Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 9 Number 3, December 2008
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Rockmore, Tom, In Kant’s Wake: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Oxford, Blackwell, 2006. 208 pages, ISBN 978-1-4051-2571-0, Hardback £55.00, Paperback £17.99
Reviewed by
Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
For over two centuries, philosophers have defended and critiqued Kant’s writings, attempting to clarify issues such as the epistemology of knowledge, the possibility of a priori knowledge, and even philosophy’s claim to knowledge. These debates from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced a weighty legacy for today’s philosophers. Yet what exactly is the state of the philosophical debate in the twenty-first century? Has it come to a halt, or is it still moving forward? These questions frame Rockmore’s dense and captivating analysis of philosophy in the twentieth century.
Epistemology—or a tradition of knowing—is of key interest to Rockmore. In the book’s introduction, he clearly outlines his aim: to provide an informed picture of the key philosophers and movements of twentieth-century Western philosophy. Rockmore concentrates on American pragmatism, Marxism, “continental philosophy” and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. He explains his stress on movements versus individuals by citing a lack of a temporal critical distance to these thinkers. Nonetheless, Rockmore does give a detailed account of the major players in the twentieth-century Western philosophical tradition, including Heidegger, Husserl, Wittgenstein and Quine. Leading up to his discussion of philosophy in the twentieth century, Rockmore also deals extensively with Descartes, Kant and Hegel. This review can only address but a few of the issues and philosophers Rockmore discusses in his expansive study, which comprises seven chapters.
The first chapter, “Toward Interpreting Twentieth-Century Philosophy”, emphasizes the very political nature of philosophy: an idea that surfaces at several stages in the book. Also important is the debate on the separation between philosophy and the history of philosophy; a debate that Rockmore squarely rejects. Philosophy is “intrinsically historical” (13) because it relies on an ongoing exchange between future thinkers who are in turn influenced by the world in which they live. Thus, Rockmore insists that the main philosophical threads are part of a lager debate, and he structures his analysis accordingly. What is more, Rockmore explains that he will follow Richard Bernstein’s model of a broad overview of the twentieth century while paying heed to Michael Friedman’s belief that the main philosophical thinkers are engaged in dialogue (16). This dialogue has often taken the form of debate, but is a dialogue just the same. At the core of this dialogue, according to Rockmore, is the Kantian tradition.
In Chapter 2, “Kant and the Post-Kantian Debate”, Rockmore concerns himself with Kant’s theory of knowledge. He provides the reader with a sound survey of the “problem of knowing”: the role of the senses in acquiring knowledge, “innate” vs. “experienced” knowledge, and rationalism vs. empiricism. Rockmore succinctly describes Kant’s position on Hume and Descartes and of the primary role of the subject in the principle of knowledge. This “consists in making out a backward inference from effect to cause, in a word from the representation of the world to the world it represents” (29). Rockmore’s discussion of Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation (1770) and Critique of Pure Reason (1781) examines this topic in greater detail. The assertion that knowledge depends on the observer is traced back to Copernicus’s explanation of the motions of the planets. This “Copernican revolution” relies on a subject of knowledge that “is both active and passive” (43) and that “stands outside of experience” (46). The philosophers who would follow in Kant’s footsteps shifted both the position of the subject and the relation of the subject to history as it concerns the principle of knowledge.
Each of the four chapters that follow is dedicated to a specific movement and the leading thinkers in the respective group. “On Marxism in the Twentieth Century” revisits Marxism’s role in the philosophical and political spheres and its insistence that “philosophy is political, hence never simply neutral” (50). While Hegel’s students sought a way to link theory to practice, Marx and his followers were concerned with a practical, socially beneficial application of theory. Rockmore’s main interest in this chapter is not to debate whether Marxism was a failed project already at its outset, but rather to position Marxism “as a specific philosophical approach which has a legitimate claim to figure in the main quartet of leading tendencies of the period” (51).
This chapter is especially interesting and clearly written. Rockmore reminds the reader that although the political views of Marx and Engels were concordant, their philosophical views were quite disparate largely due to their differing reactions to German idealism. Rockmore argues that there was no break between Marx and Hegel; thus, the Kantian debate continues through Hegel to Marx. Therefore, “Marx’s position is not extra-philosophical, but, rather, belongs to German idealism” (56). In his assessment of Engels, Rockmore maintains that Engels largely misunderstood Kant, especially regarding Kant’s views on philosophy and science. Moving his discussion to the twentieth century, Rockmore outlines the theories of Lukács, Korsch, Kojève and Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School. Of note is Rockmore’s focus on the logical and historical knowing process in Marxist thought. This process represented a major break with Kant’s position on theory’s “disinterest” in a “new and better social world” (65). Commenting on Habermas’s post-Frankfurt School writings, Rockmore states that Habermas takes a Kantian approach to Marxism. For Habermas, historical materialism “simply lacks a self-reflective dimension” (71).
