Alla Soglia Dell' età Romantica (review)

272 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY than most that his great original intellects cannot be crammed into any conceptual pigeonhole. By juxtaposing them all as he does he deepens our understanding of each. ALAN B. SPITZER State University o/ Iowa Alla Soglia Dell" et~ Romantica. By A. Pupi. (Milan: Vitae pensiero, 1962. L. 3000.) Pupi's object in this book, At the Dawn o/the Romantic Age, is to recapture the milieu and the personalities of those who had what Kant called "rational faith." The two main issues of the polemics which produced the Kantian theory of the supremacy of practical reason are formulated in Jacobi's and Mendelssohn's philosophies. Jacobi, rejecting Spinozism as atheism, appeals to faith as an element of all human knowledge and of reality (p. 49), using Kant to justify his appeal to practical faith and in this way evading the Kryptokatholicismus of which he was accused (p. 230). Mendelssohn, on the other hand, denies the existence of things in themselves, mistaking, according to Jacobi's version of Kant (p. 210), Kant's theory of the limits of human knowledge for a theory of knowledge as such (p. 279). Meanwhile, in the face of the fall of philosophical reason, Hamann praises reason as "God's original light" (p. 225). These are the terms of the polemic created by Kant's short treatise, What Does It Mean to See One's Way Clearly? We must never forget these sayings because "the Kantian language and other great systematic formulations are always based on them and have an organic continuity through the circular medium of men's daily and concrete speech" (p. 214). Kant intervenes in the dispute with the notion of Vernun/tglaube whose Griinde should be interpreted as the very nature of reason (p. 289). However, while we may interpret the word "opinion" (Meinung) as knowledge (Wissen), when the objective Griinde are given, the VernunItglaube will always be a Glaube because it is based only on "ge[iihltes Bediir[nis der VernunIt," and consequently its Grund must be taken as only subjective (pp. 288--290). What Kant wants to point out is that "thought detached from experience (pure reason) is no longer able to show that it knows reality, but it can see its own way in the sphere of the possible" (pp. 283--284); however, the Vernuntt of the Vernun/tglaube is neither the speculative and demonstrative reason, as Mendelssohn supposed, nor an obscure intuition "without the consent of reason," called "faith" by Jacobi. This is, in short, the theme of the book. I cannot agree with the author's thesis that the Kantian supremacy of practical reason settled the issue in the age-old dispute between philosophy and faith (p. 275). The very protest of Wizemann, which the author cannot omit, is an example of it, and certainly this was not the only protest; it was followed by lively criticism, particularly by Schelling, who soon expressed himself in his Philosophical Letters. See particularly the first letter (on p. 8 of the Italian Edition by G. Semerari, Florence: 1958). I think too that this attempt to make practice the objective guaranty of theoretical philosophy is somewhat problematic, all the more if one admits the impossibility of a theoretic reasoning about God's existence only in practice. It seems to me that the author, whose strict and relevant philology is admirable, leaves out too much of the theoretic problematicity of the subjects he faces, as, for instance, the ambiguity of the talk about faith, which is formally assertive but really hypothetical; the assertiveness, if practical, should be justified in action, not in talk. In consequence of his recourse to practice as a last resort for justification , Kant is compared to Pascal by Goldmann, who sees in both of them the theme of the "wager" (see pp. 445-446, Le Dieu Cachd, Paris, 1955) which shows, to my mind, the problematicity of the whole matter. This cannot be settled merely by historical exposition. The limitation of Pupi's study, though philologically rich and detailed, lies, according to BOOK REVIEWS 273 my judgment, in the fact that he has limited the historical inquiry to the scholarly study of documents and...