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فلسفهٔ آلمانی: ۱۷۶۰ تا ۱۸۶۰ – میراث ایدئالیسم
فلسفه آلمانی از سال ۱۷۸۱ آغاز و برای مدتی به فلسفه مسلط اروپا تبدیل میشود. این فلسفه توانست طی ظهور خود عملاً شیوه تلقی اروپاییها و همه جهانیان را از خودشان، طبیعت، دین، تاریخ بشر، سرشت، دانش، سیاست و به طور کلی ساختار ذهن انسان را دچار تغییرات اساسی کند. این فلسفه از آغاز فلسفهای بحث برانگیز و همواره دیر فهم بوده و تقریباً همیشه با عنوان آلمانی توصیف میشده است.
576 pages, Hardcover
First published August 29, 2002
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March 12, 2015
~~
Pinkard’s book begins at the close of the Seven Years War, and traces Kant’s emergence out of the strangely fractured, fragmented entity that was not quite yet Germany, painting a picture of the dying orders, civil, secular, and religious traditions, faltering under the influence of Enlightenment ideals, that had slowly ceased being capable of providing vital meaning to a people under rapidly changing conditions of existence throughout Europe. The publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 fundamentally shifted all coordinates in European intellectual life, essentially dissolving the ancient metaphysics, asserting a new conception of individuality, self-consciousness, and human freedom, and led to a series of philosophical systems and anti-systems that over the greater part of the next century ultimately came to create “us moderns”. What Kant set in motion with his three Critiques was truly a “fundamental break in human time”, and I don’t think it is an overstatement to claim that Kant, the post-Kantians, and his most prominent successor Hegel, went a long way to creating the terms of the world in which we live out our lives today.
To try to sum up or go through the particularities of all these systems of philosophy would be pointless in this review space, and that’s the entire reason for reading Pinkard’s book anyway.
(What, I’m supposed to do all the heavy lifting for you people?) In an extremely reductive and brief manner, then, Kant essentially laid claim to a relationship between reason and human freedom, and asserted that as all humans share the capacity for self-consciousness, and as we all exhibit a kind of spontaneity in our interactions with each other and the world, we are all capable of determining for ourselves the terms of our own being and freedom. That is, each human, as a self-conscious agent, has inherent dignity and the freedom to act in the interest of their own highest good, and this autonomy cannot be given from any outside source (for then it would not be freedom), it must be supplied by the agent’s own activity, or own self-direction. In essence, to assert our autonomy, we must only be subject to laws of which we are the authors.
This last statement became the most famous of Kant’s antinomies, for at the core of the idea of free will seems to be a glaring paradox: “...if we are to impose a principle (a maxim, the moral law) on ourselves, then presumably we must have a reason to do so; but, if there was an antecedent reason to adopt that principle, then that reason would not itself be self-imposed; yet, for it to be binding on us, it had to be… self-imposed.” (Pinkard, pg.59) If we are not freely taking up the stances we take toward our being in the world, if there is some initial cause to our taking up such stances, maxims, etc., then we cannot claim to be free agents, asserting free will. The paradox comes from the notion that to be self-determining agents within the world, we both have to choose, to create ourselves while at the same time accepting that those selves are in some ways already determined for us, perhaps pre-reflectively, in some kind of “supersensible substrate” to our intuitions, some baseline where concepts and judgements, self-consciousness that is, can come into existence at all. Kant’s assertion was that this would necessarily be something that is “neither nature nor freedom and yet is linked with the basis of freedom.”
Along with Kant’s ideas about self-consciousness relating to “things-in-themselves”, that is, the subject-object dichotomy, seeking a resolution to these antinomies became the spur and impetus for most of what followed in the development of idealism as a philosophical system.
Pinkard does a wonderful job situating Kant's revolution in philosophy and explaining the basic tenants of the three Critiques. Following this there is a brief section dealing with the anti-Kantian reactionaries (Jacobi and Reinhold) that came to argue against the Critiques as a dangerous and foolish prescription for anarchy and nihilism. The French Revolution (which Pinkard deals with succinctly and beautifully in relation to the contesting philosophies of the time) at first seemed to legitimize the Kantian notions of personal dignity and liberty related to reason, but with the Terror and the guillotine, Kant’s reactionary critics seemed to have been somewhat validated in their nervous reception of idealism: perhaps mankind was not meant for such radical self-legislation.
The book then moves to focus on the intellectual hothouse of Jena at the end of the 18th century, and Fichte (whose important contribution was positing the “Not-I”, the Other’s importance in the development of self-consciousness, which would later greatly influence Hegel). The university in Jena during these decades was a coalescing point of some of the most prominent figures to emerge in idealism- Fichte, Schelling, and the early Romantics, Hölderlin, Novalis, Schleiermacher, Schlegel. These chapters dealing with both major and minor figures of the intellectual circle in Jena were among the most exciting, invigorating in Pinkard’s book. It made this reader long to have experienced such a vital time in the development of human destiny, where great minds converged and argued over the fate of human agency, a time when Thinking and Thought took prominence in the lives of men.
