Metacritique: The Linguistic Assault on German Idealism edited and translated by Jere Paul Surber (Humanity Books) The translations of essays and introduction in this volume provide for the first time in English the linguistic critique of transcendental philosophy as it was worked out in Germany in the ninetheenth century by J.G. Hamann, S. Maimon, F.H. Jacobi, and J.G. Herder. This metacritique of German idealism has an analogue in the British reaction to idealism that gave birth to analytical trends in twentieth century philosophy. Surbers essay and apt selections of key paasages from these neglected authors provides the Anglophone reader with an important glimpse of a powerful counterforce to German idealism.

From the editors introduction:

When reference is made to German philosophy in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, most people will immediately think of that tradition which has come to be called "German Idealism," along with its best-known representatives, I. Kant, J. G. Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel (the latter two, of course, only at very early stages of their careers by then). For many years, the usual historical scenario ran something like this. Kant, by his Critical Philosophy, not only decisively attacked the defects of the philosophical positions developed during the Enlightenment (often classified under the headings of "Rationalism" and "Empiricism"), but lie effected (by his own admission) a revolution in philosophy so complete as to clear the field of all other competitors. Thereafter, so the story runs, philosophy could only proceed by building upon the transcendental foundations established by Kant. Beginning with Fichte, who (at least early on) claimed to remain true to the "spirit" if not the "letter" of Kantian transcendental philosophy, any relevant or trenchant philosophical criticism of the Kantian philosophy was to be found only within the transcendental tradition which Kant himself inaugurated. In other words, the basic terms, distinctions, arguments, and systematic procedures employed by Kant were granted as, to a significant extent, valid by the later German Idealists, their differences therefore remaining, as it were, affairs under the roof of transcendental philosophy and its Idealist development. To conclude the tale, it was not until after Hegel's systematic completion of this tradition in his mature philosophy that new forms of critique, which did not accept, at least as a starting‑point, the Kantian transcendental turn, first became possible.

Without wanting to minimize the profound impact of Kant's Critical Philosophy on the history of philosophy or the depth of genuine philosophical insight of Kant's Idealist successors, one must today view such an account of that philosophical milieu with some misgivings. As a matter of historical fact, while Kant's Critical Philosophy certainly aroused a great deal of interest and often sympathy, even well beyond more narrowly philosophical circles, it was by no means the case that all critical resistance in the German‑speaking lands to Kant's transcendental mode of philosophizing or its later developments was decisively vanquished. In this respect, deserving of mention would be, at the least, the various continuing attempts to respond to Kantian critique on the part of both the rationalist and empiricist camps which he had attacked; the continuation of certain already well‑developed viewpoints which could not straightforwardly be associated with either of the above, most notably those of Herder, Hamann, and Jacobi; the so‑called "Popularphilosophen," who simply did not share Kant's underlying assumption that philosophy could or should ever strive to be "scientific"; such literary figures as Goethe and Schiller, for whom transcendental philosophy, while in many ways attractive, was never an end in itself; and, somewhat later, the early Romantiker who, though certainly influenced by Kantian transcendentalism in a general way, chose quite different though still philosophically significant modes of expression.

One might, of course, respond that all of the above examples of claimants to a part of the philosophical landscape of the late eighteenth century either ultimately failed in their attempts to respond effectively to Kant's Critical Philosophy or, for whatever reasons, made no serious attempt to do so. On such grounds, one might then be justified in regarding them as rightfully falling below the threshold of contemporary philosophical interest, if not of historiography. There is, however, at least one case which cannot be so easily dismissed; it was a strand of opposition to the Critical Philosophy and its progeny which quite self-consciously invoked Kant's own project in referring to itself as "Metakritik."

First employed by Johann Georg Hamann in a short essay in 1784, Metakritik (or, as we might anglicize this term, "Metacriticism") could in no way be accused of either ignoring the critical questions raised by Kant or of having failed, in any straightforward sense, to respond cogently to them. On the first count, all three of the works which form the core of this philosophical approach (the essays by Hamann, Salomon Maimon, and Johann Gottfried Herder translated in this volume) very directly and explicitly confront the transcendental standpoint represented by Kant and, by implication, his Idealist followers. Of course, like Kant in relation to the targets of his own critique, the rationalists and empiricists, they did not formulate their "metacritique" in terms which their opponents would likely have accepted as valid‑but explicitly confront the transcendental position they certainly did. On the second count, although the Metakritik does not appear to have deterred many of its contemporaries from adopting the "transcendental standpoint," a good deal of philosophical reflection in the twentieth century seems to stand decisively on its side against Kantian and later forms of transcendentalism. For Metakritik, in its most general sense, was nothing less than an attack, not just on the specific philosophical doctrines of Kantian Transcendental Idealism, but on the implicit linguistic assumptions operative in their very articulation. That is, the basic viewpoint of the Metakritik was that, whatever else Kantian transcendental philosophy might be, it must at least be a set of specific linguistic practices and constructions, a sort of "language-game" one might say today, concerning the "grounds for the possibility" of which it should be, in a way completely paralleling Kant's own arguments, fully appropriate to inquire. Of course, the critical point was not that the "transcendental game" could not be played; rather, it was that it could not have the significance which it claimed for itself‑that is, to constitute a final and complete presentation and analysis of "the grounds for the possibility of experience."

