Otto Friedrich Gruppe 1804-1876: Philosoph, Dichter, Philologe (review)

Two hundred years after his birth, Otto Friedrich Gruppe is commemorated in essays by American and European scholars. Contributions in English, French, German, and Italian treat diverse aspects of Gruppe's life and work. While Gruppe's son, Otto Gruppe, in his time a well-known philologist, considered his father's best work to be his poetry, O. F. Gruppe's great-grandson, Dr. Ludwig Bernays, the editor of this volume, wisely chose a more encompassing approach. The present review considers contributions dealing with Gruppe's philosophical writings. The essays dealing with Gruppe as a poet, journalist, philologist, and secretary of the Königliche Akademie der Künste have to be considered elsewhere.

Gruppe was a language-critical philosopher and archenemy of metaphysics and all speculative philosophy. He sharply criticized Hegel years before Feuerbach, Marx, and Kierkegaard did. Gruppe's Antäus. Ein Briefwechsel über speculative Philosophie in ihrem Conflict mit Wissenschaft und Sprache, 1831, was programmatic for the revolution in philosophy he proclaimed in Wendepunkt der Philosophie im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, 1834. In condemning metaphysics and speculative philosophy not as false but as meaningless, he made the verifiability of propositions the criterion of their meaningfulness. He expected language critique not only to overcome metaphysical speculation but also to achieve the restoration of the peace of mind and the healing of the metaphysicians once they realized that they had been dealing with pseudo-problems. Parallels to features of twentieth-century analytic philosophy are obvious.

Olaf Briesehighlights Schelling's attempt to neutralize such a radical critic as Gruppe by getting him an appointment in the Prussian Kultusministerium, with the understanding that he restrict his critic to the hegelian philosophy. Gruppe did not fully comply. A year after Schelling's death, he attacked Schelling's philosophy in Gegenwart und Zukunft der Philosophie in Deutschland, 1855. Briese regards Gruppe as a positivist. Yet Gruppe explicitly rejected positivism along with materialism, emphasizing empiricism instead. His language-critical method included an interdependence theory of language and thought that enabled him to present language critique as critique of cognition. For Gruppe language is not merely a tool and organ of thought, as Briese claims, but a factual and historical a priori. Gruppe's relativity theory of concepts and terms presented their meaning as constituted by their use and context. Kierkegaard, who met Gruppe in Berlin, referred to Gruppe as a "Notabilität." Briese regards this as ironical. Given Kierkegaard's fondness of irony, this seems plausible. Yet Kierkegaard's writings show too many direct parallels to Gruppe's writings (see H. J. Cloeren, Language and Thought: German Approaches to Analytic Philosophy in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries [Berlin, 1988], ch. 11) to accept this as the only possible reading.

Volker Peckhaus investigates Gruppe's role for logic. Gruppe considered metaphysics and speculative philosophy deeply indebted to Aristotelian logic. Preferring Bacon's organon to that of Aristotle, Gruppe was circumspect to call for a reformation of formal and informal logic or, in K. R. Popper's term, a logic of scientific discovery. Gruppe had no antenna for the development of mathematical logic and did not contribute to the reformation of logic other than by calling for it. Not even his insistence on the priority of judgments over concepts, later so important for Frege, changes this. Unlike Briese, Peckhaus realizes the importance of Gruppe's interdependence theory of language and thought.

Katherine Arens looks at Fritz Mauthner's Gruppe and provides a new way of looking at Gruppe as an ancestor "of a critical hermeneutics based in culture and history as well as in imminent experience" (93). Why "imminent," however, is not clear. Arens attributes to Kant synthetic a priori concepts (87), which should read synthetic a priori judgments.

Luc J. M. Bergmans shows parallels between Gruppe's philosophy and the Dutch movement of significs. Bergmans published this before, but again documenting the little known influence Gruppe had on this school of Dutch thought—mediated probably by H. Vaihinger—has its merits...