From the intellectual ferment of Jena at the turn of the century emerged Hegel, whose philosophical system claimed to dissolve the Kantian paradoxes, and whose all-consuming philosophy seemed to point to a kind of finality in the development of idealism. Again, to be absurdly reductive and brief: Hegel asserted that the subject-object split, the dichotomy that had led to all of the post-Kantian controversies of agency and free will, was an error, was posing the question of human freedom incorrectly, or from a “sideways on” perspective; in essence, having the argument stem from the subject-object split was only seeing part of the picture, not the whole universality of self-consciousness. Hegel claimed that self-consciousness, instead of being posited either by us toward things-in-themselves, or from things-in-themselves toward us (Kant’s “supersensible substrate”), was instead a social phenomenon, something developed historically, something achieved through our own development over time in a necessary progression of relating to other agents within the world. The subject-object split was only a “moment”, that is, human agents must, to come to self-consciousness, posit the subjective and objective viewpoints in order to achieve a “space of reasons” in which intuitions can form and we might hold judgements and concepts. Self-consciousness is, to Hegel, more a matter of social institutions and practices developed and played out in a normative space over time. What matters is not the source of our self-determination, which is indeed only something that might emerge because of the conditions of its own possiblity, but the normative structures that have allowed it to come into being in the first place. Again, what I'm giving you is a ridiculously abbreviated and reductive summation of Hegel's logic.
Pinkard’s book concludes with a chapter dealing with post-Hegelian reaction and “resignation”- late-period Schelling attempting to root idealism in a more religious ground, to take it back from emerging “radical” young Hegelians like Marx and Feuerbach, who were developing it further into the realms of dialectal materialism, and then sections on Schopenhauer’s pessimism and Kierkegaard’s existential despair, a late anti-Hegelianism, a last gasp after the failed revolutions of 1848, that seemed to exhaust the potential that idealism carried of becoming a universal, liberating philosophy destined to bring us to a greater freedom and understanding of our place in the universe. The “legacy” of idealism is then debated in an interesting chapter on how “we moderns” conceptualize the music of Beethoven and Wagner; a very interesting chapter that I don’t feel I have fully digested.
Flitting around the edges of the ending of this book is the haunting question of whether, in light of what has become of "us moderns" in the globalized, postindustrial, postmodern, hypercapitalist world of our epoch, modernism has "failed". I won't comment on that here, at least not in depth, but I will add a personal observation, that many of the people I know seem to exhibit characteristics of Kierkegaard's final "despair": "...for Kierkegaard, the Hegelian hope of a reconciling politics, art, and philosophy had to be abandoned. There is no hope for any political reconciliation of modern life; all that is left, he seemed to be saying, is a set of radically individual callings- of each individual, confronting the necessary but impossible task of leading his own life, acknowledging the despair that necessarily follows from that acknowledgement. On Kierkegaard's view, the fate of the modern world was not the establishment of reconciliation in Sittlichkeit and free politics, but a social world of puffed-up conformism populated by despairing individuals engaged in efforts to deny and repress their despair." (pg. 355)
I can’t conjure enough praise for this book. In less than 400 pages Professor Pinkard has given me exactly what I have been seeking for so long, an introduction to German Idealism and its legacy that doesn’t intimidate or obfuscate. He has accomplished this in a rich, compulsively readable book of philosophical history, pouring out a flood tide of ideas to ponder, perspectives on thinking and the nature of thought and being and human activity that I did not, perhaps could not have held or conceived before. As I said in an earlier status update, never have I had philosophical/epistemological/ontological concepts so clearly expressed to me, never have I felt I had such a solid grasp on these complex ideas.
Pinkard’s book begins at the close of the Seven Years War, and traces Kant’s emergence out of the strangely fractured, fragmented entity that was not quite yet Germany, painting a picture of the dying orders, civil, secular, and religious traditions, faltering under the influence of Enlightenment ideals, that had slowly ceased being capable of providing vital meaning to a people under rapidly changing conditions of existence throughout Europe. The publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 fundamentally shifted all coordinates in European intellectual life, essentially dissolving the ancient metaphysics, asserting a new conception of individuality, self-consciousness, and human freedom, and led to a series of philosophical systems and anti-systems that over the greater part of the next century ultimately came to create “us moderns”. What Kant set in motion with his three Critiques was truly a “fundamental break in human time”, and I don’t think it is an overstatement to claim that Kant, the post-Kantians, and his most prominent successor Hegel, went a long way to creating the terms of the world in which we live out our lives today.
To try to sum up or go through the particularities of all these systems of philosophy would be pointless in this review space, and that’s the entire reason for reading Pinkard’s book anyway.
(What, I’m supposed to do all the heavy lifting for you people?) In an extremely reductive and brief manner, then, Kant essentially laid claim to a relationship between reason and human freedom, and asserted that as all humans share the capacity for self-consciousness, and as we all exhibit a kind of spontaneity in our interactions with each other and the world, we are all capable of determining for ourselves the terms of our own being and freedom. That is, each human, as a self-conscious agent, has inherent dignity and the freedom to act in the interest of their own highest good, and this autonomy cannot be given from any outside source (for then it would not be freedom), it must be supplied by the agent’s own activity, or own self-direction. In essence, to assert our autonomy, we must only be subject to laws of which we are the authors.
This last statement became the most famous of Kant’s antinomies, for at the core of the idea of free will seems to be a glaring paradox: “...if we are to impose a principle (a maxim, the moral law) on ourselves, then presumably we must have a reason to do so; but, if there was an antecedent reason to adopt that principle, then that reason would not itself be self-imposed; yet, for it to be binding on us, it had to be… self-imposed.” (Pinkard, pg.59) If we are not freely taking up the stances we take toward our being in the world, if there is some initial cause to our taking up such stances, maxims, etc., then we cannot claim to be free agents, asserting free will. The paradox comes from the notion that to be self-determining agents within the world, we both have to choose, to create ourselves while at the same time accepting that those selves are in some ways already determined for us, perhaps pre-reflectively, in some kind of “supersensible substrate” to our intuitions, some baseline where concepts and judgements, self-consciousness that is, can come into existence at all. Kant’s assertion was that this would necessarily be something that is “neither nature nor freedom and yet is linked with the basis of freedom.”
