Idealism and realism

Richard Kroner's monumental study of German Idealism, From Kant to Hegel, portrays that philosophical movement as a teleological process brought under way by Kant, originally advanced, in different ways, by Fichte and Schelling, and culminating in the universal synthesis of all prior views and standpoints that is Hegel's system. This linear, progressivist, and finalist perspective is informed by Hegel's self-understanding of his place at the end of the history of philosophy and owes much to Hegel's own work in writing the history of philosophy in general and the history of modern philosophy in particular. But it has not remained the only, or even the dominant, reading of German Idealism. Over the past few decades a number of philosophers and scholars have argued for the superior role of Schelling in the later development of German Idealism and sought to show that it was with Schelling and not Hegel that the movement reached its deepest and most far-reaching insights. Similarly, there has been a reassessment of the place that Fichte occupies through his later works in the history of German Idealism. Finally, even Schopenhauer, once excluded from the German idealist canon, has been incorporated into a more comprehensively conceived genealogy of classical German philosophy between Kant and Hegel.

Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), and Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), two sons of Prussian pietists and a Swabian poet, are among a handful of thinkers most responsible for initiating a holistic turn in German thought in the second half of the eighteenth century. If this era is generally associated with the end of the Enlightenment, the writings of Hamann, Herder, and Schiller represent the German “Counter-Enlightenment,” dedicated to the premise that the genuine meanings of things derive from their interactive functions in a developing, self-determining whole. Hamann and Herder are also known to historians of German culture as prime movers of the so-called “Storm and Stress” (Sturm und Drang) movement epitomized in the theater - its artform of choice - by the early plays of Schiller (The Robbers) and Goethe (Götz of Berlichingen). This highly self-reflective movement derives from an identity crisis that is both national and philosophical, because the effort to establish a distinctively German literature in the face of France's cultural hegemony coincides with the question of the nature of reason itself.

The idealist achievement

The period of German Idealism constitutes a cultural phenomenon whose stature and influence has been frequently compared to nothing less than the golden age of Athens. For this reason the era from the 1770s into the 1840s that we tend to call “the age of German Idealism” is often designated in Germany simply as the period of “classical German philosophy.” This designation is meant to indicate a level of preeminent achievement rather than to characterize a specific style or content. It thus bypasses issues such as how philosophers of this era match up with the division in German literature between classicism and romanticism, and how strong a distinction is to be made between the “Critical” or “transcendental” idealism of Kant and the so-called “absolute” idealism that culminated in the work of the three most famous philosophers who came after him: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.

Kant's mature writings about morality and right fall into four different categories. (1) There are the foundational writings, which include Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and the Analytic of the Critique of Practical Reason (1788). (2) There are the writings that attempt to ground a morally motivated answer to metaphysical or religious questions. Kant deals with this concern toward the end of all three Critiques: in The Canon of Pure Reason, The Dialectic of Practical Reason and the Methodology of Teleological Judgment. (3) There are the writings in which Kant applies ethical principles. The central work here is the final product of Kant's ethical thought, the Metaphysics of Morals (1797-8), but this category also includes other works on politics and religion of varying lengths, including On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory but Will Not Work in Practice (1793), Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1794), and Perpetual Peace (1795), as well as a number of short occasional pieces, such as Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784), What Does It Mean To Orient Oneself in Thinking? (1786), The End of All Things (1794), On A Presumed Right to Lie from Philanthropy (1797), and Conflict of the Faculties (1798), as well as part of the Methodology of the Critique of Practical Reason and part of the Methodology of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) (“The Discipline of Pure Reason in its Polemical Use”).

