Wolfgang Förster in Klassische deutsche Philosophie: Grundlinien ihrer Entwicklung [Classical German Philosophy: The Basic Lines of Its Development] (2008) describes the philosophies of several major figures in German philosophy during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the most important being those of Kant and Hegel. Although it was closely connected to the Romantic movement after 1800, German philosophy during this period was based on the scientific discoveries of that time. And the philosophers sought to construct theories to explain what was known more systematically.
While we may superficially associate Romantic thinking and attitudes with a vague admiration of nature and its beauty, that emphasis on the importance of Nature was both a product of and a participant in a rapidly changing understanding of the role of religion in society and in understanding the role of humanity in both the natural and social world. Jacob Bronowski wrote in The Ascent of Man (1973):
A young German philosopher, Friedrich von Schelling, just at this time in 1799, started a new form of philosophy which has remained powerful in Germany, Naturphilosophie - philosophy of nature. From him Coleridge brought it to England. The Lake Poets had it from [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge, and the Wedgwoods [famed for mass production of dishes], who were friends of Coleridge's and indeed supported him with an annuity. Poets and painters were suddenly captured by the idea that nature is the fountain of power, whose different forms are all expressions of the same central force, namely energy.That sense of the importance of play was a key part of the aesthetic philosophy of another Friedrich von S., i.e., Friedrich von Schiller.
And not only nature. Romantic poetry says in the plainest way that man himself is the carrier of a divine, at least a natural, energy. The Industrial Revolution created freedom (in practice) for men who wanted to fulfil what they had in them - a concept inconceivable a hundred years earlier. But hand in hand, romantic thought inspired those men to make of their freedom a new sense of personality in nature. It was said best of all by the greatest of the romantic poets, William Blake, very simply: 'Energy is Eternal Delight'.
The key word is 'delight', the key concept is 'liberation' - a sense of fun as a human right.
My interest in this particular period of German philosophy at this particular time came from two things. I've been trying to familiarize myself with the theology of Friedrich Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), the most significant Christian theologian of the 19th century. After making it through his most important work, Der christliche Glaube (1821-1830), I realized I needed some more background in the philosophy of that time to better understand the context.
The other topic has been diving into the history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR or DDR; Communist East Germany). I haven’t found it so easy to construct posts about it that fit with the general approach of this blog. One of the aspects I find fascinating is the history of philosophy in the DDR, especially in the early years from 1945 up until 1957 or so. (The DDR was technically founded in 1949; before that it was the Soviet Occupation Zone.)
The early controversies in that area had to do with some major topics of 19th century philosophy such as the development of the dialectical concept which was central to the Marxist-Leninist philosophy of “dialectical materialism”, which the DDR philosophers abbreviated in common German fashion as “Diamat”. Several philosophers, like Robert Havemann and Ernst Bloch – both of whom saw themselves as Communist thinkers and supported the basic structure of the DDR – became important figures in the development of the democratic opposition in East Germany.
Wolfgang Förster has special qualifications helpful in both aspects. Because in the last years of the DDR, he was the head of the History of Philosophy Division of the Central Institute for Philosophie of the DDR Academy of Science. His professional specialty was German philosophy of the Enlightenment and classical German philosophy. His prominent role presumably reflected the official approach taken in the 1980s by the SED (the ruling Communist Party) which in that time of more normalized relations with West Germany was trying to present major figures in German history like Martin Luther in a more positive light than previously. In the immediate years after 1945, the official Party line tended to downplay the significance of German philosophers in the decades just prior to the Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels of the mid-1840s on. Hegel’s political philosophy, for instance, was derided as being a reactionary justification for the Prussian monarchy of his later years. That view was held probably even more commonly by many Westerners. For instance, F.S.C. Northrop of Yale in The Meeting of East and West: An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding (1946) indulged in what historians now call the “from Luther to Hitler” approach to German history, in which everything from the Reformation to 1933 is taken to be an anticipation of the National Socialist dictatorship, when he wrote:
It was Hegel who taught [the Germans] that actual history in its concrete happenings, coming to fulfillment in the German state with its monarchical government, was not merely the expression of the perfectly ideal, but the coming of God or the Absolute Spirit to self-consciousness by means of the dialectic process in the concrete events of history. Need one wonder, after such a moral and intellectual diet taught throughout all their universities over a period of one hundred and fifty years, that the German people took it so easily and naturally for granted, not once but twice in the twentieth century that German Kultur was by its nature and merits supreme, and destined by the movement of the universe and the perfect moral activity of God Himself to overcome all opposition and embrace the world?Northrop follows that with a silly anecdote about a conversation he had on a German train once with a woman who was expressing an entirely banal pride in German culture. Carl Schmitt, one of the Nazis’ favorite political scientists, gave a far better interpretation when he wrote that on the day of Hitler’s assumption of the Chancellorship, “Hegel, so to speak, died.” (Quoted from Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory [1941]. That book’s final chapter, “The End of Hegelianism”, has a good brief discussion of the notion that Hegel’s thought was a major source of Nazism.)