Along with Kant’s ideas about self-consciousness relating to “things-in-themselves”, that is, the subject-object dichotomy, seeking a resolution to these antinomies became the spur and impetus for most of what followed in the development of idealism as a philosophical system.
Pinkard does a wonderful job situating Kant's revolution in philosophy and explaining the basic tenants of the three Critiques. Following this there is a brief section dealing with the anti-Kantian reactionaries (Jacobi and Reinhold) that came to argue against the Critiques as a dangerous and foolish prescription for anarchy and nihilism. The French Revolution (which Pinkard deals with succinctly and beautifully in relation to the contesting philosophies of the time) at first seemed to legitimize the Kantian notions of personal dignity and liberty related to reason, but with the Terror and the guillotine, Kant’s reactionary critics seemed to have been somewhat validated in their nervous reception of idealism: perhaps mankind was not meant for such radical self-legislation.
The book then moves to focus on the intellectual hothouse of Jena at the end of the 18th century, and Fichte (whose important contribution was positing the “Not-I”, the Other’s importance in the development of self-consciousness, which would later greatly influence Hegel). The university in Jena during these decades was a coalescing point of some of the most prominent figures to emerge in idealism- Fichte, Schelling, and the early Romantics, Hölderlin, Novalis, Schleiermacher, Schlegel. These chapters dealing with both major and minor figures of the intellectual circle in Jena were among the most exciting, invigorating in Pinkard’s book. It made this reader long to have experienced such a vital time in the development of human destiny, where great minds converged and argued over the fate of human agency, a time when Thinking and Thought took prominence in the lives of men.
From the intellectual ferment of Jena at the turn of the century emerged Hegel, whose philosophical system claimed to dissolve the Kantian paradoxes, and whose all-consuming philosophy seemed to point to a kind of finality in the development of idealism. Again, to be absurdly reductive and brief: Hegel asserted that the subject-object split, the dichotomy that had led to all of the post-Kantian controversies of agency and free will, was an error, was posing the question of human freedom incorrectly, or from a “sideways on” perspective; in essence, having the argument stem from the subject-object split was only seeing part of the picture, not the whole universality of self-consciousness. Hegel claimed that self-consciousness, instead of being posited either by us toward things-in-themselves, or from things-in-themselves toward us (Kant’s “supersensible substrate”), was instead a social phenomenon, something developed historically, something achieved through our own development over time in a necessary progression of relating to other agents within the world. The subject-object split was only a “moment”, that is, human agents must, to come to self-consciousness, posit the subjective and objective viewpoints in order to achieve a “space of reasons” in which intuitions can form and we might hold judgements and concepts. Self-consciousness is, to Hegel, more a matter of social institutions and practices developed and played out in a normative space over time. What matters is not the source of our self-determination, which is indeed only something that might emerge because of the conditions of its own possiblity, but the normative structures that have allowed it to come into being in the first place. Again, what I'm giving you is a ridiculously abbreviated and reductive summation of Hegel's logic.
Pinkard’s book concludes with a chapter dealing with post-Hegelian reaction and “resignation”- late-period Schelling attempting to root idealism in a more religious ground, to take it back from emerging “radical” young Hegelians like Marx and Feuerbach, who were developing it further into the realms of dialectal materialism, and then sections on Schopenhauer’s pessimism and Kierkegaard’s existential despair, a late anti-Hegelianism, a last gasp after the failed revolutions of 1848, that seemed to exhaust the potential that idealism carried of becoming a universal, liberating philosophy destined to bring us to a greater freedom and understanding of our place in the universe. The “legacy” of idealism is then debated in an interesting chapter on how “we moderns” conceptualize the music of Beethoven and Wagner; a very interesting chapter that I don’t feel I have fully digested.
Flitting around the edges of the ending of this book is the haunting question of whether, in light of what has become of "us moderns" in the globalized, postindustrial, postmodern, hypercapitalist world of our epoch, modernism has "failed". I won't comment on that here, at least not in depth, but I will add a personal observation, that many of the people I know seem to exhibit characteristics of Kierkegaard's final "despair": "...for Kierkegaard, the Hegelian hope of a reconciling politics, art, and philosophy had to be abandoned. There is no hope for any political reconciliation of modern life; all that is left, he seemed to be saying, is a set of radically individual callings- of each individual, confronting the necessary but impossible task of leading his own life, acknowledging the despair that necessarily follows from that acknowledgement. On Kierkegaard's view, the fate of the modern world was not the establishment of reconciliation in Sittlichkeit and free politics, but a social world of puffed-up conformism populated by despairing individuals engaged in efforts to deny and repress their despair." (pg. 355)
I can’t conjure enough praise for this book. In less than 400 pages Professor Pinkard has given me exactly what I have been seeking for so long, an introduction to German Idealism and its legacy that doesn’t intimidate or obfuscate. He has accomplished this in a rich, compulsively readable book of philosophical history, pouring out a flood tide of ideas to ponder, perspectives on thinking and the nature of thought and being and human activity that I did not, perhaps could not have held or conceived before. As I said in an earlier status update, never have I had philosophical/epistemological/ontological concepts so clearly expressed to me, never have I felt I had such a solid grasp on these complex ideas.