Hegel on the sources of Kantian dualism

Absolute idealism, the philosophical movement that culminated with the work of Hegel, defined itself by its attempt to transcend the various dualisms that pervaded the philosophy of Kant. In Hegel's only complete, even if highly schematic, exposition of his system, the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817, further editions in Hegel's lifetime in 1827 and 1830), Hegel defined absolute idealism by contrast to what he called the “subjective idealism ” of Kant, which he described thus:

German idealistic thinking can be approached in many different ways, each of which has peculiar advantages and problems. According to the standard view, the German idealist movement is best looked at as a philosophical program that was developed in the wake of Kant's Critical philosophy with the intention of improving his transcendental idealism in various directions. The now-dominant version of this view has it that, starting with K. L. Reinhold, a whole generation of young German philosophers embarked on the project of arriving at new foundations for Kant's philosophy, of distinguishing what was taken to be the highly promising spirit of his philosophical conception from its rather poor literal expression by Kant himself, and of providing the missing premises for the conclusions of his theory. Although this project was approached from very different points of view by each of the main figures of that movement - J. G. Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel - there were some convictions that they shared.

The leading figures of the generation that came to philosophical maturity in the 1840s stressed, from the start, their sharp disagreements with the systematic idealism of their predecessors. As Søren Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author Johannes de Silentio makes clear in Fear and Trembling, the one thing that he is not writing is “the System,” that is, any version of Hegelian idealism. Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx could have said the same. Their followers, to this day, understandably emphasize those aspects of their heroes' work that take them so far away from German Idealism that they can appear to be an attempt to “leave philosophy” altogether and to replace it with radical critique, revolutionary activism, and rigorous empirical science. In addition, all three thinkers agree on the charge that most of German Idealism, like much of modern philosophy in general, can be dismissed as little more than an alienating effort to carry out theology by other means. Their agreement on this point is all the more remarkable since it arose despite obvious and deep disagreements: Feuerbach and Marx came to bury all religion, whereas Kierkegaard aimed to rejuvenate it by calling for a return to Christian orthodoxy.

In Victorian poetry we see a proliferation of poetic forms, departing from eighteenth-century heroic couplets and neoclassical odes, and further developing the Romantic revival of ballads, sonnets, and blank verse into increasingly refined and rarefied metrical experiments. Alongside the English fashion in Italian sonnets, French stanzaic forms, Germanic accentual verse, and various kinds of dialect poetry - as well as a fascination with the literary recreation of songs, ballads, hymns, refrains, and other musical forms - there was a return to meters inspired by ancient Greek and Latin poetry. Victorian prosody - the study of meter - also became increasingly elaborate: in addition to counting the number of stresses or syllables per line, as in the tradition of English accentual-syllabic verse, prosodists tried to measure the length (or “quantity”) of syllables in English according to the tradition of classical quantitative verse. The publication of historical surveys and theoretical treatises on meter rose dramatically throughout the Victorian period, ranging from Edwin Guest's A History of English Rhythms (1838, revised 1882) to George Saintsbury's History of English Prosody (1906-10), and peaking mid-century with the New Prosody of Coventry Patmore and his contemporaries, and again at the end of the century, with the circulation of numerous polemical pamphlets and scholarly debates about meter.

Sir Laurence Olivier's 1955 film of Richard III centres on a single character and has, according to Anthony Davies in Filming Shakespeare's Plays, more links with his Hamlet than with his Henry V. It is, says Davies, a 'psychological study developed along the lines of attitudes to and conceptions of power'. The film is unabashedly theatrical, with the kind of stylised sets that Peter Holland labels 'fake medievalism'. As Davies shows, however, the play becomes cinema. 'The primary articulation of Olivier's Richard III is essentially filmic.' Richard III, writes Jack Jorgens, is 'not really a history play'. Olivier depicts a 'renaissance wolf among medieval sheep . . . Richard's opponents [in the film] are weak and stupid, but they do not seem as evil as they do in Shakespeare'. Indeed, his victims tend to yield to him without resistance. Clarence does, of course, not reading his own vivid treachery as a family trait that inheres in his brother. Hastings does, ignoring Stanley's dream and his own stumbling horse. But Lady Anne, we notice, has taken off her wedding ring before her second meeting with Richard. It is as if she is waiting for him to ask 'Is not the causer of the timeless deaths . . . As blameful as the executioner?' in the second confrontation that Olivier crafts from the script.

Olivier notoriously includes some of Cibber’s lines (‘Somuch for Buckingham’ and ‘Richard is himself again’), some of Garrick’s structural improvements and segments of Richard’s speeches from 3 Henry IV (‘Clarence beware.Thou keep’st me from the light; / But I will sort a pitchy day for thee’: 5.7.85–6) and parts of the long speech beginning at 3.2.124. Olivier’s choice is shrewd here, because that speech marks the ‘invention of Richard of Gloucester’ and his ‘differentiation from the comparatively colorless orators and warriors who populate the Henry VI plays’.

