The Fate of Reason. German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (review)

314 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 27:2 APRIL 1989 about their reliability without assuming their very reliability. To trust or not to trust assumes choice, but this is ruled out by the sceptic who insists that trust is irresistible. Thus, for Newman, we are justified in acting (accepting our faculties as reliable). Ferreira's book is scholarly and enriching in its insights. It makes a genuine contribution to the development of the response to scepticism first formulated in the seventeenth century. Her acquaintance with the texts is competent and she has a good sense of historical connections between authors. There are a number of typographical errors , several relating to syllabification of words, occurring on pages 2, 4, 17, 4o, 57, 156, 173, 2o8, and 24o. HENRY G. VAN LEEUWEN Hanover College Frederick C. Beiser. The Fate of Reason. German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1987. Pp. xi + 395. $3~ This book comes in the wake of other studies and texts in the development of German Idealism published in the past fifteen years or so,~and like the others it attests to the revival of interest in this fascinating period of the history of philosophy. Beiser's is a synthetic work. It tries to piece together the many elements of the philosophical debate that went on in Germany between ~781 and ~793, "after the publication of Kant's first Kritik and before the appearance of Fichte's 1794 Wissenschaftsslehre" (vii). It only claims to be "an introduction, a general survey of the most important thinkers and controversies between Kant and Fichte" (vii). The reality, however, far exceeds this modest claim. The book is a model of lucidity and ease of style, and these are traits which will certainly make it excellent reading for the general reader. But its freedom from pedantry only accentuates the formidably complete knowledge of the period on which it is based. The book offers a genuine contribution to the interpretation of the development of German Idealism, and for this it will also become an important source book for the specialist. German Idealism was a complex phenomenon. Kant's Kritik was only one of the many symptoms of a crisis that the Aufkl~irung had brought upon itself in the second half of the eighteenth century by reflecting upon the limits of rationality and discovering that the power of reason is severely limited. Hume's skepticism was no doubt instrumental to this new awareness. Its deeper sources, however, lay in the very intellectual , moral, and religious factors that had originally made up the German Enlightenment . These factors conditioned both Kant's critique of reason and its first reception. The great merit of Beiser's book is that it portrays the transition from Kant to postjust to cite the most recent ones: G. di Giovanni and H. S. Harris, eds. and trans., Between Kant and Hegel: Textsin theDevelopmentofldealism, with Two Introductory Essays (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985); G. W. F. Hegel, TheJena Logicand Metaphysics, i8o4-o5, J. W. Burbidge and G. di Giovanni, eds. (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen'sUniversity Press, 1986); Manfred Kuehn, British CommonSense in Germany, x786-i8oo: A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy (Kingston: McGill-Queen'sUniversity Press, 1987). BOOK REVIEWS 315 Kantian thought precisely in the context of the crisis of the Aufkliirung, where it belongs . The book also rightly identifies Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi as an important contributor to the process. Just at the time when the first Kritik appeared, Jacobi had singlehandedly brought the crisis of the Aufkliirung to a head with his famous charge that Lessing was a Spinozist. In so doing, however, he also unwittingly determined the course that the reception of Kant was to take. In the process of appropriating Kant, Reinhold and Fichte, and Hegel later on, all had Jacobi's challenge to reason in mind. Hence, although Jacobi was certainly not of the same intellectual stature as Kant, the history of the period must still in some way be written around him, just as Beiser's is. What Beiser does not show (for it would fall outside the temporal limits of his book) is that, in the events that followed, Jacobi was...