April 7, 2017
Here I go again, up to my ears in German idealism and in its hay day, 1760 to 1860. And Terry Pinkard has brought it to me in all its glory, from Kant through Schelling and Hegel to the likes of anti-idealists like Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard.
Pinkard has a wonderful ability to bring clarity to difficult concepts. How else to explain that even a dunderhead like me was 'getting' Kant. (I cannot get over that in the late 18th century many Germans sat around just discussing this stuff.).
I am not saying that I understood everything that I read, but I have never been so close. Even some of Hegel came through. Imagine.
So if you feel ready to immerse yourself in all of the excitement of a group of people who set out to answer some of humanity's most searing questions, get this book and be prepared to jump in with both feet. It can be fun. (But as I noted more than once in my review of Vittorio Hösle's neat book on the same subject, do not expect to find others to discuss the subject matter with you.)
Pinkard has a wonderful ability to bring clarity to difficult concepts. How else to explain that even a dunderhead like me was 'getting' Kant. (I cannot get over that in the late 18th century many Germans sat around just discussing this stuff.).
I am not saying that I understood everything that I read, but I have never been so close. Even some of Hegel came through. Imagine.
So if you feel ready to immerse yourself in all of the excitement of a group of people who set out to answer some of humanity's most searing questions, get this book and be prepared to jump in with both feet. It can be fun. (But as I noted more than once in my review of Vittorio Hösle's neat book on the same subject, do not expect to find others to discuss the subject matter with you.)
April 20, 2021
090217: i tried to read this as novel which has ideas as protagonists, has history, has dialectic, has argument and disputes, through this century of German idealism. note: there was no unified 'German' state during these years. there were only several dialects, pretentions of empire, various small or large principalities, rather limited prospects for educated, independent, thinkers, and changes often following outside political developments...
this begins with Kant and the revolution in philosophy: 1) human spontaneity, autonomy 2) autonomy, moral order 3) aesthetic taste, teleology, world order. this certainly places him well in the history of philosophy, shows his power, his thought, but as always, i prefer reading about rather than by him. his work is source for all conflict, elaboration, refusal, explication, of the century. the essential distinction between physical reality, phenomena following Newton, and consciousness, noumenal reality, leads to idealism, in recognition how the world is categorically, constructively, conceptually, received perception that had no need of God. aesthetics fits in here too, as 'purposeless purposeness'. and then teleology, world order: the idea each human was required to be free for his own life, be responsible to others, that old orders were false, that hierarchies, politics, beliefs, were all up for rational exploration, insured this would be engaging, and when the next wave of thinkers came...
in, the revolution continues: 4) immediate response in 1780s 5) 1790s Fichte 6) 1790s after Fichte 7) 1795-1809 romantic appropriation 8) 1801-1807 Fries and non-romantics. all this era was strongly influenced by both enthusiasm then horror of the French Revolution, and an attempt to integrate, interpret, polemical, philosophical disputes kant had shown. Jacobi was an early opponent, convinced that the skepticism of received values devoured itself rather than created anew, using his idea of 'hume' to question the possibility of 'religion in the bounds of rationalism' as ever possible. attempting this time. reinhold defended kant, less enamoured of scot skepticism, suggested that it was consciousness that guaranteed itself, was its own foundation, and promoted philosophy over theology as the 'science' central to the new university...
fries was not convinced. for him, this 'self-authorization' was not possible, and this is a continuing thread in arguments of the post-kantians, some who believed this great freedom should be manifest, some thinking it would lead to the French Revolution terror. fries believed in 'identity', in the real being agreement of ideas with given, in human reason, in 'recognition' of 'rational agents' coming together in freedom for what is best for all. this would be application of kant's categorical and universal imperatives. but. could the 'I' 'posit' itself? where, what, who, was this foundation? the terror suggested it could not be reason alone...
so the romantics showed up. already disdainful of Newtonian physics as not useful for all the world, by religious inspiration they decided it was 'love' that was the key to foundations of any sort. first came the poets: hoderlin, novalis, schleiermacher. next came schelling, and he lived out the idea (love with married woman), here showing the contingency of personal life as much as political life, this is the most 'novelistic' sense of this history. schelling was big on 'intuition' and using this to demarcate the subjective from the objective... that it was not rationalism that answered the 'kantian paradox' but it was not God either...
then we get to Hegel: revolution competed? this is a good question. he is of course the other big name who more or less ends this history of thought. i have read on him but just enough to know i do not want much to read by him. hegel had the idea 'art' as values, as culture, was now replaced by 'philosophy'. so we have a disconnect there. the part i get here, rather than his idealistic theory of freedom's progresss, is the 'dual consciousness' and the idea it is not just between people we have 'master' and 'slave' dynamic, but also within the self, that does not need to 'posit' but is already in the act of thinking. or something like that...
after hegel's phenomenology etc. idealism as vying with materialism was losing adherents, and a kind of exhaustion comes over German thought... natural science, evolution, physics, industrial revolution was changing the grid too fast. here is some Schopenhauer, some Kierkegaard, some sense of everything Nietzsche would all blow up... but it is fun get to this point by now. fun, i repeat...
i read this as a novel, i enjoy the plot, i enjoy the characters, i find it a page-turner. i like it more than the dickens recently read...