The Metacritics, then, clearly and decisively laid down the gauntlet to the transcendental philosophers and continued to press their case throughout the 1780s, 1790s, and even into the next century. In historical retrospect, what should surprise us is not their own failure to take transcendental philosophy seriously, but the dearth of cogent responses to their "counter-critique" on the part of mainstream German Idealism. In earlier writings, I have suggested that Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in his 1795 essay on language and in his lectures at Jena on Logic and Metaphysics, may have attempted to meet the metacritical challenge, though even in his case this remains a matter of conjecture? There is no evidence that Kant or Schelling made any such attempt; Hegel did concern himself with at least the basic issues, but only in a general and somewhat disjointed manner

To find a direct and fully developed response which is not merely a recitation of orthodox Kantian doctrine, we must look beyond the mainstream of German Idealism to two figures who are usually associated with the early Romantic circle, August Schlegel and August Ferdinand Bernhardi. Bernhardi, in particular, not only published a scathing review of Herder's version of Metakritik, certainly its fullest exposition, in 1799, but followed this review with a full‑blown Sprachlehre which appeared in two volumes, in 1801 and 1803 respectively. Along with Fichte's 1795 essay on language and his subsequent lectures, Bemhardi's work must be regarded as the most complete and self-standing response available from the point of view of German Idealism to the Metakritik.

Certainly Hamann, Maimon, and Herder, the three major practitioners of Metakritik, each had his own distinctive view and general approach to philosophical as well as linguistic issues. However, as Metakritiker, they formed a united front against the transcendental style of philosophizing, employing similar arguments against it while giving them their own characteristic emphases and drawing somewhat different conclusions concerning the nature of philosophical discourse from them.

The first, and fundamental, move of the metacritical approach was to establish that, whatever else a philosophical position might involve, it was necessarily bound up with a specific form of linguistic expression. This theme was sounded in at least three distinguishable registers, all of which can be found, in one form or another and with varying degress of emphasis, within the writings of all three authors.

First, even before it is articulated for a reader or audience, every thought‑process is intimately connected with the linguistic resources available to the individual thinker. While the Metakritiker would differ significantly as to the exact relation between language and thought, all were convinced that the linguistic resources available to any individual thinker played a decisive role in determining the content, form, and resulting style of thought. Even when viewed as "interior monologue," thinking, from a metacritical perspective, could only be the actualization of certain possibilities inherent in the language or languages available to the individual thinker. They would have had no problem understanding and agreeing with Wittgenstein's dictum, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

Second, when we speak of a philosophical viewpoint or position, we are ordinarily able to point to a specific body of texts in which it is articulated. Of course, an author may well assert that he or she has failed to express herself or himself adequately in any given text or body of texts, but the fact remains that the concrete linguistic articulation of a given viewpoint must be the "final word" so far as any reader or audience seeking access to the philosophical viewpoint is concerned. Again, this suggests the view, sometimes attributed to Wittgenstein, that "whatever can be thought can be said"5; to take his remark a step further in a direction of which he would probably have approved, however, the Metakritiker might have added, "If something is not in fact said in a text, then we can only remain silent about it."

Finally, both the "interior monologue" of the individual thinker and her or his articulation of this in a concrete set of statements accessible to others are ultimately based upon the historical existence and latent possibilities of a concretely existing language. Not only are there limits to what can be thought or articulated in a given language, but the language itself exists only as a set of possibilities determined within its own historical horizon. While none of the Metakritiker, with the possible exception of Herder at certain points in his development, would insist upon the radically historical nature of language, they would agree that the possibilities inherent in a given language are a result of a process of historical development, which both constrains, at any given point in time, what can be meaningfully thought or communicated, as well as contains specific possibilities for future development.

Tying all this together and relating it specifically to the Kantian Critical Philosophy, we can say that Metakriitik begins by asserting a "linguistic a priori" as more fundamental than and the ultimate condition for any subsequent assertion of a "conceptual" or "categorical a priori" of the sort advocated by Kantian transcendentalism. The Metakritiker would thus be the first to have opened the way for the objection that Kant's "Table of Categories," taken as the most basic determinations of experience, must be regarded as specific to European languages and would have been different had Kant spoken some language other than German or, more generally, an Indo‑European language. However, it is also significant that none of the Metakritiker wished to draw such extreme conclusions from this that would amount to what we today would call "linguistic relativism."

Between Kant & Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism by George Di Giovanni, H. S. Harris, and George Di Giovanni (Hackett) fills a lamentable gap in the philosophical literature by providing a collection of writings from the pivotal generation of thinkers between Kant and Hegel. It includes some of Hegel's earliest critical writings-which reveal much about his thinking before the first mature exposition of his position in 1807-as well as Schelling's justification of the new philosophy of nature against skeptical and religious attack. This edition contains George di Giovanni's extensive corrections, new preface, and thoroughly updated bibliography. The collection of writings allows an important and too often overlooked  period in German philosophy to have some reasonable representation in English.

FOR A PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM AND STRIFE: Politics, Aesthetics, Metaphysics by Gunter Figal, translated Wayne Klein ($19.95, paperback, 224 pages, SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, State Univeresty of New York Press, SUNY; ISBN: 0791436985)

Jerry S. Clegg is Professor of Philosophy at Mills College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. In addition to numerous articles in professional journals, he has also written the highly respected introduction to the platonic constructive project, The Structure of Platonic Philosophy (Associated University Press).

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