Comments on: More Nietzsche on Kant (thanks, I’ll be here all week)

By: Anderson

Anderson — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 13:12:19 +0000

Thanks, Daniel. Wiki has a bit about Reinhold (of whom I'd never heard), apparently written by someone who's read Ameriks (or maybe just the Stanford article on Reinhold). One of the hardest things to do in philosophy is to escape the Received Version of a philosopher, as exemplified by Reinhold-on-Kant, and get to what the philosopher himself was up to. (Insert obligatory N. quote on the French Revolution here: "no text any more, only interpretations.")

By: Moby Dick

Moby Dick — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 10:08:17 +0000

And what about translating “Vermögen” with “ableness” ? Thus, you’ll keep the potential but active signification of the german word.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 22:25:45 +0000

Karl Ameriks looks at the reception of Kant in Reinhold, Fichte, and Hegel in “Kant and the Fate of Autonomy”. He argues that Reinhold was actually where a lot of the post-Kantians got their Kant, which is why a lot of the “technical” Kantian arguments for moves like the noumena-phenomena distinction, the ideality of space/time/cause/substance, the noumenal self as a moral self-legislator etc. get skipped over, but the ideas stick around: Reinhold thought he had “shorter” arguments for a lot of Kant’s theses (Ameriks especially highlights the “short argument to idealism” which Reinhold was proud of, and which looks nothing like the argument involving Antinomies et al). Reinhold was primarily interested in Kant for the sake of the moral Postulates (God, Soul, Immortality), and these for political reasons (says Ameriks), which gels nicely with Nietzsche’s accusation that Kantianism is just underhanded Christianity: If Reinhold was really as important as Ameriks claims he was, then a lot of Kantianism was spread with the intent of establishing something like a secular religion of reason.

Not an essay, but it’s not a long book (200 pages or so, I read it in a weekend); doesn’t really address Kant as the Romantics or Schopenhauer grasped him, but I thought Ameriks did a pretty convincing job arguing for the importance of Reinhold in the history of the reception of Kant.

By: yeti

yeti — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 21:45:44 +0000

I’ve also been reading BGE recently. I thought about writing a long post in the last thread, but I just want to suggest that a look at seection 44 might complicate the simple reading of N’s reception of K generally and of section 11 particularly.

By: pdf23ds

pdf23ds — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 20:24:20 +0000

What a coincidence—I just read a couple chapters of Beyond Good and Evil last weekend for a book club. First classic philosophy I’ve read in years.

I actually have nothing more to say.

By: Anderson

Anderson — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 19:56:12 +0000

Those bits about Plato are just why I found BG&E # 14 so interesting—-N. suggests that an aristocrat’s pleasure in controlling his own senses by denying the reality of their reports, is a motivation of Platonism. The comparison of the senses to the demos is fascinating.