Of all the major figures behind the Kant revival of the 1860s the strangest is Kuno Fischer.1 Few thinkers threw themselves so fully and forcibly behind Kant’s rehabilitation. No one stressed more the abiding relevance of Kant’s philosophy, and no one was more successful in explaining Kant’s arcane doctrines to a wide audience. And yet Fischer was not, at least in any strict sense of the word, a Kantian. He was raised a Hegelian, and that he remained his entire life.
It is very misleading to refer to Fischer as a Hegelian manqué, as if he were a failed, second-rate, mock or would-be Hegelian.2 For Fischer was in the very centre of the neo-Hegelian movement, having as his close associates no less than Arnold Ruge and David Friedrich Strauß. His first articles in philosophy were devoted to the neo-Hegelian cause; and he wrote some very compelling defences of the Hegelian position against two of its most formidable radical critics, Ludwig Feuerbach and Max Stirner. Such, indeed, was Fischer’s allegiance to neo-Hegelianism that, like Ruge and Strauß, he became one of its martyrs, forced out of academia for proclaiming pantheism from the podium.
Yet how could it be that this staunch neo-Hegelian became such a powerful spokesman for neo-Kantianism? That, in short, is the mystery of Kuno Fischer. There was indeed a Kantian side to his thinking; but that Kantian side did not coalesce with his Hegelian one, and the two remained locked in conflict all his life. Not that Fischer was unaware of their conflict. The major project of his philosophy was to synthesize Hegel and Kant, to unite both thinkers in a single system. Such was the task of two of his major philosophical works, his 1852 Logik und Metaphyik and his 1865 System der Logik und Metaphysik.
All throughout his philosophical development Fischer would struggle with these contradictions. His thinking was dynamic and protean, so that sometimes Hegel would get the upper hand over Kant, and sometimes Kant would get the upper hand over Hegel. From one angle his system appears a Kantianized Hegel, from another a Hegelized Kant. Yet, struggle though he did, it cannot be said that Fischer was successful in his syncretic ambitions. The contradictions between the Kantian and Hegelian sides of his system are so deep and fundamental that it proved impossible to resolve them. So obvious and basic are the contradictions that it is indeed hard to understand how Fischer attempted to put them together in the first place.
Part of the explanation for the mystery lies in Fischer’s historical empathy. It was Fischer’s great gift as an historian of philosophy to be able to enter into the spirit of each great philosopher and to recapture the essential core of his thought, the point from which everything followed. He could see the world from the point of view of the philosopher he attempted to revive and reconstruct. Like Hegel, he saw each philosophy as a work of art, an integral, autonomous whole. If we practise this methodology, it is easy to adopt and sympathize with incompatible philosophical views without seeing how to reconcile them. In his funeral speech for Fischer, Wilhelm Windelband said that Fischer once told him he did not regard himself as called upon to create a new system of philosophy, and that he did not think that the times were ready for one.3 That statement explains Fischer’s failure to develop a coherent system, and reveals that he saw his vocation more as an historian than philosopher.
Fischer’s Hegelianism seems to give the lie to our thesis that neo-Kantianism arose from a reaction against the neo-rationalism of the German idealist tradition. We have confirmed that generalization in all the early neo-Kantians we have considered so far. Fries, Herbart, Beneke and Helmholtz all called for a return to Kant to serve as a counter against speculative neo-rationalism. Yet, upon closer examination, Fischer is the proverbial exception that proves the rule. The Kantian strands in his thinking were in clear conflict with the Hegelian ones, and Fischer never succeeded in finding a stable synthesis of both. He demonstrated through this conflict that a neo-Kantian really cannot be a Hegelian after all. To be a Hegelian, Fischer had to transcend the Kantian critical limits upon knowledge; and to be a Kantian, he had to abjure the central theses of his Hegelian metaphysics. Fischer struggled for decades, from the 1840s to the 1880s, to reconcile this conflict, though, for reasons we shall soon see, he never succeeded.
Given Fischer’s pivotal role in the development of neo-Kantianism, and given our interest in the origins of neo-Kantianism, we have no choice but to examine Fischer’s philosophical development. Such an examination will show us the stresses and strains on Fischer’s thinking that made him at once both neo-Hegelian Kantian and neo-Kantian Hegelian. It will also offer us a glimpse into the evolution of neo-Kantianism in one of its central figures at one of its most critical periods.
Kuno Fischer was born July 23, 1824, in the Schlesian village of Sandewalde. His father, Karl Theodor Fischer, was a pastor in the local church. His mother died when he was very young, a loss Fischer felt his entire life. Fischer received his first education from his father, and then from a private tutor after his father moved in 1832 to serve as the pastor primarius in the neighbouring village of Winzig. He attended the Gymnasium in Posen, where he excelled in classical languages and German literature.
Fischer began his university education in 1844 at Leipzig, where he stayed only one semester. He then moved to Halle, where he studied for the next three years. It was little wonder that the young Fischer became a Hegelian. In both Leipzig and Halle he was exposed to strong Hegelian influences. During his semester at Leipzig, he heard the lectures of Hermann Christian Weiße (1801–1866), whose philosophy was permeated with Hegelian themes. Though a sharp critic of Hegel, Weiße still adopted some of the fundamentals of his philosophy, primarily his dialectic and logic.4 After moving to Halle, Fischer again came under strong Hegelian influence. There he was a student of two prominent Hegelians, J.E. Erdmann (1805–1892) and Julius Schaller (1810–1868), both of whom made an impact upon him. Schaller and Erdmann were Hegelian hardliners, apologists for Hegel’s philosophy when it was becoming less fashionable. Schaller wrote a tract defending Hegel against his critics, who, he argued, had criticized Hegel from a standpoint he had already overcome.5 Erdmann, one of the great historians of philosophy of the 19th century, formulated a programme for a scientific history of philosophy, a programme inspired by Hegel and the model for Fischer’s own work.6
While still a student at Halle, Fischer entered the ranks of the neo-Hegelian movement. In 1846 he began to write reviews and articles for Oswald Marbach’s Literatur- und Kunstbericht,7 all of which defend a strict Hegelian position. The 1840s was not the most promising time to be a young Hegelian. This decade marks the beginning of the end of the neo-Hegelian movement. Ever since the accession of Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1840, the movement had ceased to enjoy the patronage of the Prussian government, and it had come under increasing censorship and prosecution. The government had shut down Arnold Ruge’s Hallische Jahrbücher, the main journal of the movement in 1840, and it did the same to its successor, Die Deutsche Jahrbücher, in 1843. Still undaunted, Ruge and others made renewed attempts to revive a neo-Hegelian journal, a common organ for the movement. One enthusiastic supporter of this cause was the young Kuno Fischer himself. In an article for the Literatur- und Kunstbericht he claimed that the most pressing task of the age was to revive a common Hegelian journal.8 Fischer went on to praise the Hallische Jahrbücher, which “had dominated five years of German cultural history”, and whose editor was the “the Daniel O’Connell of the Hegelian philosophy.” After reading these lines, Ruge befriended Fischer, recruiting him for more neo-Hegelian journalism.9 And so, for the next two years, Fischer wrote articles on Hegelian philosophy for neo-Hegelian journals and newspapers, first for the Leipziger Revue, then for Otto Wigand’s Die Epigonen and Arnold Ruge’s Die Akademie.10
In the complicated neo-Hegelian spectrum of the 1840s, Fischer occupies a middle position, steering between the extremes of right and left, conservative and radical.11 Following Schaller and Erdmann, he defended Hegel’s metaphysics because he saw it as a bulwark against the radical materialism of the left and the supernaturalistic theism of the right. Such a stand put Fischer at odds with the left-wing neo-Hegelians, with radicals like Max Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach, who saw Hegel’s metaphysics as little more than a relic of Christian theology, the final form of alienation and hypostasis. On the other hand, Fischer did not endorse the position of those right Hegelians, such as Phillip Marheineke and Karl Daub, who wanted to rescue Christian theology through Hegel’s philosophy.12 While Fischer held that some core Christian beliefs, namely, the trinity or incarnation, could be rationalized according to Hegel’s dialectic, he saw that rationalization as a transformation, stripping the beliefs of their mythical and anthropocentric meaning; on no account could the beliefs be saved in their original meaning and form.13 Fischer stressed against the orthodox that Hegel’s dialectic had completely destroyed traditional Christian theism.14 Theism had presupposed a dualism between man and God, where man sees God as an alien, transcendent being; but the dialectic negated such alienation, placing man within God and making him a living appearance of the divine. It is important to see, however, that while Fischer regarded traditional Christian theology as outmoded, he still believed, unlike left Hegelians, that religion itself is perfectly legitimate as a form of life, as feeling, devotion and ritual.
Fischer’s critical stance towards conservative Christianity appears in full force in his endorsement of David Friedrich Strauß’ biblical criticism, which he regarded as revolutionary, the complete destruction of traditional theology.15 According to Fischer, Strauß had shown that religious belief is essentially a form of myth, and that it cannot be rescued as dogma. “A formal restoration of previous dogmatics can be no more”, he declared in one of his review articles.16 Just as Fischer’s endorsement of Ruge led to friendship, the same happened with Strauß. Fischer and Strauß met in 1854 in Heidelberg and they soon became close friends. Fischer’s friendships with Ruge and Strauß, two leading figures of neo-Hegelianism, show his deep involvement in the very heart of that movement.
The most important of Fischer’s early neo-Hegelian articles was his critique of Stirner and Feuerbach. The critique of Stirner is in an article entitled ‘Moderne Sophisten’, which appeared in several installments in the 1847 Leipziger Revue.17 The critique of Feuerbach came in the article ‘Ludwig Feuerbach und die Philosophie unserer Zeit’, which appeared in 1848 in Die Akademie.18 Though published separately, both articles defend Hegel, and criticize Stirner and Feuerbach, for similar reasons. Stirner and Feuerbach were rebels against Hegel’s metaphysics because they saw his absolute, the single infinite substance, as an alien, abstract being standing over and above the individual and oppressing him. Hegel’s philosophy did not free the individual from the alienation of religion and theology, they argued, but only reinstated that alienation in a more abstract intellectual form. Hegel’s critique of hypostasis, when taken to its ultimate conclusion, explodes his own philosophy as well, because his absolute turns out to be only another subtle and sophisticated form of hypostasis. Against this line of argument, Fischer first admits that Stirner and Feuerbach both have a point, insofar as right-wing Hegelians often give an alienated and hypostasized interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy. But he then goes on to argue that their critique rests upon a one-sided interpretation of Hegel’s thought. They stress the objective, universal and abstract side of that philosophy, failing to realize that it was Hegel’s aim to unite the objective and subjective, the universal and particular, the abstract and concrete. Hegel would have agreed with everything they said against a one-sided objectivist conception of the absolute; but his aim was to go further and to integrate the subjective with the objective, to restore “the rights of subjectivity”. Thus Stirner and Feuerbach only said against Hegel what Hegel himself had already said against Christianity. They rail against the Hegelian absolute from the perspective of the finite, individual self; but they lose sight of Hegel’s important argument that the self is more than finite and individual, that it realizes itself only by becoming part of the infinite and universal, the community of ethical life. The self realizes itself not through its personal or individual needs, as Feuerbach and Stirner assume, but only in and through the mutual self-consciousness of spirit. First and last Hegel’s philosophy is a philosophy of freedom, which teaches that freedom is realized only in the community, only in accepting the rational authority of law. Seeing freedom as little more than the right to satisfy my arbitrary individual wishes, Stirner and Feuerbach do not appreciate this dimension of Hegel’s philosophy. Hence they are little more than “modern sophists”.