I suppose I should say here that if someone is afraid that their head will be poisoned by even reading something written by a Marxist, Förster’s Klassische deutsche Philosophie is probably not one you would want to read. In any case, it would be hard to accuse this book of indulging in “vulgar Marxism.” It doesn’t try to reduce every idea of the thinkers it discusses to some particular economic development of the moment. Nor does Förster frame his discussions of these philosophers in terms of how they fell short of the ultimate truths of Marxism-Leninism, a style that was prominent in early DDR publications like Neue Welt or Einheit. He does focus on some issues of particular questions of concern to Marxist thought like dialectics. But I’m not sure a similar non-Marxist account would have emphasized it less, since dialectics were a major element of Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophy. If anything, I wish Förster had explained in somewhat more detail how the use of dialectics by the various thinkers here differed from one another.
His discussion of the historical background of the times and how that affected the broad frame of the thinking of these philosophers is really very good. And for the period before 1848 – the Vormärz (pre-March) period as it is known in German history in reference to the outbreak of the 1848 Revolution in March – the broad outline of historical developments he uses would not be particularly controversial to most historians of the period of whatever persuasion. (If you’re applying the crackpot Morman-extremist/John Birch Society theory of history advocated by Glenn Beck, that would be another story.)
After 1830, the advocates of the Romantic viewpoint and the advocates of
The transition from feudal to capitalist (bourgeois) society was underway, and the German philosophers understood that very consciously as a process that involved both social changes and pressure to change the forms of government. Merchant capitalism had long been in the process of development, and the Industrial Revolution became a reality around 1760. The English Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 was considered the first great political revolution associated with the rising capitalist order, as were also the Netherlands Revolution against Spanish rule and the American Revolution against Britain. Developments in English political economy played a very important role in German philosophy during this period, as did the new theories describing it like those of Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
The overriding political event for German philosophers of the period covered in Klassische deutsche Philosophie was the French Revolution. It is said that it was the German philosophers who worked out the theoretical implications of the French Revolution. Decisive political events of that time also included the final end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 at the hands of Napoleon's armies and the wars against Napoleon’s domination of Europe, including the German Wars of Liberation of 1813-15 (a vital event in the development of the democratic tradition in Germany and Austria) and the Spanish War of Independence of 1808-14 (where the term guerrilla was first applied to the irregular warfare against the French occupiers). The Tirolean revolt (Tiroler Freiheitskampf) led by Andreas Hofer in 1809 against Bavarian rule, a revolt that was defeated by the French, was also an important part of the Wars of Liberation.
In science and technology, developments in the study of magnetism, electricity and chemistry were transforming mechanical understandings of cause and effect in nature, and philosophers sought to find a way to characterize developmental processes in nature in a more complete way. The notion of development through the interplay of contradictory forces as a basic law of nature was elaborated by a number of the philosophers Förster studies in this book. Kant and Hegel both described their own forms of such a theory, both expressed in terms of their own version of dialectics. They understood dialectics not just as a form of thinking but as a reflection of the processes of nature and as a way to describe developmental processes in nature, history and thought.
Förster devotes a separate chapter to the development in natural science around 1800. He discusses the scientific work of Breite Gottfried Reinhold Trevenius (1776-1837) in biology; Henrik Steffens Lorenz Oken (1779-0851), who Förster calls Schelling’s most important student; the geologist Henrik Steffens (1773-1845), another student of Schelling; Karl Friedrich Burdach (1776-1847); and, Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869).
This is the first of eleven posts based on Förster’s book. In the remainder of the posts I’ll focus more on the work and significance of the philosophers he discusses.
Tags: hegel, schelling
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