Table Of ContentThe Concept of Will in Classical German Philosophy
The Concept of Will in
Classical German Philosophy
Between Ethics, Politics, and Metaphysics
Edited by
Manja Kisner and Jörg Noller
ISBN 978-3-11-064912-3
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Table of Contents
Manja Kisner and Jörg Noller
Introduction 1
Part I Kant’s Conception of Will
Sorin Baiasu
Free Will and Determinism: A Solution to the Kantian Paradox 7
Markus Kohl
Spontaneity and Contingency: Kant’s Two Models of Rational
Self-Determination 29
Halla Kim
How is the Corruption of the Will Possible? Kant on Natural Dialectic and
Radical Evil 49
Günter Zöller
Eleutheronomy: Will, Law and Liberty in Kant’s Esoterically Political
Philosophy 71
Part II The Concept of Will after Kant
John Walsh
The Fact of Freedom: Reinhold’s Theory of Free Will Reconsidered 89
Amit Kravitz
On the Real Possibility of a Pure Moral Will: Maimon vs. Kant 105
Tom Giesbers
Drive asa Constitutive Element of Practical Action in Jacobi and
Fichte 125
Manja Kisner
Drive and Will in Fichte’s System of Ethics 139
VI TableofContents
Ansgar Lyssy
Reality as Resistance: The Concept of the Will in Bouterwek’s Idea of an
Apodictic (1799) 159
Jörg Noller
“Will is Primal Being”: Schelling’s Critical Voluntarism 181
Daniel Wenz
Hegel’s Logical Foundation of the Will: Reconciling Psychology and
Social-Ontology 203
Alex Englander
Hegel and the Paradoxof Willkür 227
Jenny Bunker
Ethics and Will in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy 247
Index of Names 263
Index of Subjects 265
Notes on Contributors 269
Manja Kisner and Jörg Noller
Introduction
Theconceptofwillisfundamentaltophilosophy.Itoccupies–atleastsinceAu-
gustine – a special placein the historyof philosophy.The conceptof will plays
animportantrolenotonlyinethics,butalsoinmoralpsychology,politicalphi-
losophy,philosophyof law, and even in anthropology,epistemology, and meta-
physics.However,theconceptofwillbecameespeciallyimportantintheperiod
ofClassicalGermanPhilosophy.Here,thewillevolvedintooneofthecentralno-
tions ofKant’spracticalphilosophy, andafterthatunderwentdecisivetransfor-
mationsinpost-Kantianphilosophy.Inthisshort,butprolifictimespanofabout
thirtyyears,eachmajorthinkerfromKanttoHegelandSchopenhauerdeveloped
his own understandingof the will.
This volume collects thirteenoriginal essaysthatportraydifferent accounts
ofthewillinClassicalGermanPhilosophyandoutlineitstransformationsfroma
historical as well as systematic perspective. Besides articles that shed light on
major figures such as Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel or Schopenhauer, lesser-
known philosophers such as Bouterwek, Jacobi, Maimon and Reinhold, with
their own original contributions to the theory of the will are presented as well.
The volume emerged from a conference that took place on November 24th and
25th, 2017, at the UniversityofMunich. Its aimwas tobringtogether both estab-
lished scholars as well as early career scholars in order to discuss the concep-
tionsofwillinandafterKant.Althoughthepresentedselectionisnotcomplete
andmanyotherphilosopherscouldbeincludedaswell,thecollectionneverthe-
lessoffersarepresentativeoverviewofthedevelopmentoftheconceptofwillin
the period of Classical German Philosophy for the first time.
From a systematic point of view,the aim of this volume is to look into this
development and to inquire into the relation between the will and related con-
cepts such as “autonomny”, “practical reason”, “drive”, “incentive”, “lower
andhigherappetitivefaculty”,“decision”,“choice”,“intelligibledeed”,and“ac-
tion”.The papers of this volume address and discuss the following questions:
How is the concept of will related to the concepts of (practical) reason and un-
derstanding?Howistheconceptofwillrelatedtotheconceptsofdriveandstriv-
ing?Howdoestheconceptofwillcontributetoatheoryof(practical)subjectiv-
ity?Howisthewilldeterminedinordertobefree?Howisthewillmotivatedto
morallygood action? And finally: How is the (free) will situated within society,
history, and the world?