this begins with Kant and the revolution in philosophy: 1) human spontaneity, autonomy 2) autonomy, moral order 3) aesthetic taste, teleology, world order. this certainly places him well in the history of philosophy, shows his power, his thought, but as always, i prefer reading about rather than by him. his work is source for all conflict, elaboration, refusal, explication, of the century. the essential distinction between physical reality, phenomena following Newton, and consciousness, noumenal reality, leads to idealism, in recognition how the world is categorically, constructively, conceptually, received perception that had no need of God. aesthetics fits in here too, as 'purposeless purposeness'. and then teleology, world order: the idea each human was required to be free for his own life, be responsible to others, that old orders were false, that hierarchies, politics, beliefs, were all up for rational exploration, insured this would be engaging, and when the next wave of thinkers came...
in, the revolution continues: 4) immediate response in 1780s 5) 1790s Fichte 6) 1790s after Fichte 7) 1795-1809 romantic appropriation 8) 1801-1807 Fries and non-romantics. all this era was strongly influenced by both enthusiasm then horror of the French Revolution, and an attempt to integrate, interpret, polemical, philosophical disputes kant had shown. Jacobi was an early opponent, convinced that the skepticism of received values devoured itself rather than created anew, using his idea of 'hume' to question the possibility of 'religion in the bounds of rationalism' as ever possible. attempting this time. reinhold defended kant, less enamoured of scot skepticism, suggested that it was consciousness that guaranteed itself, was its own foundation, and promoted philosophy over theology as the 'science' central to the new university...
fries was not convinced. for him, this 'self-authorization' was not possible, and this is a continuing thread in arguments of the post-kantians, some who believed this great freedom should be manifest, some thinking it would lead to the French Revolution terror. fries believed in 'identity', in the real being agreement of ideas with given, in human reason, in 'recognition' of 'rational agents' coming together in freedom for what is best for all. this would be application of kant's categorical and universal imperatives. but. could the 'I' 'posit' itself? where, what, who, was this foundation? the terror suggested it could not be reason alone...
so the romantics showed up. already disdainful of Newtonian physics as not useful for all the world, by religious inspiration they decided it was 'love' that was the key to foundations of any sort. first came the poets: hoderlin, novalis, schleiermacher. next came schelling, and he lived out the idea (love with married woman), here showing the contingency of personal life as much as political life, this is the most 'novelistic' sense of this history. schelling was big on 'intuition' and using this to demarcate the subjective from the objective... that it was not rationalism that answered the 'kantian paradox' but it was not God either...
then we get to Hegel: revolution competed? this is a good question. he is of course the other big name who more or less ends this history of thought. i have read on him but just enough to know i do not want much to read by him. hegel had the idea 'art' as values, as culture, was now replaced by 'philosophy'. so we have a disconnect there. the part i get here, rather than his idealistic theory of freedom's progresss, is the 'dual consciousness' and the idea it is not just between people we have 'master' and 'slave' dynamic, but also within the self, that does not need to 'posit' but is already in the act of thinking. or something like that...
after hegel's phenomenology etc. idealism as vying with materialism was losing adherents, and a kind of exhaustion comes over German thought... natural science, evolution, physics, industrial revolution was changing the grid too fast. here is some Schopenhauer, some Kierkegaard, some sense of everything Nietzsche would all blow up... but it is fun get to this point by now. fun, i repeat...
i read this as a novel, i enjoy the plot, i enjoy the characters, i find it a page-turner. i like it more than the dickens recently read...
March 12, 2017
Reading a book about philosophy in the age of post-truth seems anachronistical; almost paradoxical. But I did it anyway and it was well worth my time. This book is your one-stop-shop on the philosophy and philosophers of German idealism; from Kant via Jacobi, Reinhold, Fichte, Hölderlin, Novalis, Schleiermacher, Schlegel, Schelling, and Fries, on to Hegel and then Feuerbach, Marx, Schelling (yes, again) and then finally Schopenhauer and Kiergegaard (who was not a German, but a Dane, but welcomed nonetheless); add Spinoza and Newton as special ghosts who make an appearance from time to time.
It’s fascinating to witness the development of modern thought that Kant had kicked off with his three Critiques. I can’t truly say I understood everything from this book. These topics are objectively hard for anyone to wrap their minds around. But what I did understand (or what I think I did) impressed me much and makes me want to delve deeper into the subject (if only those guys wouldn’t had written so eccentrically) — a true inspiration!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
It’s fascinating to witness the development of modern thought that Kant had kicked off with his three Critiques. I can’t truly say I understood everything from this book. These topics are objectively hard for anyone to wrap their minds around. But what I did understand (or what I think I did) impressed me much and makes me want to delve deeper into the subject (if only those guys wouldn’t had written so eccentrically) — a true inspiration!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
September 4, 2022
Existence is paradoxical. The Enlightenment showed we are responsible for our own responsibility and showed that the spontaneity within us that gives us our freedom enslaves us since we must obey it because it is who we are in control and there is no central overriding authority outside of us except for the one within us that we choose to believe in, and our meaning comes from us however we deem it to be.
Kant knows existence is not a predicate and that not being’s negation does not necessarily give us being. He also believes that we possess free agency that depends on duty that comes from within us justifying for us a categorical imperative and that the moral law within us is the only possible proof for a supreme being. Reason justifying Reason leaves a hole in all thought (see Kant’s antinomies) and Kant’s starting paradox of being free in an unfree world need resolving because our spontaneity is depended on our freedom and our freedom is depended on our spontaneity.