Fischer’s advocacy of the neo-Hegelian cause eventually went beyond the confines of political journalism. It became the motive for something even grander, namely his first book, Diotima. Die Idee des Schönen,19 which appeared in 1849, in the wake of the Revolution of the previous year. The ostensible aim of this book was to provide a popular introduction to aesthetics, especially for women; but Fischer insists that aesthetics has to be set in the context of a general worldview.20 Aesthetics, he argues, is not just one branch of learning but “a world principle”. Diotima was meant to be a popular introduction to Hegelian metaphysics, using aesthetics as a lure for broader educational and political goals. What, though, did aesthetics have to do with neo-Hegelianism? What, indeed, did it have to do with the Revolution that was now convulsing the political world? “Why do I write about beauty when the world now strives bloodily for freedom?”, Fischer asks, much like Schiller had some fifty years earlier.21 And he responds, much like Schiller, that “freedom achieved is beauty, and it is no treason against that striving if one recalls its happy goal”. (xii)
Diotima is an important and interesting document in Fischer’s philosophical development because it gives a simple and straightforward exposition of his early neo-Hegelian metaphysics. The main principle behind that metaphysics is what Fischer calls “the principle of subject-object identity”, that is, the thesis that mind and nature, subject and object, are ultimately the same. This principle is common to Schelling and Hegel, Fischer explains. While Schelling invented it, Hegel gave it its proper logical foundation. The central question about this principle is which side of the equation should predominate, the subjective or objective, mind or nature (45). Do we resolve the subjective into the objective, the mind into nature, or the objective into the subjective, nature into the mind? “Is it spirit that creates and does everything, or is it nature that is everything in everything?” Schelling tried to give equal weight to both sides, but Hegel was right, Fischer thinks, to give primacy to mind over nature, to the subjective over the objective. “The unity of spirit and nature cannot be natural but must be spiritual … The nature of spirit is the logic of actuality.” (49) Why is this so? The point follows, Fischer argues, from the chief principles of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie (46–50). According to Naturphilosophie, all of nature consists in a hierarchy of stages of development, in increasingly greater degrees of organic development and organization, the highest level of which consists in nothing less than human self-consciousness. Hence nature finally realizes its own energies and powers in subjectivity, which is the inner truth of nature herself. The single activity that appears as necessity in nature becomes freedom in man. The realm of freedom is history, which consists in the self-consciousness of freedom (50).
Though its metaphysics is fundamentally Hegelian, it would be a mistake to describe Diotima as a purely Hegelian work. Some of Fischer’s attitudes prove to be more Romantic than Hegelian. The entire atmosphere of the work is Romantic, taking us back to the early Romantic circles in Jena and Berlin. True to its namesake, Diotima is a paean to the powers of art and beauty, reaffirming the apotheosis of art of the early Romantic circle. The essentials of Fischer’s aesthetic theory are straightforwardly Romantic. He puts forward what he calls “an aesthetic worldview”, which is “the aesthetic pantheism” of Frühromantik. According to this worldview, God is one with the entire universe, which is a work of art. The divine appears in nature as beauty, and the goal of the artist is to reproduce that beauty (86). Elements of this aesthetic pantheism also reappear in Hegel, of course, but Hegel had always distanced himself from the Romantic circle, and in two basic ways. First, he placed philosophy above religion, and religion above art, as a means of knowing the truth. Second, he maintained that art was obsolete in the modern world, because the rational comprehension of philosophy stood above the intuition and feeling of art. It is a strong indication of Fischer’s independence from Hegelianism that he does not accept either of these Hegelian theses. While he does not explicitly take issue with Hegel, he maintains their very opposite. Rather than placing religion above art, Fischer places art above religion, because it is only in art that the feelings of religion are articulated and become visible. And rather than maintaining the obsolescence of art, Fischer thinks that the arts will be reborn in a new social and political order (108, 112). It is only in Fischer’s attitude towards Romantic irony that his persistent Hegelianism reasserts itself. Like Hegel before him, Fischer finds Romantic irony the most extreme form of egoism and alienation from the social and political world (156–175).
Such, in sum and substance, was Fischer’s early neo-Hegelianism. It is hard to read Fischer’s Diotima and early articles without admiring his grasp of Hegel’s philosophy and without admitting that he had a strong defence against Hegel’s critics. This was no superficial convert to the Hegelian cause. The young Fischer had his reasons, and good ones, for being a Hegelian. All this leaves us, then, with the question: Why did such a convinced Hegelian ever become a Kantian? That is the mystery we have to unravel in the following sections.
In September 1850 Fischer took his habilitation exam in Heidelberg, which he passed with flying colours. Now having the necessary qualification to teach at the university, Fischer began to lecture on logic, metaphysics and the history of philosophy in the autumn semester. His lectures proved to be extremely popular, so much so that a larger lecture hall was necessary to accommodate his growing audience. The students were drawn to Fischer’s lectures partly because of his rhetorical skills, and partly because they liked what they heard. Fischer was teaching them the latest doctrines, the modern, progressive and liberal ideas behind the Revolution of 1848. Not least because of the success of his lectures, these early years in Heidelberg were some of the happiest in Fischer’s life. It seemed he had found his calling in teaching.
That happiness vanished suddenly in September 1853. Fischer’s popularity had brought him enemies, especially in the theology faculty, who not only envied his success but who also suspected his neo-Hegelian ideology. Daniel Schenkel, professor of theology and head of the theology faculty, was alarmed by the popularity of Fischer’s lectures, whose content undermined the Christian dogmas taught by the theology faculty. Fearing for the reputation of the theology faculty, Schenkel duly informed the High Consistory in Karlsruhe of Fischer’s dangerous lectures, which were corrupting the youth. Although Schenkel insisted that he had advised only employing another lecturer in philosophy to combat Fischer’s influence,22 the Consistory pushed for something more harsh and drastic: the revocation of Fischer’s lectureship. Even though the university senate and philosophy faculty rejected this measure, matters were taken out of their hands by a change in government in June 1853. The early 1850s were dangerous times for young liberals and radicals, especially for those who espoused their views from the lecterns. For these were years of reaction and retrenchment after the Revolution of 1848, and the new authorities were determined to keep tight controls over press and education. The new education minister Friedrich von Wechmar, a staunch reactionary, peremptorily deprived Fischer, without appeal or hearing, of his venia legendi, his right to lecture. And so for the next three years Fischer would live in the wilderness, with no prospect of employment or a steady income. An outcast, he now joined the company of Feuerbach and Strauß. Fischer had become the latest neo-Hegelian martyr.
What, exactly, did Fischer teach that proved so provocative to Schenkel and the theology faculty? We know well what Fischer said on the podium from 1850 to 1852 because he published the first part of his lectures in 1852, which eventually became the first volume of his Geschichte der neuern Philosophie.23 It would be these lectures that Schenkel would later cite as evidence against Fischer. The especially offensive parts are the 14th and 29th lectures, which are blunt statements of rationalism and pantheism. There Fischer puts forward the bold argument that all philosophy, if it is only consistent and complete, ends in pantheism. He defines pantheism as the thesis that God is the world-order, the universe as a whole. All philosophy is pantheistic, Fischer argues, because philosophy is the attempt to know things through reason, and to know anything through reason requires knowledge of the universe as a whole. Since everything in the universe is connected with every other thing, to know one thing requires knowing all things. The attempt to know anything through reason therefore demands that we know the universe as a whole, which is God itself. Hence all philosophy is pantheism. As Fischer summarized his argument: “For philosophy, rationalism [and] pantheism are the same; philosophy says we should know; rationalism says that we should know through concepts; and pantheism says that the conceived or known God is the eternal order.” (553–554)
Fischer’s thesis was not a little déjà vu. In 1786, in his Briefe über Spinoza, Jacobi sparked off “the explosion” of the famous “pantheism controversy” by advancing the thesis that all philosophy, if it is only consistent, ends in pantheism. That thesis had lost none of its power to provoke in the 1850s. Fully aware of this precedent, Fischer saw in Jacobi a kindred spirit.24 He agreed with Jacobi that rationalism ends in pantheism, that faith consists in feeling and action rather than dogma and doctrine, and that Leibniz’s philosophy is only a halfway house on the road to Spinozism. There were, however, two important differences between Fischer and Jacobi. First, Fischer did not equate pantheism with Spinoza’s naturalism. According to Fischer, Spinoza’s naturalism is indeed atheism, just as Jacobi always taught; but not all pantheism is naturalism. There is a generic concept of pantheism, which simply identifies God with the world-order; and there are more specific concepts depending on just how one defines that world-order. There is naturalistic pantheism, which identifies the world-order with nature; and there is spiritualistic pantheism, which identifies the world-order with spirit. Second, Fischer refuses Jacobi’s salto mortale, his leap of faith in a personal God and freedom. It is not necessary to resort to such desperate measures to save religion, Fischer argues, because the standpoint of philosophy stands above religion and explains its essential truths in rational terms. Rationalism does not destroy religion but preserves its essential content in conceptual and systematic form.
It was Fischer’s equation of pantheism with rationalism that proved so offensive to Schenkel and the theological faculty. Schenkel explained the rationale for the withdrawal of the venia legendi in an article in the Darmstadtischen Kirchen Zeitung, ‘Das Christenthum und modernes Philosophenthum’.25 The High Consistory in Karlsruhe, he said, based its charges against Fischer on those passages from his Geschichte der neuern Philosophie where he had affirmed that pantheism is the only rational worldview. That seemed to imply that Christian theism is irrational, given that it is completely opposed to pantheism. Schenkel states simply and firmly some of the classical reasons why theism and pantheism are incompatible. Theism demands a dualism between God and the world; but pantheism identifies the one with the other. Theism requires a personal God; but the absolute of pantheism is impersonal. Theism holds that God creates the world from nothingness and by free will; but pantheism maintains that the world is eternal and exists of necessity. For all these reasons, Schenkel concluded that Fischer’s pantheism was utterly at odds with Christian doctrine. Rather than the personal living God of Christianity, Fischer had simply divinized the world itself, which was tantamount to paganism and atheism. Schenkel’s defence of the faith was very much the standard orthodox position. Refusing to take a salto mortale, he affirmed that the characteristic doctrines of Christianity are based on revelation, on the divine word as stated in Scripture. Schenkel ended his piece by citing a rather implausible ally: Heinrich Heine. It was Heine who admitted all when he said that pantheism is really only “a bashful atheism”.