The first partof the volumeis dedicatedtoKant’spractical philosophyand
to his conception of the will. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110654639-001
2 ManjaKisnerandJörgNoller
(1785)andCritiqueofPracticalReason(1788),Kantlinksthewilltopurepractical
reasonandpresentshisnotionofautonomy.Incontrasttohistheoreticalphilos-
ophy,whichfocusesontheworldofappearances,hispracticalphilosophydeals
withtherealmoftheintelligible,ornoumenal.Despitethegreatimportancethat
theGroundworkandthesecondCritiquehaveinhisoeuvre,Kant’sconceptionof
the will in these two works is not yet unequivocally defined. Kant argues here
that “a free will and a will under moral laws are one and the same” (4:447). It
isnotuntilReligionwithintheLimitsofReasonAlone(1793)andhislateMetaphy-
sicsofMorals(1797)thatKantexplicitlydefinesandpointsoutthedifferencebe-
tweenWille(will)andWillkür(choice).However,thefollowingquestionsarisein
connection with this distinction: Is Willkür (choice) just an abstraction of free-
dom or even a false kind of freedom? Or does our individual freedom involve
choosing between the moral law and our empirical motives? What are the mo-
tivesofourfreewill?Cantheybepurelyrational orneedtheybepartlyempiri-
cal?AlthoughKant’stheoryofthewillisregularlydiscussedinKantscholarship,
therearestillmanyaspectsofhistheorythatneedfurtherelucidation.Themain
problemsconcernthesolutionoftheThirdAntinomy,Kant’sdistinctionbetween
Wille and Willkür, the transition from transcendental to practical freedom, and
the transition from practical to political philosophy. The four articles on Kant
in the first part of the volume approach these problems from different angles
by taking into account different works of Kant.
The questions that arise on the basis of Kant’s conception of the will were
alsodecisivelyinfluentialtothesubsequentdevelopmentofpost-Kantianphilos-
ophy. In order to outline the essential transformations that the concept of will
underwent from Kant to Hegel, the following chapters of the second part of
the volume discuss the major figures of German Idealism – Fichte, Schelling
andHegel–aswellasothermoreorlesswell-knownpost-Kantianphilosophers
who also developed their own theories of the will under the influence of Kant.
OneoftheearlypopularizersofKant’sphilosophyingeneralandKant’spracti-
calphilosophyinparticularwasKarlLeonhardReinhold.Hisownconceptionof
will,whichhedevelopedinconfrontationwithKant’stheoryaspresentedinthe
GroundworkandsecondCritique,isespeciallyimportant.ReinholdvaluesKant’s
practicalaccountandunderstandshimselfasafollowerofKant,butatthesame
timehealsodetectssomeshortcomingsinKant’stheoryofthewill.Accordingly,
in the Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, Volume II, Reinhold presents his own
theoryofthewillasacriticaladjustmenttoKant’saccount.Kant’sreneweddis-
cussion of the concept of will in his late Metaphysics of Morals is – interalia –
also due to Reinhold’s critique. Reinhold argues for a conception of individual
freedomasWillkür(choice).Thisraisesthequestionofhowthewillisconnected
to practical reason and how we come to act morally.
Introduction 3
Anotherimportant,butlesswell-knowncritiqueofKant’sconceptionofwill
was developed in the last years of the eighteenth centuryby Salomon Maimon.