After having read The Collected Works of Immanuel Kant I understand why early 19th century Germany needed to respond, and to read the Collected Works one gets the strong feeling by the end that Kant does not believe in God. Kant shows (at least for me) that ‘the truth is out there’ is the wrong way to see the world. Only Spinoza understood before Kant how that was the wrong way to think about the truth, and this book definitely gives Spinoza a prominent place within it. Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’ places the mind as the faculty for truth through Reason depended on the intuitions of space, time and causality. For Kant, the subject (self) is needed before the object (thing) can be grasped, and that the truth resides inside of us. The thing-in-itself gets posited within us by us and with the aid of our reason and intuitions, according to Kant.
Most of what follows Kant as demonstrated in this book is a reworking of the paradox between the self and the thing, the appearance and the thing-in-itself, or the phenomenon and the noumenon. Fichte posits a transcendental ego and has an ‘I’ contrasted with a ‘not I’. Hegel creates sense certainty and with an object outside of the self and dialectically pieces the two together and gives absolute knowledge, that for him is universal truth across space, time and cause, and makes every determination a negation of the infinite, implicitly assuming a divine nature outside of us in the process. The book mentions that some would say an infinite regress is not possible, I’ll mention that an infinite regress is possible outside of finite sets. Hegel assumes an infinite set and doesn’t realize a different set of rules applies for the infinite.
Always this book will try to show how the paradox of existence is trying to be resolved within German Idealistic thought. The goal is for one to have a thought that is unthinkable. That’s how the paradox is trying to be resolved. The original paradox that Kant has and ignores, but all the philosophers who come after him think they can resolve it. The glitch in the Matrix is only fleetingly visible for a moment until the unthinkable become the thought and then the thought goes back to being the unthinkable.
Kierkegaard knows the problem. This author, Pinkard, expertly explains Kierkegaard and knows why he’s relevant even today. Either/Or tries to resolve the aesthetic and the moral part that is within us. This author correctly points out that Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue was myopic when he came to Kierkegaard. I feel vindicated for when I read After Virtue, I felt the same way, and it’s always nice to have a real philosopher agree with me when I disagreed with another real philosopher.
Kierkegaard believes that the more we want eternal life and infinite rewards the less we can have a rewarding life and that we must take a leap-of-faith that is beyond reason and logic in order to jump over the chasm. Modernity gave us control over ourselves and are own meaning and that means that it is up to us to determine are own fate, but the more freedom we have the less choice we have to make that leap-of-faith. For Kierkegaard the opposite of sin is faith not virtue.
This book never loses sight of the paradox that enshrouds us because that’s what the German Idealist were trying to resolve. The freedom that we have coming out of the Enlightenment made us less free the more we know we have it because then we must act accordingly as if we have freedom not from our spontaneity. The Paradox never gets resolved.
Schopenhauer puts the complete nexus of being in our Will. Nietzsche will make it will-to-power, and Heidegger makes it Care, but that’s really for the sequel since the author does mention Heidegger but usually only the later Heidegger. I’ll note briefly, that Heidegger takes truth out completely and structures being as present-at-hand, ready-at-hand, and being human (dasein) and the world we are thrown-in-to creates our being human. Heidegger never really resolves the paradox but just ignores it by saying we are our own meaning creators except when we aren’t, but at least he realizes truth is not necessarily outside of us, or within us while realizing our meaning is what we make of it.
We are individuals living in the world with others, and our virtues make us consider others beyond our own satisfaction. Only for a narcissist and the pathological is that not true. For all non-narcissist or non-pathological people, without others there can be no self. Hegel understands this and writes his Phenomenology with that in mind, and ‘Avicenna’s floating man’ thought experiment demonstrates how we are without purpose or a sense of self-awareness unless there is another to make us ourselves. That is part of the paradox of our existence, we need another to be ourself, unless we are pathological or a narcissist like Donald Trump who is not capable of selfhood just unchecked ego, and no willing of his own will just a primal scream of an unfiltered will at the emotional level of an 8-year-old.
Obviously, I found this book entertaining. I think the German Idealist are relevant to today. Tragedy is when the paradox resolves with sorrow, and comedy is when the paradox resolves with happiness, the paradox is always inherent except for farces. Schopenhauer makes a good point when he was quoted in this book to the effect of saying in all honesty who would want to have to go through their life again. I find Schopenhauer’s pessimism optimistic. That gets at the heart of the paradox and life is best when we just enjoy ourselves because life is shorter than you think.
Kant knows existence is not a predicate and that not being’s negation does not necessarily give us being. He also believes that we possess free agency that depends on duty that comes from within us justifying for us a categorical imperative and that the moral law within us is the only possible proof for a supreme being. Reason justifying Reason leaves a hole in all thought (see Kant’s antinomies) and Kant’s starting paradox of being free in an unfree world need resolving because our spontaneity is depended on our freedom and our freedom is depended on our spontaneity.
After having read The Collected Works of Immanuel Kant I understand why early 19th century Germany needed to respond, and to read the Collected Works one gets the strong feeling by the end that Kant does not believe in God. Kant shows (at least for me) that ‘the truth is out there’ is the wrong way to see the world. Only Spinoza understood before Kant how that was the wrong way to think about the truth, and this book definitely gives Spinoza a prominent place within it. Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’ places the mind as the faculty for truth through Reason depended on the intuitions of space, time and causality. For Kant, the subject (self) is needed before the object (thing) can be grasped, and that the truth resides inside of us. The thing-in-itself gets posited within us by us and with the aid of our reason and intuitions, according to Kant.