Although Fischer could make no appeal against his dismissal, he defended himself against Schenkel’s charges in two tracts, Das Interdict meiner Vorlesungen and Apologie meiner Lehre, which both appeared in 1854.26 Neither makes for edifying reading. Both are filled with petty polemics and righteous indignation. For the most part, they add little to clarify Fischer’s own philosophy. Indeed, they even obscure and distort it. Rather than clearly stating his views, taking his stand and accepting the consequences, Fischer is evasive, denying the obvious implications of his views and twisting their meaning to make them appear less heterodox. He insists that he never wrote that non-pantheistic philosophy is irrational,27 though that is the clear implication of his thesis that all rationalism ends in pantheism. Rather than disputing with conservative Christian theists, Fischer protests that his real target was the radicals, “certain materialists, certain sophists, certain legal philosophers of today”.28 Nothing from the original context, however, indicates that he ever had these figures in mind. Fischer had indeed done battle against the radicals in some of his early journal articles, but these are not explicit in the Geschichte. On the whole, though he squirms and squawks, Fischer is guilty as charged. While we can accept his protestations that he has nothing against religion, his pantheism is fundamentally heterodox, flatly contrary to Christian dogma, and for just the reasons Schenkel cited. While Fischer distances himself from Spinozian naturalism, the monism and rationalism of his pantheism still undermine Christian theism. Its monism leaves no place for the distinction between God and world; and its rationalism gives no room for revelation or divine mysteries. Rather than admitting these points, Fischer simply chooses to ignore them. Because he was so evasive, and even twisted his original meaning, Schenkel could come to only this damning conclusion about the motives of his opponent: “Carrière um jeden Preis”.29
Not that these tracts are complete write-offs, non-entities from a philosophical point of view. Towards the close of the Apologie meiner Lehre Fischer gives us what we have been long waiting for: a clear and simple statement of his general worldview.30 Fischer had already made it very clear in Diotima and his Geschichte that he, as a philosopher, is a pantheist; he did not explain, however, what form his pantheism took. Although he made it clear that he rejected Spinoza’s naturalistic pantheism, he said very little about the idealistic or spiritualistic pantheism that he opposed to it. Now in the Apologie we get a clearer account of this idealistic or spiritualistic version of pantheism. According to this version, the order of things consists in spirit and everything is its creation, a mode of this single infinite living and self-conscious substance. This spirit is not something supernatural and mysterious because it appears as the world-order itself, the intelligible unity of all things. Fischer conceives this spiritualistic or idealistic pantheism as the middle path between two extremes: naturalistic and supernaturalistic pantheism. A naturalistic pantheism is materialism, and a supernaturalistic pantheism is irrationalism. The problem with naturalistic pantheism is that it cannot explain the phenomena of mental life—religion, art, science and morality—and so ends in a dualism between these phenomena and nature. The difficulty with supernaturalistic pantheism is that it makes the essence or whole of things mysterious. The great advantage of idealistic pantheism is that it maintains the unity of the world while making it perfectly comprehensible. Fischer insists that this idealistic pantheism is not only compatible with Christianity but that it even provides it with its necessary foundation. Christianity conceives of the divine as spirit, which is the incarnation, the idea of the divine becoming human, the infinite becoming finite. It is precisely this idea that is affirmed in idealist pantheism, which sees the infinite in the finite. Having expounded such a doctrine, Fischer now felt that he could rest with an easy conscience, fully able to claim that he is a true Christian.
Whatever we make of Fischer’s crudely sketched world-view, it shows his distance from left and right Hegelians alike: the left would never accept his sympathy with religion and his attempt to rationalize the incarnation; the right would not like his pantheistic rendition of the incarnation that left no place for the uniqueness of Christ or miracles. It was with his idealistic pantheism that Fischer hoped to save the Hegelian legacy, which represented for him the rational via media between materialism and supernaturalism.
In our account of Fischer’s philosophical development so far we have found a very convinced and able young Hegelian, one surprisingly mature for his age, and one who had the will and power to defend Hegel’s system against its most potent critics. After his dismissal from Heidelberg, Fischer had even become a martyr for the Hegelian system. This would have made him all the more a convinced and passionate Hegelian, given that martyrs, almost by definition, do not recant the cause for which they suffer. But all this leaves us with some difficult questions: When, how and why did Fischer become a Kantian?
All these questions are posed for us by a book that Fischer published in 1852 during the halcyon Heidelberg years: Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftslehre.31 This work is very much what we would expect from Fischer’s philosophical development hitherto. That is to say: it is very much a Hegelian work. It has all the trappings of a textbook of Hegelian logic and metaphysics. In his exposition Fischer follows the general structure and method of Hegel’s logic, adopting the same general categories and sub-categories, and using the same dialectic to reveal their inner contradictions and connections. But not only the structure and method of the work is Hegelian. In his introduction Fischer provides an historical account of the development of philosophy from Kant to Hegel that is pure Hegel. According to this account, the contradictions and inadequacies in the philosophies of Kant, Fichte and Schelling are overcome in Hegel’s system. It is a story straight out of Hegel’s Geschichte der Philosophie.32
Yet there is another aspect of Fischer’s early text that is very puzzling, indeed downright mysterious. Despite its many Hegelian features, there is also a deep Kantian dimension to Fischer’s early logic and metaphysics, one that seems to come out of nowhere. Now, for the first time, it seems as if Fischer has become, if only in part, a Kantian. Just what this new Kantian dimension amounts to Fischer explains in his preface. Here he states that “the problem of logic” is one and the same as “the problem of knowledge”, and that the problem of knowledge has to be seen from the transcendental standpoint formulated by Kant (xii). We can solve the problem of knowledge, Fischer maintains, only if we assume that there is one and the same being that acts in nature and that thinks in the mind, that is, only if we suppose that nature and spirit are identical (xiv). This is the so-called “principle of subject-object identity”, that Fischer already espoused in Diotima. That principle is central to, and characteristic of, Schelling’s and Hegel’s absolute idealism. Fischer stresses, however, that he adopts this principle “only within transcendental philosophy” (xiv; his italics). If he follows Hegel, he explains, that is only because Hegel “grasped and systematically developed the concept of identity in a transcendental spirit.” (xv) It is for this reason, and only for this reason, Fischer insists, that he makes common cause with Hegel. This means that the Hegelian system, as he puts it, “must be placed under the control of Kant” (xv; his italics). Because of the Kantian qualifications he places on the Hegelian system, Fischer calls his standpoint “critical philosophy of identity” (xvi).
A critical philosophy of identity! The Hegelian system “under the control of Kant”! That, in a phrase, is the new Kantian dimension of Fischer’s philosophy. But nothing in his earlier philosophical development prepares us for this. Whence this Kantian dimension? The mystery only deepens when we consider Fischer’s views on Kant just before or around the same time he wrote Logik und Metaphysik. In his Geschichte Fischer had espoused the most extreme rationalism, according to which everything in the universe must be knowable (at least in principle).33 From this perspective, the Kantian notion of a limit upon knowledge is utterly absurd. In his Apologie Fischer even stated that Kant’s philosophy is irrationalist because it places limits upon reason with its thing-in-itself.34
One apparent solution to the mystery is just to say that Fischer is still not that much of a Kantian after all. This is because the critical dimension of his philosophy is enveloped by the Hegelian, limited to just one moment of his Hegelian system. After all, the Hegelian dialectic comprises a negative or critical moment, which is intended to address the demands of Kantian criticism. Surely, this is what Fischer had in mind, it seems, when he wrote that Hegel grasped the concept of identity in a transcendental spirit. On this reading, then, Fischer’s Kantianism is a very domesticated kind, one under the control of Hegel.
Is this an accurate reading of the Logik und Metaphysik? The crucial question is how we are to understand the crucial qualifying adjective “critical” in Fischer’s philosophy of identity? Is the critical standpoint external or internal to Hegel’s system? Is it added onto the system as a watchguard to control or prevent its inherent dogmatic tendencies? Or is it already integral to Hegel’s system as one moment of the dialectic? So the question now before us is: Was Fischer a Kantian Hegelian, who made Kant the controlling force over Hegel? Or was he a Hegelian Kantian, who made Kant a mere moment of the Hegelian system?
At first Fischer seems to leave no doubt about his answer to this question. In his introductory historical exposition he makes it clear that the critical aspect is internal to Hegel’s system and central to its guiding spirit. Hegel’s philosophy is “the critical philosophy of identity” because it removes the dogmatic tendencies in Schelling’s “philosophy of identity”. Schelling understood the philosophy of identity in a purely dogmatic manner because he appealed to intellectual intuition, thus failing to provide a proper demonstration of the absolute standpoint (§17; 32). Hegel’s logic is a critical version of Schelling’s philosophy of identity because it attempts to demonstrate what Schelling simply presupposed (§16; 33). In attempting to show the necessity of the absolute standpoint in the Phänomenologie, Hegel synthesized the critical dimension of Fichte’s philosophy with the metaphysical aspect of Schelling’s philosophy (§18; 33–34).35 So the answer to our question seems clear: the critical aspect of Fischer’s system is absorbed into the Hegelian; in other words, Fischer is indeed a Hegelian Kantian.
Yet the whole business turns out to be more complicated. It would be a mistake to read Fischer’s early Logik und Metaphysik as a strictly Hegelian work, either by intention or implication. For the more we read into the details of the work, the more we find that Fischer is not simply expounding Hegel but also revising him, and indeed according to Kantian guidelines. In his account of some of the transitions of Hegel’s logic Fischer insists on giving them a new formulation, one that intends to improve on Hegel’s own texts. When discussing the transition from being to nothingness, for example, Fischer insists that the normal account of that transition misses the crucial factor empowering the move from being to nothingness: namely, the activity of thinking itself (§29Z; 56). The normal account states that being goes over into nothingness because being is completely indeterminate and therefore the same as nothingness. But this removes all reason for further development of the dialectic, Fischer complains, because the result of equating being with nothingness in this manner is a tautology, a mere zero, so that any further movement is stalled or a creation ex nihilo (§29Z; 56). The reason that being becomes nothingness is because the pure activity of thinking is not a thinking of anything, and so it is a thinking of nothingness. We must not think of the content of the concepts of being and nothingness, apart from the thinking of them, because that would be purely dogmatic. We must rather stress the thinking of these contents, the activity of the subject which makes them possible. In emphasizing the role of thinking, instead of the content of the thoughts themselves, Fischer was pointing to the subjective, transcendental dimension of these concepts.
We will leave aside here the question whether Fischer’s revision really improves upon this transition in Hegel’s logic. The point to see now is much simpler: that Fischer is re-writing the transition, introducing factors that are not present in Hegel’s own version. When Fischer takes issue with the normal account of the transition it is clear that he does so against Hegel himself, who stressed that being is nothingness because of being’s complete abstractness and indeterminacy.36 Hegel had insisted that his transitions are generated entirely by the content of the concepts themselves, so that we do not have to introduce or presuppose any activity behind them.37 But for Fischer everything rests upon introducing this activity of thinking, because for him it represents the transcendental standpoint, the ineliminable aspect of subjectivity that is necessary to all thought. He had insisted in his preface that one fundamental lesson of Kant’s philosophy is that “There cannot be any categories without a self-consciousness which produces them.” (xv) This was Fischer’s way of reaffirming the Kantian principle that the “I think” must be able to accompany all representations, that is, a concept has no meaning at all unless it could be the content for some self-consciousness. Schelling had insisted that we abstract from this “I”, the subject of knowledge, to get to the standpoint of subject–object identity;38 but Fischer regards such an effort as self-defeating: to abstract from myself I still presuppose myself. What makes Hegel’s philosophy of identity critical, in contrast to Schelling’s dogmatism, is partly its retention of the dimension of subjectivity, of self-awareness within the absolute standpoint.
Just how much Fischer was revising and transforming Hegel becomes apparent when we consider the tensions between his transcendental standpoint and Hegel’s philosophy. The transcendental standpoint means that we recognize limits upon our knowledge, that we do not pretend to know anything about reality in itself, that is, reality as it exists apart from and prior to consciousness itself. As transcendental philosophers the limits of our world are the limits of possible experience. Fischer himself duly takes note of these restrictions, endorsing them when he writes that the categories are applicable only to appearances, and that there can be only a metaphysics of appearances and not supersensible objects (§11, Z2b; 21).39 Such restrictions can hardly be described as Hegelian because they clash with fundamental claims of Hegel’s logic. Hegel had insisted that the movement of the dialectic is that of things themselves, and that his categories express the very essence of things. He famously described the realm of logic as “the exposition of God as he exists in his eternal being before the creation of nature and any finite mind.”40
So, given Fischer’s emphasis on subjectivity, on the activity as well as content of thinking, and given his limitation of knowledge to appearances, it seems more accurate to describe him as a Kantian rather than Hegelian. The Kantian dimension of his thinking is not absorbed into the Hegelian, as if it were only a moment of the dialectic; rather, it stands as a watchguard over the Hegelian, preventing it from transcending the limits of experience and from dispensing with the role of the subject in constituting the world. In the final analysis, then, Fischer seems to be really a Kantian Hegelian rather than a Hegelian Kantian.