Marxism is but one example of how Kant’s dogmatic philosophy propelled the debate on approaches to knowledge. “Pragmatism as Epistemology”, the book’s fourth chapter, offers the reader a helpful overview of American pragmatism, a movement often cited as being the most substantial American input to the philosophical debate. Rockmore is careful to distinguish between American pragmatism and pragmatism in general, which he links directly to Kant and his distinction between an “objective truth claim” and “mere belief” (77). Rockmore’s interesting discussion of C. S. Peirce and his theories is of great service to the reader. Rejecting the general foundationalist epistemological model as a means for the knowing process (and thereby rejecting Descartes and Kant), Peirce concerned himself with inquiry, “understood as the struggle to overcome doubt through belief” (81). A summary of the works of William James and John Dewey, who were “more interested in action than in theory” (89), explains the practical aims of pragmatism. An example of this is Dewey’s work at the Chicago Department of Philosophy and at Jane Addams’s Hull House.
“Continental Philosophy as Phenomenology” looks at hermeneutics, structuralism and postmodernism. Rockmore traces these movements to J. H. Lambert’s coinage of “phenomenology” in 1764. The link to Kant is established via Kant’s letter to Lambert in 1770, in which Kant describes his “‘general phenomenology,’ (phaenomenologica generalis)[,] concerned with determining the limits of the principles of sensibility” (101). Indeed, Rockmore points to the fact that the theoretical section of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason deals in part with general phenomenology. Later in the chapter, Rockmore links Husserl’s belief in phenomenology’s ability to solve Hume’s dilemma of differentiating “essence” from idea” and Husserl’s rejection of historicism with Kant. For Rockmore, Heidegger stands as the only philosopher in Kant’s wake who does not take an “epistemological approach to Kant’s philosophy”—yet in his work Being and Time (1927), Heidegger portrays himself as “Kant’s legitimate successor, the only one who resolves Kant’s concern” (117). Discussing Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Rockmore illustrates the importance of the German philosophical tradition—in particular Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger—for French philosophy.
Anglo-American analytic philosophy is the last movement Rockmore discusses. The book’s fifth chapter pays close attention to thinkers including Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein and Frege. In contrast to the other movements, which were centred on one important figure (e.g. Engels, Peirce, Husserl), Rockmore explains that analytic philosophy comprised more “a kind of coalition that came together for a single purpose, namely opposing British idealism” (130).
Moore’s disregard of idealism derives, as Rockmore explains, from Kant’s attempts to disprove idealism. Rockmore criticizes Moore’s weak argumentation and returns to the question of the historical nature of philosophy: a standpoint Rockmore strongly maintains but analytic philosophy rejects. He also comments that “analytic philosophers tend to concentrate on problems not people, arguments and not texts” (133), but notes that this is changing (again citing Michael Friedman and others). Richard Rorty, whom Rockmore references at various points in his study, also rejects epistemology. This reflects Wittgenstein’s view that the problems of philosophy are not real: instead, they are caused by “confusions about knowledge that cannot be solved but can only be dissipated” (153). Rockmore completely dismisses Rorty’s comments on the history of philosophy.
After having been presented with the respective stance of four philosophical movements on epistemology, the reader is left with many questions—the most basic being what the status of today’s philosophical debate is. Rockmore’s concluding chapter ties together these loose ends well. Rockmore comments that classification of thinkers often brings about more questions than answers—and is often arbitrary. Theoretical questions are illustrated in a practical light: Rockmore applies questions of classification and specialization to issues of professionalisation and job searches in the academy. The demand for specialization invariably leads to a lack of knowledge not only about the interrelatedness—or the dialogue—of these movements. Rockmore finds this development regrettable, as it ultimately obscures the understanding of how philosophy has developed.
However, the main thrust of the concluding chapter—and of the study on the whole—is that Kant serves as a “backdrop” to the development of philosophy in the twentieth century. Although he admits that his thesis is controversial, Rockmore sees two advantages in adapting such an approach. First, it suggests a conscious (or even a subconscious) participation in a meta-philosophical tradition. Second, this signified philosophical tradition can be best understood by means of the “philosophical signifier”, Kant.
In sum, Rockmore’s study is a cogent contribution to the understanding of the Western philosophical tradition. Its strength lies not only in the information and analyses Rockmore offers but also in the clarity of his organization and writing. Rockmore has shown that Kant’s wake is not waning as the philosophical debate moves into the twenty-first century.