Most of what follows Kant as demonstrated in this book is a reworking of the paradox between the self and the thing, the appearance and the thing-in-itself, or the phenomenon and the noumenon. Fichte posits a transcendental ego and has an ‘I’ contrasted with a ‘not I’. Hegel creates sense certainty and with an object outside of the self and dialectically pieces the two together and gives absolute knowledge, that for him is universal truth across space, time and cause, and makes every determination a negation of the infinite, implicitly assuming a divine nature outside of us in the process. The book mentions that some would say an infinite regress is not possible, I’ll mention that an infinite regress is possible outside of finite sets. Hegel assumes an infinite set and doesn’t realize a different set of rules applies for the infinite.
Always this book will try to show how the paradox of existence is trying to be resolved within German Idealistic thought. The goal is for one to have a thought that is unthinkable. That’s how the paradox is trying to be resolved. The original paradox that Kant has and ignores, but all the philosophers who come after him think they can resolve it. The glitch in the Matrix is only fleetingly visible for a moment until the unthinkable become the thought and then the thought goes back to being the unthinkable.
Kierkegaard knows the problem. This author, Pinkard, expertly explains Kierkegaard and knows why he’s relevant even today. Either/Or tries to resolve the aesthetic and the moral part that is within us. This author correctly points out that Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue was myopic when he came to Kierkegaard. I feel vindicated for when I read After Virtue, I felt the same way, and it’s always nice to have a real philosopher agree with me when I disagreed with another real philosopher.
Kierkegaard believes that the more we want eternal life and infinite rewards the less we can have a rewarding life and that we must take a leap-of-faith that is beyond reason and logic in order to jump over the chasm. Modernity gave us control over ourselves and are own meaning and that means that it is up to us to determine are own fate, but the more freedom we have the less choice we have to make that leap-of-faith. For Kierkegaard the opposite of sin is faith not virtue.
This book never loses sight of the paradox that enshrouds us because that’s what the German Idealist were trying to resolve. The freedom that we have coming out of the Enlightenment made us less free the more we know we have it because then we must act accordingly as if we have freedom not from our spontaneity. The Paradox never gets resolved.
Schopenhauer puts the complete nexus of being in our Will. Nietzsche will make it will-to-power, and Heidegger makes it Care, but that’s really for the sequel since the author does mention Heidegger but usually only the later Heidegger. I’ll note briefly, that Heidegger takes truth out completely and structures being as present-at-hand, ready-at-hand, and being human (dasein) and the world we are thrown-in-to creates our being human. Heidegger never really resolves the paradox but just ignores it by saying we are our own meaning creators except when we aren’t, but at least he realizes truth is not necessarily outside of us, or within us while realizing our meaning is what we make of it.
We are individuals living in the world with others, and our virtues make us consider others beyond our own satisfaction. Only for a narcissist and the pathological is that not true. For all non-narcissist or non-pathological people, without others there can be no self. Hegel understands this and writes his Phenomenology with that in mind, and ‘Avicenna’s floating man’ thought experiment demonstrates how we are without purpose or a sense of self-awareness unless there is another to make us ourselves. That is part of the paradox of our existence, we need another to be ourself, unless we are pathological or a narcissist like Donald Trump who is not capable of selfhood just unchecked ego, and no willing of his own will just a primal scream of an unfiltered will at the emotional level of an 8-year-old.
Obviously, I found this book entertaining. I think the German Idealist are relevant to today. Tragedy is when the paradox resolves with sorrow, and comedy is when the paradox resolves with happiness, the paradox is always inherent except for farces. Schopenhauer makes a good point when he was quoted in this book to the effect of saying in all honesty who would want to have to go through their life again. I find Schopenhauer’s pessimism optimistic. That gets at the heart of the paradox and life is best when we just enjoy ourselves because life is shorter than you think.
June 26, 2015
من ترجمه ی فارسی این کتاب رو که خانم قطرویی انجام داده اند ویرایش کردم. به نظرم کتاب فوق العاده ای است برای کسانی که می خواهند وارد جرگه ی ایدئالیست های آلمانی شوند اما مایلند به جای مطالب پیش پا افتاده، شرح ها و توصیف های بدیع و دقیقی مطالعه کنند. پینکارد، نویسنده ی این کتاب، شخص معتمدی است! پدیدارشناسی هگل را ترجمه کرده و بهترین زندگی نامه ی هگل را در هزار صفحه نوشته! نثر نسبتا خوبی هم دارد، برای کسی که می خواهد به زبان اصلی آن را مطالعه کند. منتهی، کتاب نوعی مرجع است و بنابراین لزومی ندارد از ابتدا تا انتها یک نفس خوانده شود. مثلا کسی که می خواهد مقداری با شلینگ آشنا شود می تواند فصل مربوط را مطالعه کند.
September 15, 2018
گویا کتاب قرار است بر دو کانون واقع شود: انقلابِ اول( کانت) و انقلاب دوم( هگل) . فیشته و شلینگ قرار است ما را از کانونِ اول به کانونِ دوم برسانند. کانونِ اول در ذهن خواننده شِمای روشنی پیدا میکند؛ ولو تا انتهای لانهی خرگوش نرویم. اما بازنمودِ کانونِ دوم علیرغم سوسوهای متعدد و کم و زیادش، ما را در تاریکیِ مواجهه با هگل تنها میگذارد و این شاید حاصل مواجههی کانتیِ نویسنده با فرمِ هگلی - قسمی نافشردگیِ محض در پیِ فشردگی- باشد، که ممکن است در چنین قالبی به اَشکال « نابهنجار» درآید.