This would seem finally to resolve the matter. Yet there are more complications still, because Fischer, having stressed the role of Kantian limitations of knowledge, never surrendered his earlier rationalism. Thus he tells us that the ordo idearum is one and the same as the ordo rerum (§24; 43), that “the objective dialectic is the self-development of objective reason (the essence of things)” (§24; 44), and that the idea studied by logic is “the real world itself”, which is the world “not in some state of appearance but in its true essence” (§22; 40). All this raises the question: How do we reconcile these metaphysical claims with Kant’s critical restrictions? How does Fischer square his radical rationalism with his critical principles?
We still have not fully answered our original question: When, how and why did Fischer become a neo-Kantian? The mystery has only increased, because Fischer’s apparent neo-Kantianism seems to come out of nowhere and to be utterly at odds with his Hegelianism. Rather than one question, we now have two. First, where did Fischer’s neo-Kantianism come from? Second, is Fischer’s system consistent? Is it possible to reconcile the Kantian and Hegelian sides of his logic and metaphysics? To answer these questions, we have no choice but further to unravel the tangled thread of Fischer’s philosophical development.
After the rescript against his lectures, Fischer languished in the wilderness for three years, from September 1853 to November 1856. Though unemployed, he was not idle, for he devoted himself to writing his Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, specifically the volumes on Bacon and Leibniz.41 The University of Berlin had attempted to acquire Fischer in the autumn of 1855, when several luminaries of that storied time and place—Alexander von Humboldt, August Böckh and Adolf Trendelenburg—pushed for the appointment.42 Yet the cultural minister Karl von Raumer blocked these efforts on the grounds of Fischer’s Lehrverbot in Heidelberg. Just as all seemed lost for Fischer in Berlin, he received from Moritz Seebeck, the head of the board of trustees at the University of Jena, the offer of an honorary ordinary professorship there. “And so little Jena has once again saved the honor of Germany”, Humboldt wrote to a friend upon hearing the news.43 Naturally, Fischer gladly and graciously accepted the offer. Not since Wolff’s restauration in Halle in 1740 had an academic appointment been so celebrated in Germany. For the next sixteen years Fischer would be a professor at Jena, the birthplace of classical German philosophy.
Fischer’s appointment to Jena brought with it a renewed interest in Kant. He had begun to lecture on Kant in his early Heidelberg years, but that came to an abrupt end with the rescript. A draft of a book on Kant was pushed to the backburner as Fischer worked on Bacon and Leibniz.44 But, in Jena, Fischer would have to lecture on Kant again, and the preparation for that made him rethink all his work on Kant. His inaugural lecture, appropriately enough, was on Kant. Entitled portentously Clavis kantiana,45 this lecture was little more than a summary of Kant’s doctrines and the stages by which he developed them. But it showed Fischer’s intentions and interests on an auspicious occasion. In the next years Fischer would devote himself to giving lectures on Kant at the university.
It is only from these lectures that we begin to see the reasons for Fischer’s steadily evolving Kantianism. Already in his 1852 Heidelberg lectures Fischer took a crucial step towards Kant by acknowledging his central role in the history of philosophy. Fischer taught that there are three basic stages in the history of modern philosophy: the dogmatic, which simply assumes, without examination, that thinking can know being; the critical, which examines this assumption but ends in scepticism; and the philosophy of identity, which restores this assumption on a critical level through dialectic.46 The thesis that the second stage is necessary to avoid dogmatism shows Fischer’s recognition of the pivotal role of the critical philosophy. Criticism would have to be one component of the Hegelian philosophy. Yet the 1852 lectures still do not go far enough because the final synthesis, the culminating stage of development, is still Hegelian. But in the late 1850s Fischer begins to give Kant an even greater importance, and one that even trumps Hegel. Like many philosophers in the 1850s and 1860s, Fischer felt that philosophy was going through a crisis, and that nothing less was at stake than the future of philosophy itself. The rapid growth of the empirical sciences seemed to doom philosophy to obsolescence; and philosophers like Stirner and Feuerbach saw philosophy as little more than disguised theology. Who could save philosophy from this crisis? Who could rescue it from imminent death? The answer was clear: Immanuel Kant. It was not Hegel, because he was more part of the problem than the solution. Hegel’s speculative metaphysics had become increasingly disreputable and unpopular because its methodology seemed utterly at odds with the new empirical and historical sciences. While Stirner and Feuerbach would only scoff at Hegel, they would have to respect Kant, whose critical method had been their ultimate inspiration too.
The impending crisis of philosophy, and Kant’s central role in resolving it, was the central theme of three important lectures that Fischer gave in the spring of 1860. These lectures, which were later published under the title Kant’s Leben und die Grundlage seiner Lehre,47 have often been regarded as a milestone in the history of neo-Kantianism—and with good reason. Not the least reason for their influence was the occasion and manner of their original delivery. Fischer spoke before a large audience in the palace of Sophie Luise, the grand duchess of Sachsen-Weimar; and the style of the lectures was clear, simple and lively, so that even a layman could follow. In simple and straightforward terms Fischer spelled out the reasons for the relevance of Kant’s philosophy to his age. Kant was now declared the saviour of philosophy, the Immanuel to lead philosophy out of the wilderness.
The aim of his lectures, Fischer tells us in the preface, is to explain “the foundations of the critical philosophy” and “the intellectual greatness of Kant” (v). His lectures will provide the shortest, but also a fully sufficient, answer to two important questions: “Who was Kant?” and “What is meant by critical philosophy?” (viii). The lectures are devoted to three specific topics: the character of Kant, the problem of knowledge, and the doctrine of space and time (vi). Kant’s greatest achievements, in Fischer’s opinion, were his discovery of the problem of knowledge and his theory of space and time. Two of the lectures are devoted to these achievements; a third discusses Kant’s life and personality.
Indisputably, the most important and influential of Fischer’s three lectures for the later reception of Kant was the second, that devoted to the problem of knowledge.48 This text is a locus classicus for the neo-Kantian conception of philosophy.49 If its ideas are familiar to us today, that is not least because Fischer put them forward so long ago. It is in this lecture that Fischer makes his case for why Kant’s conception of philosophy is still relevant to, and indeed crucial for, contemporary philosophy. He argues that only Kant’s conception rescues philosophy from its impending obsolescence. His lecture considers what he somewhat dramatically calls “die Lebensfrage der Philosophie”, that is, the question of its life or death, whether philosophy has a right to exist at all. Fischer’s argument is that philosophy deserves to exist if, and only if, it follows the Kantian conception.
Fischer begins his lecture with the basic question “What is philosophy?” It is necessary to raise this question anew, he explains, because philosophy is no longer the mother of all the sciences as it had been in the past. Philosophy gave birth to all the special sciences, though they have now grown independent of her. We need to re-examine, then, how philosophy differs from the other sciences, what are its distinguishing characteristics, and what special role it plays in the general economy and classification of the sciences. It is especially important to do this, Fischer stresses, because nowadays some deny that philosophy has any place at all in the general scheme of the sciences. For them it seems that philosophy is destined for obsolescence because it satisfies none of the basic criteria of a science. Each science should have its special subject matter, its specific part of reality to investigate; but the problem is precisely that every part of reality has already been taken by one of the empirical sciences (94–95). It appears, then, that philosophy has no role to play at all and might as well disappear. Fischer is especially worried by those advocates of empirical science—he does not give them a name—who insist that everything has to be explained on the basis of natural laws (96). They regard physics as the only science, and they insist that we should explain only what we observe. By their criteria of science—observation, experiment, explanation by general natural laws—philosophy should not be a science at all. Though Fischer does not name them, it is clear from the context that he has in mind the materialists.
Fischer’s response to the materialists is to ask them to reflect on their own methods and presuppositions (96). To explain facts or events in nature, they have to use and apply concepts like cause and effect, force and manifestation, substance and property. These concepts are the instruments of their enquiries; they are not, however, their objects. It is just here that a space opens for the role of the philosopher. He makes into an object of enquiry what the empirical scientist uses, applies and presupposes but does not reflect upon. What the physicist cannot explain is the possibility of physics itself. All the empirical sciences explain specific objects in experience; but they cannot explain the possibility of experience in general. They explain things, but not knowledge of things (97).
The special task of the philosopher, then, is to explain what all scientists presuppose but can never explain themselves: the possibility of empirical science. All the empirical sciences aspire towards knowledge; but they have no explanation of knowledge itself, of how and whether it is possible and in what it consists. Philosophy therefore has to ascend to a higher order of reflection than all the empirical sciences. While they study objects themselves, philosophy makes their study its object. It therefore stands above the empirical sciences, and so transcends them. Hence Kant calls this second-order reflection “transcendental” (99).
The specific problem and concern of philosophy, as Fischer now conceives it, is “the problem of knowledge”. He outlines three possible positions regarding the possibility of knowledge: 1) we can accept that possibility on good faith; 2) we can deny that possibility and attempt to refute it; and 3) we can investigate that possibility and show not only that but how it is possible. The first option is dogmatism; the second is scepticism; and the third is criticism (100). By putting forward the options in these terms, Fischer made it clear that only the third is possible. As Kant had put it in the final paragraph of the Kritik: “The critical path alone is still open.” (B 883) The implications of this new schema should be clear: Hegel had now been silently dethroned in Fischer’s thinking. For now the schema of dogmatism–scepticism–criticism had put criticism in the culminating position once occupied by the philosophy of identity.
Fischer goes no further in his lecture than explaining the problem of knowledge according to Kant. He does not attempt to sketch Kant’s solution to the problem. “My lecture therefore ends,” he concludes, “on just that point where the solution of the problem begins” (115). Yet in explaining the problem so clearly, and in stressing the crucial role of Kant in resolving it, Fischer had done much. He had secured a place for philosophy in the realm of the sciences, and he had shown how and why Kant’s critical philosophy alone deserves to occupy that space. The Lebensfrage had been decisively answered, and not thanks to Hegel.
The three lectures of Fischer’s Kant’s Leben und die Grundlagen seiner Lehre were only the prelude for something much larger and grand. Shortly after the lectures appeared, Fischer published a two-volume work on Kant which eventually became Volumes III and IV of his general Geschichte der neuern Philosophie. Volume III treated Kant’s development and the Kritik der reinen Vernunft; Volume IV examined the entire structure of the critical philosophy, all Kant’s major works after the first Kritik.50 The publication of this work was an important event in the history of neo-Kantianism. It was by no means the first scholarly study of Kant, having been preceded by the works of Rosenkranz, Fortlage and Erdmann,51 to name a few. Nevertheless, it was more exacting, painstaking and complete than its predecessors. And, more importantly, despite its size, it was no dry or dull tome. Written in a lively and engaging style, it made Kant comprehensible for a wider public. With Fischer’s book, Kant ceased to be another dead philosopher from the past and became a living thinker of vital concern to the present.
