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[ 6 ] 1 ] German Post-Kantian Idealism and Dewey’s Metaphysics: Mutual Themes James Scott Johnston The purpose of this essay is to note two mutual themes in post-Kantian idealism (hereafter, PKI) and Dewey’s early and early-middle metaphysics (roughly 1882–1912). These themes are (a) the turn away from subjectivism and (b) naturalism. Two “waves” of each of these are discernible: the first occurred in Germany circa 1790, the second in England and the United States circa 1890. These waves were generated by the shocks of what was perceived as an over-subjectivization of knowledge, experience, and consciousness in German philosophy and Anglo-American philosophy. The “solution” for each was the turn toward an understanding of body/mind/spirit/world that is anti-subjective, naturalistic, and organic. I shall demonstrate that a number of thinkers attempted to get out from under the subjectivist spell in Germany, Great Britain, and America. I discuss J. G. Fichte, J. F. C. Hölderlin, and F. W. J. Schelling in regard to PKI and (early and early-middle period) John Dewey in regard to Anglo-American neo-idealism (AANI) and experimental idealism.1 As Dewey self-consciously identified with AANI (from 1882 to 1893), he shared many of the convictions of his contemporaries in their turn to PKI to combat materialism, crude realism , and positivism. After his “break” with AANI, he continued his quest for an anti-subjectivist, naturalistic philosophy. Crudely put, Dewey took PKI’s notions of self and social relations and naturalized them and took the notion of dialectic and rendered it an experimental set of methods, which, in Dewey’s terminology, is scientific inquiry. I wish to investigate Dewey’s early and early-middle metaphysics in the context of his commitment to the central theses of PKI, anti-subjectivism and naturalism. Historical Background I shall begin with brief historical remarks on PKI. Distinguishing characteristics of PKI include a response to skepticism regarding claims of knowledge; )DLUILHOG&KLQGG $0 German Post-Kantian Idealism and Dewey’s Metaphysics 7 the centrality of the self (and particularly self-consciousness) that is absent from prior schools of thought, including rationalism; the turn away from subjectivity and subjectivist accounts of knowing and being; and the development of a naturalist account of nature/mind or mind/world.2 I shall deal with these briefly and in turn; we shall see the latter two themes reemerge as important elements of the response to AANI in the late nineteenth century. Skepticism is best understood as a reaction to the rationalism of the period leading up to (and, in some accounts, including) Immanuel Kant.3 Kant, it is said, “destroys” metaphysics by creating a gulf between what we can know (science) and what we can believe (faith). There is no turning back to Cartesian certainties; Kant effectively demonstrates that Descartes’s understanding of the self is premised on a viciously circular appeal to a transcendental ideal that is unavailable to cognition (Kant, Critique, A379). Kant’s solution is a seemingly dualistic one: transcendental idealism. Here, the phenomenal realm corresponds to our knowledge of the world and the noumenal realm to our thinking things in themselves. “I understand by the transcendental idealism of all appearances the doctrine that they are all together to be regarded as mere representations and not as things in themselves, and accordingly that space and time are only sensible forms of our intuition, but not determinations given for themselves or conditions of objects as things in themselves” (A369). Did Kant solve the problem? Without an overarching law or principle to connect these, the ability to ground knowledge claims seemed imperiled. This state of affairs was unacceptable to those who followed Kant; much labor was invested in closing the gap by accounts of mind and world that attempt to derive a first principle from which all further knowledge claims are possible. The way forward for PKI was to retreat from subjectivism toward a non-question-begging ground that incorporated both mind and world. Important in this movement was a “theory of the subject,” as Dieter Henrich has called it.4 This meant a robust understanding of the self, the nature of self-reflexivity, and the role the self plays in the formation or development of epistemological matters such as perceptions and representations. The other significant development that had to occur to avoid a questionbegging ground was a movement toward nature and the natural. This was not an “objectivist” move (though G. W. F. Hegel did call...

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