Reginald Scot's 1584 treatise The Discovery of Witchcraft has a section entitled 'To cut off one's head, and lay it in a platter, etc, which the jugglers call the decollation of John the Baptist'. Scot explains how the Elizabethan playhouses worked this particular conjuring trick by means of a stage-device that looked like a pillory, and which showed one actor's head as if it belonged to another body. Other contemporary documents describe many similar illusions, which seem to have been common on the stage as well as on street-corners. Opinion was divided about their value: Ben Jonson despised their vulgarity in the Induction to Bartholemew Fair, some denounced them as witchcraft, others felt that 'if these things be done for recreation and mirth, and not to the hurt of our neighbour, nor to the profaning and abusing of God's holy name, then sure they are neither impious nor altogether unlawful, though herein or hereby a natural thing be made to seem supernatural'. It would be a mistake therefore to assume that members of Shakespeare's audience automatically suspected that such 'jugglers' were in league with the devil, even though several contemporary plays, from Doctor Faustus to Friar Bacon to Volpone exploit that idea - for fear, for laughs, for satire. The basic theatricality of Shakespeare's plays (disbelief only partially suspended) means there is room for lots of stage-tricks in the midst of the ordinary pretences of his theatre (costumes, stage-voices, boys as women). Both depend on illusion, but there is also a complex relationship, often a necessary conflict, between the representation of the mundane and the marvellous.

We all object to stereotypes. They are oversimplified preconceptions, involving those who trade in them in lazy thinking and prejudice. They don't derive from direct experience. They are subject to fashion. And they tend to come into conflict with one another. But however objectionable they may be, on intellectual or moral grounds, we can't avoid them in our own, as well as other people's, thinking.

When, in Kenneth Branagh’s film of Hamlet (1996), the Gravedigger (Billy Crystal) remarks that in England the men are as mad as Hamlet, we laugh. Not exactly uproariously, but in the way, no doubt, that the line has raised a laugh for four hundred years. We laugh at the complexity of the dramatic irony in the situation – the Gravedigger’s subject is his Prince, he is his Prince’s subject, and yet here he is literally addressing his Prince on the subject. However, we also laugh at the English playwright giving the Danish character a stereotypical characterisation of the English. And if we’re English we laugh, slightly awkwardly, at the joke at our expense (not sure whether or not we recognise ourselves in it, not sure whether we’re particularly proud of our great English playwright’s laboured handling of it).

The romantic comedy Shakespeare in Love (1998) wittily puts the dramatist into the world of show business. Shakespeare's relationship with the theatre manager, Henslowe - and through him with 'the money' - is the occasion for a multitude of jokes referring to the entertainment industry of late sixteenth-century London in terms of its equivalent four hundred years later. In one moment of crisis Henslowe is even on the point of giving birth to a great cliché. 'The show must . . .' he starts, and Shakespeare completes the phrase by urging him impatiently to 'Go on.' The moment passes, unnoticed by either of them. The tension between the artist and the marketplace has always been a good source of humour in drama and fiction and on film, and the story is usually told in terms of the crassness of the producers and the crushed idealism of the 'creative' department. This is true to the experience of many artists, not least those writers and directors who worked in Hollywood at the height of the studios' powers. Writers and directors have often given accounts of their dealings with the 'front office' in which the latter's functionaries figure as craven, sentimental and reactionary, a characterisation many in the industry would of course dispute.

On a less personal and anecdotal level, analysts of culture are reluctant to allow that commercial films can be effectively radical. In his study of the cultural politics of Shakespearean interpretation, Big-Time Shakespeare (1996), Michael Bristol ruefully observes that ‘the cultural authority of corporate Shakespeare has nothing to do with ideas of any description’. Perhaps one might argue that if ‘ideas’ are defined less restrictively, the tension between ‘Shakespeare’, ideas and big business has yielded an engaging variety of cinematic results