Kant scholars from the late 19th century give clear testimony about the importance of Fischer’s work. Emil Arnoldt wrote that, thanks to Fischer’s book, a great shift took place in the public’s attitude towards Kant in the 1860s.52 Rather than seeing Kant as a historical figure superseded by the great system builders, people now began to take Kant on his own terms. And, speaking at Fischer’s funeral in 1907, Wilhelm Windelband stressed its importance for neo-Kantianism:
This work, which still deserves the most eminent place in the now immeasurably swollen Kant-literature, had doubtless the greatest influence in arousing the movement of neo-Kantianism, which, in the last decades of the 19th century, has decisively influenced philosophy in Germany and beyond its borders.53
Given the great importance of Fischer’s work, it is worthwhile to examine its aims, methods, genesis and content. Since it is impossible to summarize all its contents, whose two volumes comprise more than a thousand pages, we will consider only two aspects of Fischer’s work that are of special historical and philosophical importance: namely, his interpretation of transcendental idealism, and his account of the method of transcendental philosophy.
In the preface to the first edition of his work Fischer tells us a little about its genesis. The work took at least nine years to complete. The first draft of what became the first volume was already finished in 1851. After his dismissal from Heidelberg in 1853, however, Fischer’s work on Kant was interrupted, and he devoted himself instead to the study of Bacon, Spinoza and Leibniz. With his appointment to Jena in 1856, he again began to lecture on Kant, and these lectures were a major revision of the original draft. As he lectured on Kant, Fischer’s views kept changing, so that hardly a sentence from the original draft remained (vii). He found it necessary to correct and simplify essential points; but he was least satisfied with the exposition. The need to lecture on Kant—to make his philosophy clear and accessible to a general audience—forced Fischer to improve the exposition from its original version. The work had now so grown in size that it had become a two-volume work (ix).
As it happened, Fischer’s Kant book became a never-ending work-in-progress, a virtual sounding board for its author’s constantly evolving views. Five editions of the book were published in Fischer’s lifetime,54 and these editions differ considerably from one another in organization and content. Fischer kept adding and taking away material, and he was constantly revising the exposition. As a result, the structure and outline of the chapters constantly change. Some editions contain polemics that are responding to current issues; but these are simply dropped in later editions in favour of new polemics. In short: the book is an editor’s nightmare. Students and scholars are advised to cite carefully the edition they use. Here, for historical reasons, we will consider chiefly the first edition of 1860.
Fischer’s aim in writing his book, as he explains in the preface, was to provide “an exposition and reconstruction of the Kantian philosophy in its genuine and still little understood spirit” (xiii). The throng of systems following Kant claimed to have superseded him. Rather than examining Kant on his terms, they had used him for their own purposes, either as material for their systems or as a target for criticism. Fischer wanted to put an end to that practice: “My exposition will reproduce the Kantian philosophy in its original spirit” (xiv). That sounds presumptuous and naive, but it is understandable enough when one considers its context: the general state of Kant interpretation before Fischer, which was much as he had described it. To provide a sound historical interpretation of Kant, Fischer stressed the great value of knowing his philosophical development and his historical context (xv).
Fischer’s understanding of Kant’s transcendental idealism rests chiefly on his interpretation of the Transcendental Aesthetic. Like Schopenhauer, who greatly influenced his reading of Kant, Fischer saw Kant’s theories of space and time as his great achievement. “The transcendental aesthetic is Kant’s most spectacular deed. In both its result, and in the path to this result, this investigation is a model of scientific precision and method.” (293) This part of the Kritik was also the basis for Kant’s central and characteristic doctrine, his transcendental idealism. As Fischer wrote in the preface: “The correct and sound understanding of the critical philosophy depends on one major point: correct insight into the new doctrine of space and time, the transcendental aesthetic, as Kant called this doctrine.” (xiv–xv) Sure enough, Fischer later defines Kant’s transcendental idealism in his chapter on Kant’s theory of space and time.55 Kant’s doctrine is called transcendental idealism, we are told, because it maintains “the transcendental ideality of space and time” (317). This doctrine means that space and time are forms of our representation only, that they are nothing more than a priori intuitions, and so not true of things-in-themselves. Space and time, as Fischer bluntly puts it, are “mere representations”, and they are “nothing as such” (309).
There are two crucial points behind the transcendental ideality of space and time, Fischer explains (317–318). First, it means that space and time are conditions of appearances only. As conditions under which we perceive the world, they cannot give us knowledge of how the world is in itself, apart from and prior to our perception of it. Second, they are necessary conditions of appearances (317–318). This means that space and time, though only forms of intuition, are still indispensable in that everyone must perceive the world according to them. It is on the basis of their universality and necessity, Fischer holds, that Kant can justifiably talk about their empirical reality. Space and time are not arbitrary and accidental representations of things in experience, but they are conditions under which we have any experience at all. Although they are not true of things-in-themselves, they are still necessarily and universally true of objects in our experience (314). Hence we can talk about the transcendental ideality and the empirical reality of space and time. While space and time are transcendentally ideal with respect to things-in-themselves, they are empirically real with respect to objects of possible experience (316–317).
What, then, about the thing-in-itself? What is Fischer’s stance towards this enduring conundrum? Like Adickes long after him,56 Fischer thinks that Kant is committed to the reality of the thing-in-itself, that is, its existence as an entity, as something that exists beyond our experience. What exists apart from and prior to the application of the a priori forms of intuition cannot be represented by us, and that is the thing-in-itself (313). Fischer had no sympathy for the demand of Otto Liebmann, his later student, to banish the thing-in-itself from the critical philosophy; and he would later disapprove of the interpretation of the Marburg school, which would attempt to make the thing-in-itself only a limiting concept, an ideal for enquiry.57 Such interpretations had simply too many texts against them, Fischer maintained. Without the thing-in-itself Kant’s transcendental idealism made no sense, because it is essentially the doctrine that appearances are not things-in-themselves. Nevertheless, though Fischer insists on a realist interpretation of the thing-in-itself, he cautions against interpreting it as the cause of our sensations. When Kant writes that the qualitative dimension of sensation is “given from the outside” (von Außen gegeben), he does not mean that it is the product of something independent of our consciousness. “To say that something is given from without in the proper meaning of the Kantian philosophy can only mean: the origin is not pure reason, that is, it is not given a priori, it is no product of reason.” (312) We must not assume, then, that there is something out there, “as if we were the receiver, and some other being outside us, I know not what, were the giver.” (313)
Fischer adopts a two worlds reading of Kant’s transcendental idealism, according to which noumena and phenomena designate distinct kinds of entity. He rejects firmly the opposing thesis that noumena and phenomena are simply different ways of representating one and the same thing, as if phenomena were the thing as perceived by the senses and noumena the thing as understood by the understanding (404). This, he says, is the old dogmatic conception of the relationship between things-in-themselves and appearances, which Kant explicitly denies. The appearance and thing-in-itself differ not in degree, as if there were one and the same thing seen clearly by the understanding and confusedly by the senses. Rather, because understanding and sensibility are so heterogeneous, they differ in kind; and because they differ in kind, they should be regarded simply as different objects (405). For this reason it is also a mistake to interpret appearances as if they were simply aspects or properties of things-in-themselves (405). Appearances are for Fischer merely representations within us, and as such they do not have to be attached to things-in-themselves (396). He does not dispute that Kant sometimes writes about appearances as if they were aspects of things-in-themselves; but he claims that these passages are limited to the second edition of the Kritik where Kant was eager to distinguish his idealism from Berkeley’s (404). This was a falling off from his original doctrine in the first edition, where Kant had identified appearances with representations alone.
Does Fischer assume, then, that Kant’s idealism is the same as Berkeley’s? Raising just this question in Book II, Chapter 4, Fischer replies that the equation of Kant with Berkeley is a grave mistake (397). The two philosophers agree that the objects of knowledge consist in representations, that what we perceive exists only for some subject. But Fischer stresses that Kant’s idealism has something Berkeley’s does not: a transcendental dimension, the universal and necessary forms of understanding and sensibility, which allows him to distinguish between illusion and reality. These forms are necessary conditions of experience, so that they are not objects in experience (and so representations) but that which makes any such object possible. Because Berkeley did not recognize this dimension of experience, his idealism fell prey to Hume’s scepticism, which pointed out the weakness of the distinction between illusion and reality on Berkeley’s premises. It is solely this transcendental dimension of his doctrine that Kant needed to distinguish his idealism from Berkeley’s, Fischer insists. Kant went astray, however, when he added the ‘Refutation of Idealism’ to the second edition of the Kritik. By distinguishing between objects and our representations of them, Kant violated the spirit of his own transcendental idealism (397). In thus stressing the differences between the first and second editions of the Kritik, an authentic first edition and apocryphal second one, Fischer had given his imprimatur to one of Schopenhauer’s more controversial readings.58
Regarding Kant’s method, Fischer stresses the great importance of first having a solid understanding of Kant’s problem. We will understand the purpose and logic of that method only if we first examine the questions Kant intends to answer with it. The main question the critical philosophy poses is “How is knowledge possible?” (263) But Kant cannot answer this question, Fischer insists, until he raises two more. He cannot simply presuppose that there is knowledge because this will be questioned by the sceptic. He therefore has to ask the more basic question: “Is there knowledge?”, or “Is there really a fact of knowledge to investigate?” (263). And since he cannot answer this question until he knows what knowledge is, he has to ask the even more basic question: “What is knowledge?” (264). The critical philosopher therefore has to answer three basic questions: “What is knowledge?”, “Is there knowledge?”, and “How is such knowledge possible?”.
It is striking that Fischer first writes about Kant’s method in epistemological rather than psychological terms. It seems that the problem is not to show the causes or processes by which we arrive at knowledge but to examine the evidence for claims to knowledge. In a telling metaphor Fischer likens the procedure of the critical philosopher to that of a lawyer (264). Just as the lawyer intends to examine the “basis in right” (Rechtsgründen) of a question, so the critical philosopher has to examine the “question of right in knowledge” (Rechtsfrage der Erkenntniß). As Fischer puts it:
Kant has to deal with the question of right regarding knowledge. To speak legally, he wants to put knowledge on trial. The first thing is to introduce the proceedings, the second is to come to a judgement. We introduce the proceedings when we show in what the case consists, and that the case lies before us. We decide the case when we show its possibility, i.e., when we show in virtue of what right knowledge takes place, or when we deduce it in a legal sense. (263–264)
Fischer goes on to explain Kant’s distinction between the Quaestio facti and the Quaestio juris (265). The Quaestio facti concerns the questions what is knowledge and whether there is knowledge. The Quaestio juris concerns the question how knowledge is possible. It is remarkable, however, that Fischer, despite his insistence on a close reading of the texts, does not explain these questions in Kant’s own terms. For Kant, the quid facti? concerns the origins of knowledge, the attempt to explain its causes or basis in fact. It is the quid juris? that examines the right of knowledge and investigates the basis for synthetic a priori knowledge.59 Kant is firm and explicit that answering the Quaestio facti does not solve the problem of knowledge, because showing how concepts arise from experience does not substantiate their claims to universality and necessity.60 It is really the Quaestio juris that takes up the question of justification, which Fischer places under the Quaestio facto. Fischer’s readings of Kant’s questions arise not from carelessness but, as we shall soon see, from his own peculiar and tendentious interpretation of the method of the Kritik.
