After Hegel: German Philosophy 1840–1900 by Frederick C. Beiser (review)

Frederick Beiser has done it again! One of the major experts on German philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in this country, he has written a book that will prove a most helpful introduction for anybody setting out to study German philosophy after Hegel. After his The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (1987)—to name only his most influential book to-date—forever changed the way we have studied that period, resurrecting from neglect, even oblivion, such philosophers as Karl Leonhard Reinhold, whose roles were essential in the progression from Kant to speculative idealism, Beiser now offers his audience a welcome introduction to a period of German philosophy that is much less treated than the late German Enlightenment or, for that matter, the first half of the nineteenth century, where the big names of the idealist philosophers Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel still dominate.

What makes Beiser’s treatment especially interesting is that he avoids the big names. Philosophers who today are considered most important, such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, receive scant mention, while Beiser focuses, in his first chapter, on the identity crisis of German philosophy after the waning of Hegel’s philosophy, and in subsequent chapters on pertinent contemporary philosophical debates of the period, namely the materialism, Ignorabimus, historicism, and pessimism controversies. Of these, the Ignorabimus controversy, initiated by Emil du Bois-Reymond, is little known even in Germany; and so is the pessimism controversy, which is surprising given the popularity of Schopenhauer’s philosophy since the publication of his Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851.

Beiser’s treatment of the latter is thus most welcome. He gives much room to the reaction of the neo-Kantians to Schopenhauer’s pessimism, since both they and Schopenhauer claimed to be Kant’s true heirs. One could only wish that Schopenhauer had lived long enough to answer their criticisms, for they are put forward very much in the spirit of Kant, as when Otto Liebmann, Jürgen Bona Meyer, and Alois Riehl questioned Schopenhauer’s central concept of will “as mere striving, urge, or impulse,” whereas in their view the will needed an end or motive (171). Of course they were right from a narrowly Kantian perspective, but at the same time they missed the most essential feature of Schopenhauer’s philosophical approach to self and world. Unfortunately, the same could be said of Beiser’s book, which, given the restrictions of his focus on controversies, at times does not give sufficient space to the philosophies themselves. His treatment of Schopenhauer’s conception of will as thing-in-itself fails to take seriously Schopenhauer’s claim of the self’s immediate intuition of the will within itself. Thus Schopenhauer’s overall philosophy, which represents maybe the last complete philosophical system that includes metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and logic, gets short thrift.

As Beiser recounts details of the four controversies, philosophers better known in the non-German speaking world, such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Friedrich Albert Lange, and Eduard von Hartmann, find their roles described, as well as ones lesser known, such as Adolf Trendelenburg, Carl von Nägeli, and Heinrich Czolbe. As regards Czolbe, another potential disadvantage of Beiser’s approach emerges: in emphasizing controversies, he gives much room to thinkers whose thought might just not be interesting enough to justify fairly extensive treatment, as when it turns out that Czolbe, who had attempted a “systematic foundation of materialism” (84), eventually “confessed the error of his materialist ways,” realizing that his “naïve realism” was untenable (88). On the other hand, there is little doubt that Czolbe played an important role in the materialism controversy as it unfolded.

Of course, the inclusion of minor figures is at the same time a definite advantage of Beiser’s book, especially his discovery of two completely forgotten writers: Agnes Taubert, the wife of Eduard von Hartmann, and Olga Plümacher. Both contributed eloquent defenses of the pessimistic worldview, and according to Beiser’s helpful section...