Greg Detre
Monday, 08 January, 2001
post-Kantian
It focuses on the paradigm shift around the 17th century from seeing the universe as ordered by meaning and predictable by interpretation � e.g. the �refutation� of Galileo�s finding of moons around Jupiter by pointing to the 7 holes in the head, the 7 metals, and consequently just the 7 planets. With Descartes and modern science came the �disenchantment�, the desacralisation and the objectification. The universe was now seen as a causal set of contingent correlations, discoverable empirically � previous Aristotelian ideas were seen as soft and comforting illusions, human idolatry, our instinctive anthropomorphising instinct imposed on the universe. In the same way, perceptions of the self mirrored this move to objectification � rather than defining the self relative to a meaningful, ordered universe, the self first defined the outside.
Then came Herder and the expressivist movement in Germany, where the distinction between pre- and post-Enlightenment so clear in France was blurred. The expressivists talked of freedom, the freedom of man to realise himself, to express himself in his life � life as art, where art was liberated from Aristotelian mimesis to become fully expression. The freedom of man�s self became a freedom, not from authority, but to fulfil himself, not a preset universal form, but an ideal of himself that he creates for himself. Thus the aspirations of the expressivist consciousness are: unity, freedom and communion with both man and nature.
The Ancient Greeks were seen as a sort of paragon by the Enlightenment (Wincklemann). Though each were individuals, developed and expressed fully (rather than the homogenised, atomistic, self-sufficient individuals that the Enlightenment seemed to call for) yet they lived harmoniously and completely as a community. H�rlin describes this as the first of two �ideals of existence�. Yet Kant showed this mode of existence to be in the past � now, our reason shows us the necessity of moral law, leaving us wholly free to pursue its dictates. Yet this leaves man as embedded in a perpetual struggle between what he rationally knows to be right and what his nature propels him towards. The post-Kantian hope encouraged by the third of Kant�s critiques is that somehow there is a second ideal which we can work towards of harmonising the desires of nature and reason in an even more sublime way � aware of what we ought to do, and having ceased to desire anything else � but is this still freedom???
Taylor regards the Hegelian system as unsurpassed in its attempt to address the driving problem of his generation, the reconciliation of radical autonomy and expressive unity. There is something very Eastern-seeming in the ideas of Schelling, Schiller and Fichte in the way they consider the cosmic subject, perhaps Nature as an Absolute in which we partake, instantiated as self-consciousness. They walk the impossible dividing line between static rationality and shifting creativivity, with Berkleyan ideas about God as the subject as opposed to the underlying Kantian thing-in-itself.