Maimondoubtsthatrespectforthemorallawisindeedasufficientdriving-force
ofourfinitewill.Instead,hearguesthatmoraldriving-forcesmustberootedin
the observable natural driving-forces. On this point, Maimon’s account differs
significantlynotonlyfromReinholdbutalsofromGermanIdealists.Thisdiscus-
sionaboutdriving-forces(Triebfedern)wasextremelyimportantforthedevelop-
ment of Fichte’s practical philosophy. In the period of his Wissenschaftslehre
nova methodo (1796–1798), Fichte goes a step further than Reinhold and Mai-
monbynotonlyfocusingontheproblemofdriving-forces,butalsobyintroduc-
ingintohissystemaconceptofdrive(Trieb),whichwasoriginallyusedasabio-
logical term. Futhermore, the concept of drive is important in explaining the
concept of will in Fichte’s System of Ethics from 1798. This book is Fichte’s
only work on ethics that was published during his lifetime. The concept of
drive serves here as an important intermediary concept that connects nature
and freedom.
At the end of the eighteenth century yet another,but verylittle-known phi-
losopher–FriedrichBouterwek–offeredarivalaccountofthewill.Ontheone
hand he followed Kant and understood himself as a Kantian, but on the other
hand he advocated a different approach than Reinhold, Fichte or Jacobi. Due
to Bouterwek’s specific type of realism, he conceives of the will as a natural
force that functions in a way similar to other natural forces.With his account
he anticipates later, more ontological conceptualizations of the will, such as
Schopenhauer’s,which, at least to some extent, he might have influenced. But
alreadybeforeSchopenhauer’smetaphysicsofthewill,theconceptofwillexpe-
rienced an important shift in Schelling’s philosophy towards a more holistic
theoryofthe willthat triestocombinerealisticandidealisticelements.Inafa-
mous passage Schelling identifies the concept of will as primal being (Ursein),
andtherebypointsoutthatthewillcannotbeproperlydescribedinamerelyfor-
mal way and only with regard to negative freedom, but that it also needs its
counterpart in positive freedom. This step toward the identification of will
with primal being might be understood as a step in another direction than we
observe in Kant, Fichte or Reinhold.
Departingfromamerelyformalconceptionofthewill,wearealsoledtoHe-
gel’s account of the will discussed in his Science of Logic as well as in the Ele-
ments of the Philosophy of Right. Hegel focuses mainly on the disctinction be-
tween Wille (will) and Willkür (choice). Unlike Reinhold, who defended a
conception of freedom as Willkür, Hegel argues that the concept of Willkür
fails to unify the form of voluntary choice with its content, which is always
givenfromoutside,andisthereforeheteronomousandcontingent.Forthatrea-
4 ManjaKisnerandJörgNoller
son,Willkürcannevertrulybeaformofrationalautonomy.Also,Willkürcannot
exist on its own, since it needs commitments to ethical life as a background,
which Hegel accounts for by means of his conception of Sittlichkeit.
Finally,Schopenhauer’sphilosophyofthewillcombinesdifferentaspectsof
previous conceptions and transforms them into a metaphysics of the will. Ac-
cordingtoSchopenhauer,thewillisnotjustahumancapacity,butratherauni-
versal principle – a blindly striving, non-rational force that all living beings
share. Unlike the previous philosophers, however, Schopenhauer qualifies the
striving of the will in negative terms. Similar to Schopenhauer, Schelling and
Hegelalsopointoutthedynamiccharacterofthewillandconceiveitasastriv-
ing force, but they differ substantially in how they define the purpose of this
striving.Whereas for Schelling, Hegel or Fichte, the main goal of the will still
lies in the realization of freedom and morality, Schopenhauer’s principle of
the will does not have any rational goal and is also never fulfilled.This brings
Schopenhauertohisethicaldismissalofthewillandtohisviewsonthedenial
of the will. Schopenhauer’s credo is that we need to negate the will in order to
escape its meaninglessness.
This brief overview of different conceptualizations of the will in Classical
German Philosophy demonstrates how important and much discussed this
topicwas inthis timespan.Startingfromamerelyethical perspective,thecon-
cept of will went throughvarious transformations and gradually evolved into a
concept that supersedes mere moral philosophy and develops into an ontology
andsociologyofthewill.Theaimofthisvolumeistopresentthisgenealogyof
thewillbypointingtothevividandveryprolificexchangeofideasbetweenphi-
losophers active in the period of Classical German Philosophy.
TheeditorsofthevolumewouldliketothankPhilipZogelmannM.A.forhised-
itorial support.