Fischer’s initial explanation of Kant’s method seems entirely epistemological rather than psychological. It seems that the critique of pure reason is more like a legal tribunal, which assesses claims to knowledge, and that it is not really a psychological enquiry into the origins and causes of knowledge. This is entirely in keeping with Fischer’s reservations about Fries’ interpretation of Kant: that in conflating Kant’s enquiry with empirical psychology, Fries misunderstood the transcendental dimension of the critical philosophy, which was to investigate the very possibility of an empirical science like psychology.61 Nevertheless, contrary to all these appearances, it is remarkable that Fischer never fully broke with the naturalistic paradigm of doing epistemology, that he never carefully and consistently distinguished the methods of empirical science from those of the critical philosophy. Hence, in his original explanation of the task and place of the critical philosophy in the sciences, he wrote as if Kant simply applied the method of the natural sciences to the fact of knowledge itself:
The fact of exact science is indisputable. The natural scientific and empirical method of investigation is indisputable. And the new investigation that Kant carried out with such success in the field of philosophy consists in applying this method to that fact. If a natural scientist wants to explain some physical fact, he seeks the conditions under which the phenomenon follows, the forces from whose combination it proceeds. Kant followed just the same investigation, now directed at the fact of science itself. (14)
So, despite explaining the critique as a legal enquiry, and despite his criticism of Fries, Fischer still understood Kant’s method as similar in kind to the natural sciences. Transcendental philosophy was an investigation not into the logic of cognition but into its origins. The critical philosopher would treat science as a fact just as the natural scientist would regard his data as facts.
Why did Fischer still cling to this naturalistic interpretation of Kant’s method? Doubtless, part of the explanation was the prevalent authority and prestige of the natural sciences, whose methodology had proven so successful, and which had cast a shadow over the more a priori methods of philosophy (viz. Hegelian dialectic, Schellingian construction). Yet this is only part of the explanation.
The other part becomes clear as soon as we consider Fischer’s peculiar conception of Kant’s empirical method. It was not the method of empirical psychology, as Fries assumed, but that of natural history. It was indeed nothing less than the natural historical method that Kant had first developed in his early pre-critical work Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels. Remarkably, Fischer argued that this method was also that of the critical philosophy itself!62 According to that method, everything in nature has its history, and to understand it consists in tracing its origins and path of development. What at first appears to be static and eternal in nature will turn out to be, when properly understood, the product of a long and gradual history; for example, the circular orbits of the planets around the sun seem like an eternal fact but they are the result of the action of the forces of attraction and repulsion upon a primal mass of dust. Fischer believed that Kant had followed this method throughout his career, and that it was by no means a relic of his pre-critical years. Indeed, it was because of this method that Kant had come to a “developmental-historical worldview”, according to which everything in nature has a history, and everything in history has a purpose. Fischer argued that Kant intended to apply this same method to epistemology; his aim was to explain the fact of knowledge from a genetic perspective, so that it too could be seen as the result of history. Transcendental philosophy was therefore meant to be “die Entstehungs- und Entwicklungslehre der menschlichen Erkenntniß”.63
This was an extraordinary interpretation, one especially remarkable because it flew in the face of Kant’s texts. For Kant went to great pains to distinguish his transcendental enquiry from Locke’s “plain, historical method” whose task was to explain the origins of our knowledge from experience. But, as we have just seen, Fischer had his own tendentious reading of the Quaestio juris, which he made into the question how knowledge is possible, thus removing the normative and logical dimension and making it seem more like a genetic or historical enquiry. The motive for Fischer’s peculiar interpretation should now be clear: he was assimilating Kant to Hegel in the interests of his own “critical philosophy of identity”. For it was Hegel rather than Kant who had followed a genetic and historical method in his epistemology to expose the ahistorical illusions of philosophy. Hegel himself would have been astounded by Fischer’s interpretation of Kant, given that he had used his historical method to expose what he regarded as Kant’s ahistorical illusions. But Fischer was striving and struggling to fit Kant into a Hegelian mould. That Fischer was still Hegelian, despite his growing Kantianism, shall soon become perfectly clear.
Given Fischer’s work on Kant in the early 1860s, it would appear as if his Hegelian days were finally over. How, indeed, could Fischer be anything but a full-blown Kantian? In his lectures and book he had stressed how Kant’s philosophy alone could solve the crisis of philosophy, and how all modern philosophy is either a preparation for or development of the critical philosophy. Furthermore, Fischer had now endorsed Kant’s theories of space and time in the Transcendental Aesthetic, which he saw as the basis of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Where, then, could Fischer go but down the critical path he had so clearly marked out for himself?
Prima facie this is just what happens. In 1865 Fischer published a new edition of his Logik und Metaphysik, now renamed System der Logik und Metaphysik.64 This was not, however, just a reissue of its 1852 Hegelian predecessor. What the reader now has before him, Fischer assures us in the preface, is “a completely new work” (iv). He not only rewrote many sections, but he also added new ones, so that the new introduction alone was now as long as the whole old edition. Fischer explained that the old edition was riddled with obscurities and difficulties, and that it no longer reflected his new way of thinking, which was the product of all his lectures on logic and metaphysics in the past twelve years (iii–iv). It seems that this new way of thinking is going to be much more Kantian because Fischer writes that the new edition takes into account “two things that one may not neglect in philosophy: Aristotelian logic, and the critical, I mean Kantian philosophy” (vi). He also suggests that many of the errors of the previous edition came from a “scholastic adherence to a traditional and prescribed doctrine”—an obvious reference to his own Hegelianism (iv). One expects, therefore, a much more Kantian, a much less Hegelian, work in this new reformed and improved System der Logik und Metaphysik.
Yet, as reasonable as they are, the reader’s expectations are utterly dashed. Rather than abandoning or modifying his Hegelian doctrines, Fischer reaffirms them, embarking upon a new defence of the philosophy of identity against its latest critics. One of the major changes of the second edition is its new much longer historical introduction, which examines the latest developments in philosophy since Hegel’s death, and specifically the attempts by Herbart, Schopenhauer and Trendelenburg to surpass Hegel. Special sections are devoted to the exposition and critique of each of these philosophers. Fischer regards their attempts to go beyond Hegel as total failures, either because they relapse into realism (Herbart), or because they grasp subject–object identity in a one-sided manner, not recognizing that its subjective dimension is as important as its objective one (Schopenhauer and Trendelenburg). These were points Fischer made against Hegel’s critics back in the 1840s, in the days of the Leipziger Revue and Epigonen articles. Fischer also had not budged on his basic metaphysical principles. The solution to the problem of knowledge still remains for him the principle of subject–object identity, which he regards as the fundamental pillar of Schelling’s and Hegel’s absolute idealism. Upholding that principle, he argues, demands giving equal weight to its subjective and objective factors, to thought as well as being (§67; 183). Fischer’s account of the method of logic is also still fundamentally Hegelian. Logic consists in the development of pure thinking (§68; 188), and to study this development philosophy needs to follow a method that is both genetic and critical: genetic, in that it traces thinking from its origin through its stages of development (§72; 197), and critical, in that it evaluates thinking according to its own aims or goals (§72; 199). That genetic and critical method was, of course, nothing less than the Hegelian dialectic. In his second edition of the Logik und Metaphysik Fischer provides a completely new account of the dialectic of being and nothingness, one more explicitly critical of Hegel (§77; 219); but he still retains the broad outlines of Hegel’s logic, dividing it into a doctrine of being, essence and concept (§75, 212).
Fischer’s 1865 Logik und Metaphysik very much remained, then, “the critical philosophy of identity” of its 1852 predecessor. The tenacity of its author is remarkable in view of the tensions that infected his earlier formulation of that doctrine. We have seen how Fischer both recognized Kant’s critical limits upon knowledge yet advanced Hegel’s grander metaphysical claims about knowledge of the absolute. Rather than resolving this tension in the 1865 version, Fischer only let it grow. His new endorsement of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, which appears in the 1860 edition of his Geschichte, means that he is more committed than ever to Kant’s critical limits upon knowledge, for Kant’s teaching there insists that space and time are a priori intuitions valid only of appearances and not things-in-themselves. Fischer does not shirk from these implications but even insists upon them. For he defends Kant’s critical teaching that space and time are valid only for appearances against Trendelenburg’s “third alternative”, according to which space and time could be a priori intuitions and still true of things-in-themselves (§66; 175). The clash with Hegelian metaphysics is made perfectly explicit when Fischer himself insists that the Transcendental Aesthetic is incompatible with Hegel’s own teaching, according to which space and time have an objective rather than subjective status (§§65, 66; 157, 175). All this raises anew the question how Fischer plans to reconcile this critical doctrine with his own Hegelian metaphysics. It is in vain, however, that the reader searches for an answer to this question.
There are other tensions between Kantian and Hegelian doctrines in the second edition of the Logik und Metaphysik. The ultimate source of Fischer’s attraction to Kant’s theory of space and time is that it could serve as a bulwark against naturalism, which assumes the objective existence of space and time. If the existence of matter in space and time is only the result of our forms of perception, there is no longer the danger that the self will be the product of natural forces alone, still less that it will be one cog in the vast machine of nature. It makes all the difference in our worldview, as Fischer put it, whether the self is in space and time or whether space and time are in the self. Yet in the new Logik und Metaphysik Fischer does not develop these anti-naturalistic inclinations and intuitions; instead, he continues to affirm the philosophy of identity, which affirms a strong naturalism of its own, according to which everything in the universe unfolds according to the necessity of the concept (§70; 193). The great virtue of this philosophy, we are told, is that it maintains a unified vision of the world and overcomes the Kantian dualism between freedom and nature, idea and reality (§71; 195).
Another remarkable tension arises from Fischer’s vascillation about the method of philosophy. He had stated clearly in the new Logik und Metaphysik the problems with Fries’ anthropological and psychological interpretation of the critical philosophy. The categories and forms of intuition of the critical philosophy cannot be objects of experience for psychological or anthropological investigation, he insists, because that makes them empirical, depriving them of their universality and necessity (§55; 112). The method of the critical philosophy cannot be psychological or anthropological, he further argues, because its purpose is to investigate the very possibility of psychology or anthropology (§58; 112). Yet Fischer also continued to uphold the value of a genetic method in epistemology, according to which everything is understood as a stage in the historical development of reason (§72; 197–199). It was precisely this method, though, that Fries saw as constitutive of his own psychological and anthropological viewpoint. It was hard to see how the genetic method does not involve the very psychological and anthropological tools that it is the purpose of the critical philosophy to investigate.
Thus Fischer’s logic and metaphysics of 1865 remained the same unstable, combustible mixture of the “critical philosophy of identity” of 1852. Clearly, this compound could not last; eventually, it would have to explode. Fischer would have to be either a Kantian or a Hegelian, but he could not be both.
What finally seems to push Fischer in a firmer and clearer Kantian direction is his new views about human freedom, which first appear in a lecture he gave in 1875, ‘Ueber die menschliche Freiheit’.65 In re-examining the classical question of human freedom, Fischer praised the Kantian solution to the problem, claiming that in it “the question of human freedom is seen for the first time in its true meaning” (45). Fischer had adopted something like the Kantian distinction between the intelligible and phenomenal character. He distinguished between our natural character, which is completely subject to natural necessity, and our moral character, which has the power to change our natural character according to the will. While our actions are necessary as expressions of our natural character, they are free in the determinations of our moral will, which gives us the power to do otherwise (38, 42). Again like Kant, Fischer maintains that we know we have this power to transform ourselves from the fact of conscience, which tells us that we could have done otherwise even though our natural character and all its actions are necessary (39, 40). This affirmation of the Kantian doctrine of freedom marks a silent and implicit repudiation of the metaphysical doctrines of his 1865 Logik und Metaphysik. For there Fischer had stressed, in true Hegelian fashion, that freedom develops of necessity (§70; 193), and he praised the philosophy of identity for grasping this point and overcoming the Kantian dualism between freedom and necessity (§71; 195).
