The Philosopher's Voice: Philosophy, Politics, and Language in the Nineteenth Century

Notes

249 Notes Chapter 1 1. Hegel, Encyclopedia, § 401, Addition; Werke (Hegel-Institut Berlin, from Past Masters, 1999, same edition as the Suhrkamp edition of Hegel’s Werke), 10: 109. 2. Plato, Apology in Four Texts on Socrates (trans. Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 17 a. 3. The difference between teaching and persuasion is a recurrent theme in Plato’s dialogues. The issue becomes even more difficult to resolve if we take Socrates’ claims about ignorance seriously. He denies that he uses his voice rhetorically to persuade his audience, and yet he also denies knowing anything that he could teach his audience. One wonders if the problem of Socrates’ elenchos (examination method) could be resolved by considering his awareness of the ambiguity of voice as politically embodied activity that aims beyond political life. For synoptic discussion of problems with regard to the Socratic elenchos, see Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicolas D. Smith, The Philosophy of Socrates (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000). For further relevant discussion of Socrates, see Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Nehamas concludes that Socrates actually says nothing to us because he wrote nothing. Rather it is Plato who speaks for Socrates. Such an important point does pose a problem for my subsequent account. I do assume that we can study the voice of the philosophers I consider in the present text by way of their written words. I further try to read their written words back into their historical and rhetorical contexts. Of course, this may be impossible. Indeed the nineteenth century saw a rebirth of irony and a fracturing of the idea of self-identity that seems essential for a consideration of something as unified as “the” philosopher’s voice. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, for example, do not speak with anything like the unified voice I will be ascribing to Kant, Fichte, or Hegel. This is fitting, however, because the content of Kant’s, Fichte’s, and Hegel’s philosophical theories affirm the idea of concrete self-identity. I do, however, take up the issue of multiplicity of voices as well as a consideration of irony of style and presentation in the chapters on Marx. As a result of the content of his own political and philosophical theory, Marx, like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, opens the possibility that the philosopher has a multiplicity of voices. 4. There are many texts that treat this set of philosophers and this era of philosophical activity. Among these are Joseph M. Schwartz’s The Permanence of the 250 Notes Political (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), Dick Howard’s From Marx to Kant (2nd ed., New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), Bernard Yack’s The Longing for Total Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), and George Armstrong Kelly’s Idealism, Politics, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). These accounts suffice to show the interpenetration of philosophy and politics in this historical era, however, none of them includes an account of the relation between philosophy, politics, and language that I am arguing lies at the heart of the problematic that instigates the development from Kant to Marx. 5. Wilhelm von Humboldt, On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species (trans. by Peter Heath, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 41. 6. For a discussion of this see George Steiner, After Babel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), especially chapter 2. 7. Hegel, Encyclopedia, § 401, Addition. 8. Hegel, Encyclopedia, § 401, Addition. 9. Hegel, Encyclopedia, § 459. 10. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 147. 11. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 147; Hauptwerke [Akademie Ausgabe (Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften. Hrsg. von der KöniglichPreussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Berlin, 1902-) from Past Masters , 1998), 7: 245. 12. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 147; Hauptwerke, 7: 245. 13. Kant, Anthropology, 23; Hauptwerke, 7: 139. 14. Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” in Kant’s Political Writings (ed. by Hans Reiss, Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54. The contrasting metaphors of maturity, immaturity, tutelage, childishness, and enlightenment are themselves political concepts . As Willi Goetschel interprets this passage: “In fact, the juridical definition of enlightenment suggests with this ‘overturn’ a crucial point: the concept of legal majority [Mündigkeit], the age at which one is competent to use one...