §584, 314–15)

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