Fischer had now embraced two central and characteristic Kantian doctrines: the theory of space and time of the Transcendental Aesthetic, according to which everything in space and time is only an appearance; and the Kantian theory of freedom, according to which there is a dualism between our noumenal moral character and our phenomenal natural character. It is hard to imagine two doctrines more opposed to the philosophy of identity of Schelling and Hegel. And yet, as we shall soon see, Fischer still could not bring himself to abandon his Hegelian metaphysics. Rather than interpreting Hegel in Kantian terms, he interpreted Kant in Hegelian ones.
Fischer’s final settling of accounts with Kant came in 1883 with his Kritik der kantischen Philosophie.66 This tract is as much a critique of the rapidly evolving neo-Kantian movement as it is of Kant himself. Fischer makes criticisms of prominent neo-Kantians, of older ones like Fries and Herbart, but also of more recent ones like Hermann Cohen and Emil Arnoldt. The very idea of a critique of Kant’s philosophy signals that Fischer, unlike the neo-Kantians, does not take Kant as the final word in philosophy. Fischer seems to be asserting the enduring values and relevance of his old Hegelianism.
Kritik der kantischen Philosophie is less a critique of Kant than a complete reinterpretation of him according to Fischer’s Hegelian metaphysics. Fischer conceives Kant’s philosophy as a metaphysics of freedom, according to which the noumenal substratum of appearances is the moral will, and the phenomenal world is the appearance of freedom. The Hegelian flavour of such a doctrine is unmistakable. Whether intentionally or not, Fischer had made Kant into the spokesman for a famous Hegelian doctrine: that the purpose behind nature and history is the self-consciousness of freedom. He had already affirmed that Hegelian doctrine in his Diotima in 1849; and he now reaffirmed it in 1883.
Fischer’s reinterpretation of Kant is a “metaphysics” in a non-critical sense of the word because he maintains that it has not a regulative but a constitutive validity. In other words, he claims that we can know that the world is the appearance of freedom, and not only that we are obliged on moral grounds to think as if it were so. Even more remarkably, Fischer thinks that we are justified in assuming such knowledge on Kantian premises. If Kant were only consistent, he argues, he would have to accept the legitimacy of a Hegelian metaphysics.
How was Fischer led to such a radical reinterpretation of Kant? Part of the inspiration for his reinterpretation came from a philosopher who had much preoccupied him in the 1860s and 1870s: Arthur Schopenhauer. The very title of Fischer’s tract is reminiscent of Schopenhauer’s famous appendix in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.67 Not surprisingly, Fischer devotes an entire section to discuss his agreement and disagreement with Schopenhauer’s interpretation and critique of Kant (75–79). Fischer agrees with two fundamental theses of Schopenhauer’s interpretation of Kant: 1) that transcendental idealism is the doctrine of the ideality of all appearances, that is, that appearances consist in representations; and 2) that Kant affirms the reality of the thing-in-itself, which is completely distinct from all appearances (78). More significantly, he also accepts Schopenhauer’s fundamental thesis that the thing-in-itself appears to us as the will. Schopenhauer held that Kant had vaguely felt the truth of this doctrine, though he insisted that it was his achievement to have expressly formulated it and made it into a general metaphysical principle. Fischer, however, wants to deprive Schopenhauer of his claim to originality on this score. Kant, he insists, was not only aware of this doctrine but expressly teaches it (79). It is indeed the fundamental principle behind his own metaphysics. Kant knew exactly what he was doing, Fischer contends, when he identified things-in-themselves with ideas, ideas with purposes, purposes with decisions of the will, and the will with freedom (80). According to Kant’s own teaching, the world is the appearance of purposiveness; and since purposiveness makes sense only through the concept of a will, the whole world should be seen as “the progressive revelation of freedom” (81).
The most crucial—and controversial—premise behind Fischer’s reinterpretation is his identification of the thing-in-itself with the will. The premise is fully explicit: “The intelligible world is the world as will” (25; cf. 79, 92). The thesis is somewhat surprising, however, because there seems to be no reason to interpret the entire noumenal world in these terms. Prima facie the will is one thing-in-itself or noumenon; but that does not mean that it is the thing-in-itself, that it exhausts the entire world of noumena. Fischer argues, however, that this equation is central to Kant’s attempt to unify the critical philosophy, to find a single basis for the worlds of nature and morality (49, 50, 79). It is well-known that in the third Kritik Kant had attempted to unify these worlds according to the idea of purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit), which demands that we treat the entire natural world as if it were created according to purposes. Fischer points out an important premise behind that attempt at synthesis: that we conceive of purposes according to human intentions (50, 81). We understand the self-organizing activity of living things in nature only according to human ends or purposes, which make sense to us only insofar as they are matters of choice or freedom. We simply have no other way of grasping their activity, Kant believes, except on the analogy of our own human intentionality and voluntary activity. If, therefore, we unite the realms of morality and nature according to purposiveness, and if we understand purposiveness according to human intentionality or the will, and if, finally, the will is the domain of freedom, then the conclusion is inevitable: freedom becomes the key to understanding the entire world itself. We should understand all of nature and history as the self-realization of freedom.
There are, of course, many Kantian texts to provide support for such an interpretation. There is the concept of the final purpose of nature in §84 of the Kritik der Urteilskraft, which saw the realization of human morality as the highest end of nature. There is also the concept of world history in the ‘Idee zur einer allgemeine Weltgeschichte’, according to which the realization of human freedom is the very end of history itself. Finally, there is Kant’s doctrine about the primacy of practical reason, which makes the noumenal will independent of phenomena but phenomena subordinate to the will (25–26). Fischer’s interpretation of Kant came from texts like these, which he does not hesitate to cite. But the most important source for his reinterpretation of Kant is his long-standing view that Kant’s philosophy was fundamentally a “Entwicklungslehre”, that is, a doctrine that everything in the world is subject to historical change and development. According to Fischer, Kant first conceived of this doctrine in his Allgemeine Weltgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels, and the doctrine persists throughout his philosophical development, appearing in his critical writings no less than his pre-critical ones (42). The idea of development makes no sense, however, without the concept of a purpose or end (48). Fischer argues that Kant has to extend this idea not only to living but also non-living beings, since it is only by this means that we can avoid dualism and have a single unified conception of the world (49).
Yet, however much these texts support Fischer, they still do not go far enough for him. For Kant would insist that we should give the idea of purposiveness a strictly regulative validity, which means that we should only treat nature and history as if they were governed according to ends. Kant always held himself back from the metaphysical doctrine that nature and history actually are only the appearances of freedom. Fischer believes, however, that Kant is not entirely consistent on this score, and that he progressively abandoned his regulative constraints with the development of his system (92–93). Though he insisted in the first Kritik that we cannot have knowledge of things-in-themselves, that restriction applied specifically to our theoretical knowledge. In the second Kritik Kant allowed for practical knowledge of things-in-themselves when he made consciousness of the moral law into the ratio cognoscendi of freedom (92). In the third Kritik Kant had developed a concept of appearance that makes no sense at all without granting knowledge of noumena, for there an appearance is not simply what appears to our senses, as in the first Kritik, but what manifests or develops a purpose (81–82). If we cannot know noumena, then we cannot know purposes, and so we cannot know that anything is in this sense an appearance. It is crucial for Kant to drop his regulative constraints, Fischer argues, for the simple reason that his own transcendental philosophy does not comply with them (82). If it were the case that we can know only appearances, then we cannot have knowledge of the conditions of knowledge, because these too do not fall within experience.
With his final essay on Kant, Fischer had reversed the position he had initially adopted in his 1852 Logik und Metaphysik. There Fischer had developed a Hegelian system “under the control of Kant”, a “critical philosophy of identity”. He had expounded the main principles of absolute idealism—the unity of self and nature, the organic structure of the world—though he had tried, in vain, to keep these doctrines within Kantian limits. Now, however, he had done just the opposite: he had created a Kantian system under the control of Hegel. For Fischer had now adopted the essentials of Kant’s transcendental idealism—the ideality of space and time and the distinction between thing-in-itself and appearance—but insisted that such transcendental idealism reveals a much deeper metaphysical truth: that all reality is the appearance of freedom. Hence the Kantian Hegelian had become a Hegelian Kantian. In making Kant’s philosophy utter this Hegelian truth, Fischer had revealed, once and for all, his deep and abiding Hegelian convictions.
1 On Fischer’s biography, the standard source has been the article by Hugo Falckenheim, ‘Kuno Fischer’, in Biographisches Jahrbuch und Deutscher Nekrolog 12 (1907), 257–272. Another valuable source is Reinhold Hülsewiesche, System und Geschichte: Leben und Werke Kuno Fischers (Bern: Peter Lang, 1989), pp. 17–46. Hülsewiesche has used Fischer’s unpublished autobiographical manuscripts, ‘Lebenlauf zum Abitur verfaßt’ and ‘Mein Lebenslauf’.
2 This is the epithet of Thomas Willey, Back to Kant: The Revival of Kantianism in German Social and Historical Thought, 1860–1914 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1978), p. 58. Willey does not investigate Fischer’s early neo-Hegelian writings.
3 Wilhelm Windelband, Kuno Fischer. Gedächtnisrede bei der Trauerfeier der Universität in der Stadhalle zu Heidelberg am 23. Juli 1907 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1907), pp. 27–28.
4 Weiße wrote one of the first critiques of Hegel’s philosophy, Ueber den gegenwärtigen Standpunct der philosophischen Wissenschaften (Leipzig: Barth, 1829). Though Weiße criticizes Hegel’s speculative logic for failing to account for the concrete facts of the empirical world, he still maintained that his logic is unsurpassable, and that the dialectic is the basis for the form or structure, if not the content, of all natural science (pp. 11, 163, 174). On Weiße, see Chapter 4, Section 1.
5 See Julius Schaller, Die Philosophie unserer Zeit: Zur Apologie und Erläuterung des hegelschen Systems (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1837). On Schaller, see Otto Siebert, Geschichte der neueren deutschen Philosophie seit Hegel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprect, 1898), pp. 16–17.
6 Johann Eduard Erdmann, Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Darstellung der Geschichte der neuern Philosophie (Riga and Dorpat: E. Frantzen, 1834–1853), 7 vols. On Erdmann, see Hermann Glockner, ‘Einführung in Johann Eduard Erdmanns Leben und Werke’ in Volume I of the new edition of his Versuch (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1932), pp. 1–200. See especially Chapter 13, pp. 155–185, which discusses Erdmann’s relationship to Fischer.
7 All the articles appeared in Literatur- und Kunstbericht, ed. Oswald Marbach (Leipzig: Wigand, 1846). Fischer wrote the following signed articles: ‘Die Autorität’, Nr. 43, 169–170, and Nr. 44, 174–176; ‘George Sand und Ida Gräfin Hahn-Hahn’, Nr. 27, 109–112, and Nr. 29, 113–115; ‘Philosophie der Geschichte in der Geschichte der Philosophie’, Nr. 20, 78–79; Nr. 21, 81–84; Nr. 22, 85–87 and Nr. 23, 90–92; ‘Philosophische Literatur’, Nr. 58, 229–232; Nr. 59, 233–235; and Nr. 60, 237–239; and ‘Theologische Fragen’, Nr. 73, 289–292; Nr. 74, 293–295; Nr. 75, 298–299.
8 Fischer, ‘Philosophische Literatur’, Nr. 58, p. 229.
9 See Ruge’s letters to Fischer in Arnold Ruge, Briefwechsel und Tagebuchblätter (Berlin: Weidmann, 1896), I, 425–426, 427, 429–430, 433–435, 437–439.
