follow-up on previous post

I should have included a bit of commentary with the link to Beiser’s review of the book, but was traveling and didn’t have the time.

The review is rather critical in spirit, but I generally like the model of 19th century philosophy Beiser advocates in the review. A few points, however:

*the big (mostly) missing name in Beiser’s account is Brentano, who inaugurated an entire school of major importance in the late nineteenth century, without which there would have been no Husserl and Heidegger, and which is of the greatest inherent interest even without knowing where it eventually led.

*The only mention of Brentano in the review is rather misleading: “Trendelenburg was the teacher of Hermann Cohen, Wilhelm Dilthey and the American philosopher Henry Morris; and his impact upon Kierkegaard is well-known. Among Lotze’s students were Wilhelm Windelband, Gottlob Frege and Franz Brentano.” I have no memory from the biographical sketches I’ve read of Brentano studying with Lotze (though I could easily just be forgetting), but Brentano was a major student of Trendelenburg, and it’s odd that he wouldn’t appear in that far more obvious connection in the previous sentence.

*I thought this part overshot the mark: “Behind the editors’ theme of ‘revolutionary responses to the existing order’ there lies an old myth, one that the editors have scarcely articulated yet tacitly adopted: namely, that the important philosophy of the nineteenth century came not from ‘academic philosophers’ but from the radical individual thinkers outside the university, viz., from such solitary thinkers as Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This myth was very much advocated by these thinkers themselves, who declared that they, unlike their academic counterparts, were not in thrall to the governments who employed them, and who claimed that they alone were free-thinkers ready to challenge the moral, religious and social status quo.”

Obviously, Beiser wants to show us that nineteenth century academic philosophy shouldn’t be dismissed en bloc as empty pedantry. And he has a point there. But why go to the opposite extreme and claim that Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were generating some sort of empty, self-promoting myth about their outsider status? It wasn’t really a myth, after all. To varying degrees these figures did all have serious problems in being accepted by the Academy. A good history of nineteenth century philosophy would obviously have to make room for these charismatic wild dogs along with the more academic Trendelenburgs and Droysens.

And the near-total omission of Brentano from the review is a stunner, given Beiser’s radical critique of the “standard curriculum” history he claims is found in the Schrift/Conway book, and his attempt to sketch the main lines of that century’s philosophy.

Beiser writes: “If we take a broad historical perspective of this period, and if we focus especially on German philosophy, which was decisive for the century as a whole, then ‘the most influential trends and developments’ were the following: the materialism controversy, the rise of historicism, and the emergence of neo-Kantianism, especially the formation of the Southwestern and Marburg schools.”

There’s no chance you can leave the Brentano School off that list. Its omission is a complete mystery to me.

But some of the other names were refreshing to see in this context, which is why I linked to the book (not for the polemical side of it, but just because Beiser does bring up a number of important currents that are often forgotten).