Antifoundationalism

Five. Hegel, German Idealism, and Antifoundationalism

Five Hegel, German Idealism, and An"tifoundati()nalism TOM ROC](MORE This essay concerns the foundations of knowledge in German idealism, with particular attention to G. w.F. Hegel's ambiguous interest in antifoundationalism. We can begin with a comment on the meaning of "German idealism." There is an unfortunate tendency to consider this period as beginning with Johann Gottlieb Fichte and encling with Hegel. In my view this tendency should be resisted since it eliminates from consideration two of the most interesting thinkers of this or any' other period: Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx. For present purposes, I shall understand German idealism as the wider period including both Kant and Marx. I will take seriously Kant's claim that his critical philosophy is empirically real and transcendentally ideal, and hence a form of idealism. And I will disregard Marxist efforts to refute idealism, either by driving a wedge between Marx arld philosophy or by classifying his view as materialism, where this term is understood to mean "nonidealist philosophy." 1 Marx will be understood as belonging to the movement of thought that originates in Kant's position and continues in the writings of Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and Hegel, each of whom}' with the possible exception of Schelling, directly influenced his thought. This essay falls naturally into two parts, including a gerleral description of some forms of foundationalism in German idealism, followed by a more specific account of Hegel's position as an attempt to come to grips with this epistemological strategy in his own account of knowledge. 10 5 106 I TOM ROCKMORE From Kant onward, the entire German idealist tradition is centrally concerned with the problem of knowledge. Hence, it is not surprising that an interest in foundationalism and antifoundationalism runs throughout the thought of this period. Certainly it is not the case, despite claims to the contrary, that epistemology disappears in the period after the critical philosophy.' The opposite is closer to the mark. The continued importance of the epistemological impulse in the post-Kantian German discussion is due mainly to the continued influence of the critical philosophy. Even the wellknown focus in Marx's position on the relation of theory and practice is directed at least as much against the critical philosophy as against what others, but not Hegel, call absolute idealism. The present task is not to sketch idealist epistemology, which has only rarely been studied as a whole, perhaps because of the mistaken view that it ends with Kant.' It will be sufficient to call attention to forms of foundationalism and antifoundationalism in the positions of the main German idealists. Here we can begin with Kant. According to Kant, philosophy is knowledge derived from concepts.' and his view of philosophy as composing an a priori system is obviously related to Cartesian foundationalism, or a theory of knowledge based on an initial principle or principles known to be true and from which the remainder of the theory can be strictly deduced. Now, in Kant's concept of a system as "the unity of the manifold modes of knowledge under one idea" 5 there is an ambiguity concerning the status of that idea, in his own terminology, as either regulative or constitutive, that is, as an idea toward which one strives or as a principle that is in fact instantiated and serves within the theory as its ground in a Cartesian sense. Kant's position is ambiguous on this point, perhaps because he was not fully aware of the need to choose between foundationalist and antifoundationalist approaches to knowledge. Kant's position is both antifoundationalist and foundationalist. It is antifoundationalist since he holds that philosophy is a mere idea of a possible science that nowhere exists 6 and since he further holds that philosophical systems in fact arise by generatio aequiooca .?in other words, through mere accretion. It is foundationalist in other, perhaps more important senses: in the idea of system Hegel,GermanIdealism,andAntifoundationalism 1°7 as the a priori realization of an idea constitutive of philosophy," perhaps in the appeal to the transcendental unity of apperception as the highest principle of the understanding, of logic, and of transcendental philosophy," and above all in the assertion that the Copernican Revolution, introduced as a mere hypothesis, will be proved apodictically in the book. to What he initially regarded as a mere hypothesis is, rather, treated by Kant as a ground in a fully Cartesian sense since, as he grand.ly states, a change in even the smallest part...