10 See the signed articles entitled ‘Moderne Sophisten’ in the Leipziger Revue (1847), Nr. 3, 9–11; Nr. 4, 13–14; Nr. 5, 17–20; Nr. 6, 21–23; Nr. 8, 30–32; Nr. 12, 45–48; Nr. 13, 50–52. See also ‘Ein Apologet der Sophistik und ein „philosophischer Reactionär”’ in Die Epigonen 4 (1847), pp. 152–165; and ‘Das Wesen der Religion von Carl Schwarz’, Die Epigonen V (1848), 177–208. See too ‘Ludwig Feuerbach und die Philosophie unserer Zeit’, in Die Akademie. Philosophische Taschenbuch I (1848), 128–190. See also ‘Arnold Ruge und der Humanismus’in Die Epigonen 4 (1847) 95–140.
11 Here I summarize only Fischer’s theological views; his political views are much less explicit and do not appear in his early articles.
12 On these and other figures on the Hegelian right, see John Toews, Hegelianism: The path toward dialectical humanism, 1805–1841 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 141–155.
13 See Fischer, ‘Theologische Fragen’, in Literatur- und Kunstbericht, Nr. 73, p. 289.
14 See Fischer, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach und die Philosophie unserer Zeit’, Die Akademie, p. 149.
15 See ‘Theologische Fragen’, p. 290. See also Fischer’s essay ‘Strauß’ “Leben Jesu”’, inÜber David Friedrich Strauß (Heidelberg: Winter, 1908), pp. 103–126.
16 Fischer, ‘Theologische Fragen’, p. 289.
17 Fischer, ‘Moderne Sophisten’ in the Leipziger Revue (1847), Nr. 3, 9–11; Nr. 4, 13–14; Nr. 5, 17–20; Nr. 6, 21–23; Nr. 8, 30–32; Nr. 12, 45–48; Nr. 13, 50–52. Under the pseudonym ‘G. Edward’ Stirner replied to Fischer’s article in ‘Die philosophischen Reaktionäre’, in Die Epigonen 4 (1847), 141–151. Fischer responded in the same issue, ‘Ein Apologet der Sophistik und ein „philosophsiche Reactionär”’, Die Epigonen 4 (1847), 152–165.
18 Fischer, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach und die Philosophie unserer Zeit’, Die Akademie, Philosophische Taschenbuch I (1848), 128–190.
19 Kuno Fischer, Diotima. Die Idee des Schönen. Philosophische Briefe (Pforzheim: Flammer und Hoffmann, 1849). All references in parentheses are to this edition. Diotima became a very successful book. It went through two more editions in Fischer’s lifetime: (Leipzig: Reclam, 1849) and (Suttgart: Scheitlin, 1852). It lived on into the 20th century. The last edition appeared as late as 1928 with Reclam in Leipzig.
20 See Fischer’s ‘Vorrede’, Diotima. Die Idee des Schönen, pp. viii–xii.
21 Friedrich Schiller, ‘Zweyter Brief’, Ueber die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, in Schiller, Nationalausgabe, ed. Benno von Wiese (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1962) XX, 310–312.
22 Schenkel insisted that he had never pushed for the interdict against Fischer’s lectures, and that he even protested against it. See his Abfertigung für Herrn Kuno Fischer in Heidelberg (Heidelberg: Akademie Anstalt für Literatur und Kunst, 1854), pp. 9, 11. Fischer, however, was convinced that Schenkel was the main agent and force behind the proceedings against him. On the proceedings against Fischer, see Hülsewiesche, System und Geschichte, pp. 29–36. The documents assembled by Hülsewiesche show that Schenkel had indeed voted against a rescript and instead proposed only warning Fischer (p. 34); yet this seems to have been a retreat from a harder position, because he had first endorsed the motion for his expulsion (pp. 30–31).
23 Kuno Fischer Vorlesungen über Geschichte der neueren Philosophie. Abtheilung I: Einleitung in das Studium der Philosophie (Stuttgart: Scheitlin, 1852). The entire volume was later published under the title Geschichte der neuern Philosophie: Erster Band, Das classische Zeitalter der dogmatischen Philosophie (Mannheim: Bassermann & Mathy, 1854). All references will be to this later more accessible edition.
24 See the 18th lecture of the Geschichte (1854), pp. 299–313.
25 Darmstadter Allgemeine Kirchenzeitung, Nr. 12 (1854). Reprinted by Kuno Fischer in Das Interdict meiner Vorlesungen (Mannheim: Bassermann & Mathy, 1854), pp. 65–78.
26 Das Interdict meiner Vorlesungen (Mannheim: Bassermann & Mathy, 1854); and Apologie meiner Lehre (Mannheim: Bassermann & Mathy, 1854). The Interdict is a reply to Schenkel’s ‘Das Christenthum und modernes Philosophenthum’; the Apologie is a response to Schenkel’s Abfertigung.
27 Fischer, Interdict, pp. 40, 45; Fischer, Apologie, pp. 57–58, 69.
28 Fischer, Interdict, p. 40; Fischer, Apologie, p. 66.
29 Schenkel, Abfertigung, p. 23.
30 Fischer, Apologie, pp. 93–95.
31 Kuno Fischer, Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftslehre. Lehrbuch für akademische Vorlesungen (Stuttgart: C.P. Scheitlin, 1852). All references in parentheses in this section are to this edition. “§” indicates a paragraph number, “Z” a Zusatz or Addition; Arabic numerals refer to page numbers. The second edition completely revised the first and appeared under the new title System der Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftslehre (Heidelberg: Friedrich Bassermann, 1865). We will consider the changes of that edition in Section 6.
32 See Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, in Werke XX, 329–462.
33 See Fischer, Geschichte der neuern Philosophie (1854), ‘Neun und zwanzigste Vorlesung’, pp. 543, 546, 547.
34 Fischer, Apologie, pp. 70–71.
35 Fischer had developed this formulation of Hegel’s philosophy as early as 1848. It appears clearly in his article ‘Das Wesen der Religion von Carl Schwarz’, Die Epigonen V (1848), 192.
36 G.W.F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Meiner, 1971), I, 66–67. In the 1869 edition Fischer is explicit that this version of the transition is a mistake of Hegel’s (§77; 219).
37 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, I, 31, 36, 47.
38 See F.W.J. Schelling, Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie, §1, Werke I/4, 10–11.
39 Fischer is not simply expounding Kant here but also reaffirming him. Though he criticizes the concept of the thing-in-itself as a residue of pre-critical dogmatism (§12; 23), he also endorses Kant’s restriction of knowledge to experience as part of his critical doctrine (§11, 20; §13; 22). As we shall see, Fischer also accepts Kant’s theory of space and time, according to which they are valid for human intuition alone.
40 Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, I, 31.
41 See Kuno Fischer, G.W. Leibniz und seine Schule (Mannheim: Bassermann, 1855); and Francis Bacon und seine Nachfolger (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1856).
42 On the story behind the attempt to appoint Fischer, see Falckenheim, ‘Fischer’, pp. 261–262.
43 As cited in Falckenheim, ‘Kuno Fischer’, p. 262.
44 See Fischer’s own account of his work on Kant in the preface to his Immanuel Kant: Entwicklungsgeschichte und System der kritischen Philosophie (Mannheim: Bassermann, 1860), pp. vii–ix.
45 See Kuno Fischer, Clavis kantiana. Qua via Immanuel Kant philosophiae criticae elementa invenerit (Jena: Schreiber, 1858).
46 See Fischer, Geschichte der neuern Philosophie (1854), pp. 89–100. This is a later edition of lectures originally given in 1852.
47 Kuno Fischer, Kant’s Leben und die Grundlagen seiner Lehre (Mannheim: Friedrich Bassermann, 1860). All references in parentheses are to this edition.
48 Fischer, ‘Das Problem der menschlichen Erkenntniß als die erste Frage der Philosophie’, pp. 89–115.
49 It is a commonplace to see Zeller’s 1862 lecture ‘Ueber Bedeutung und Aufgabe der Erkenntnistheorie’ as the beginning of this neo-Kantian conception of philosophy. See, for example, Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), pp. 133–135. Rorty cites Fritz Mauthner and Hans Vaihinger to bolster Zeller’s claim to priority (135, nn. 5–6). Though Fischer does not use the term “Erkenntnistheorie”, it is noteworthy that his conception of the epistemological task of philosophy precedes that of Zeller.
50 The whole work bore the title Immanuel Kant, Entwicklungsgeschichte und System der kritischen Philosophie (Mannheim: Friedrich Bassermann, 1860). The first volume has the subtitle Entstehung und Begründung der kritischen Philosophie. Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft; the second volume has the subtitle Das Lehrgebäude der kritischen Philosophie. Das System der reinen Vernunft. The first volume was Volume III of his Geschichte der neuern Philosophie; the second volume became Volume IV. In the ten-volume Jubiläumsausgabe the Kant volumes became Volumes IV and V.
51 See Karl Rosenkranz, Geschichte der kant’schen Philosophie (Leipzig: Voß, 1840); J.E. Erdmann, Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Darstellung der Geschichte der neuern Philosophie (Leipzig: Vogel, 1848), III/1; and Carl Fortlage, Genetische Geschichte der Philosophie seit Kant (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1852).
52 Emil Arnoldt, Kant nach Kuno Fischers neuer Darstellung (Königsberg: Beyer, 1882). Reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Otto Schöndörffer (Berlin: Cassirer, 1908), III, 213–214.
53 Wilhelm Windelband, Kuno Fischer, pp. 24–25.
54 The first three editions were published by Bassermann in 1860, 1867 (Mannheim) and 1882 (Munich); the fourth and fifth by Winter in Heidelberg in 1889 and 1898–1899. Starting with the third edition, the general title for both volumes was Immanuel Kant und seine Lehre.
55 Buch II, Zweites Capitel: ‘Transcendentale Aesthetik’, pp. 291–318.
56 Erich Adickes, Kant und das Ding an sich (Berlin: Pan Verlag, 1924).
57 Kuno Fischer, Kritik der kantischen Philosophie (Munich: Bassermann, 1883), p. 90.
58 See Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘Kritik der kantischen Philosophie’, Anhang to Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Wolfgang Freiherr von Löhneysen (Stuttgart: Insel, 1968), I, 586–587.
59 Kant, KrV, B 116–117.
60 Kant, KrV, B 119.
61 Fischer, System der Logik und Metaphysik, §55; 112.
62 Fischer became fully explicit and clear about this in his Kritik der kantischen Philosophie, pp. 39–57. In developing this interpretation Fischer refers us to the third newly-revised edition of Volumes III and IV of his Geschichte der neuern Philosophie (Munich: Bassermann, 1882), III, 514–518 and IV, 401–407. These passages do not appear in the first and second edition. Still, this conception of Kant’s methodology seems to have been implicit in the two earlier editions of the Geschichte (1860, 1867).
63 Fischer, Kritik der kantischen Philosophie, p. 43.
64 Kuno Fischer, System der Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftslehre. Zweite völlig umgearbeitete Auflage (Heidelberg: Friedrich Bassermann, 1865). The new title also drops the subtitle of the first edition, Lehrbuch für akademische Vorlesungen, because of its increased size. All references in parentheses in this section are to the second edition, where “§” indicates a paragraph number and Arabic numerals indicate page numbers.
65 Kuno Fischer, Ueber die menschliche Freiheit (Heidelberg: Winter, 1875). Reprinted in Kleine Schriften (Heidelberg: Winter 1896), I, 1–47. All references here are to the later edition.
66 Kuno Fischer, Kritik der kantischen Philosophie.
67 Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘Kritik der kantischen Philosophie’, ‘Anhang’ to Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, in Sämtliche Werke, I, 559–715.