شیوهی روبرو شدن متن با رمانتیسیسمِ آلمانی در خلال مسیری که بناست فیشته و شلینگ استراحتگاههای اصلیاش باشند، شباهتی به توقف در مسافرخانهای بین راهی ندارد و به زدن ِ گاه و بیگاه به دلِ مناظر از پیشچشمکنارروندهی جاده میماند. این که مسافر کجا از تابلو خارج میشود و آیا اصلن چنین چیزی رخ میدهد یا نه را با قاطعیت نمیتوان اعلام کرد.
مسیر ِطولانی اما غیرقابلانحراف فیشته به شلینگ تنها همراهی برای بیدار ماندن لازم دارد؛ وقتی به شلینگ میرسیم، با انبوه چیزهای آشنایی که مناظر را قاب گرفته است، احساس زودگذرِ در خانه بودن میکنیم.
شوپنهاور ( علیرغم تصویر روشن و منسجمی که از او به دست داده میشود) و به ویژه کیرکگور ( که نسبت ویژهی آنتاگونیستیاش با هگل جایی در مسیر پیدا نمیکند) اساسن بیرون از متن میایستند و به عناصری دیالکتیکی درون آن استحاله نمیشوند. رد پاهای نامنظمشان گاهی به درون منظره راهی میابد، اما کمرنگ تر از آنند که برای خروج از تابلو کفایت کنند.
فریس و راینهولت با پژواک گاه و بیگاه یاکوبی از زوایایی بدون وضوح مشخص، چیزی بیشتر از حکایتهایی پندآموز بر زبانِ پیرمرد و پیرزنهای روستاهای بین راه به نظر نمیرسند.
آنکه یاکوبیِ حاضرِ غایب و رمانتیکهای خفته در کنارههای بستر رودخانهی جنگلیِ درون منظره منتظر آمدنش هستند و جز دو بار، آن هم بدون هیچ تعین ِ مشخصی از او یادی نمیشود، مجوسِ شمال، هامانِ سازشناپذیر، است که گویی بدون گذر از منظره یا پیشتر هرگونه اثری در جاده، به نحوی غیرممکن از تابلو خارج شده است.
شیوهی روبرو شدن متن با رمانتیسیسمِ آلمانی در خلال مسیری که بناست فیشته و شلینگ استراحتگاههای اصلیاش باشند، شباهتی به توقف در مسافرخانهای بین راهی ندارد و به زدن ِ گاه و بیگاه به دلِ مناظر از پیشچشمکنارروندهی جاده میماند. این که مسافر کجا از تابلو خارج میشود و آیا اصلن چنین چیزی رخ میدهد یا نه را با قاطعیت نمیتوان اعلام کرد.
مسیر ِطولانی اما غیرقابلانحراف فیشته به شلینگ تنها همراهی برای بیدار ماندن لازم دارد؛ وقتی به شلینگ میرسیم، با انبوه چیزهای آشنایی که مناظر را قاب گرفته است، احساس زودگذرِ در خانه بودن میکنیم.
شوپنهاور ( علیرغم تصویر روشن و منسجمی که از او به دست داده میشود) و به ویژه کیرکگور ( که نسبت ویژهی آنتاگونیستیاش با هگل جایی در مسیر پیدا نمیکند) اساسن بیرون از متن میایستند و به عناصری دیالکتیکی درون آن استحاله نمیشوند. رد پاهای نامنظمشان گاهی به درون منظره راهی میابد، اما کمرنگ تر از آنند که برای خروج از تابلو کفایت کنند.
فریس و راینهولت با پژواک گاه و بیگاه یاکوبی از زوایایی بدون وضوح مشخص، چیزی بیشتر از حکایتهایی پندآموز بر زبانِ پیرمرد و پیرزنهای روستاهای بین راه به نظر نمیرسند.
آنکه یاکوبیِ حاضرِ غایب و رمانتیکهای خفته در کنارههای بستر رودخانهی جنگلیِ درون منظره منتظر آمدنش هستند و جز دو بار، آن هم بدون هیچ تعین ِ مشخصی از او یادی نمیشود، مجوسِ شمال، هامانِ سازشناپذیر، است که گویی بدون گذر از منظره یا پیشتر هرگونه اثری در جاده، به نحوی غیرممکن از تابلو خارج شده است.
October 19, 2015
One of the most riveting books I've read this year. Set my mind whirring in a thousand different directions. Philosophy tends to piss me off - these fucking problems just won't go away! - but I like to think it's a healthy kind of anger.
Truly remarkable discussion of Kant. Pinkard shows the unity of the technical, epistemological concerns of the first critique with the later philosophy of freedom, morality, aesthetics.
Part of the reason Kant casts such a long shadow is that his "solutions," such as they were, were never fully satisfying. The conundrum of reason and the thing-in-itself has been a spur to philosophers ever since. You simply cannot set up a firm limit without inviting the temptation to transgress. Arguably Kant himself gave into this in the Critique of Judgment, where he speaks of "the supersensible substrate of appearances." Art violating the bounds of reason? This starts to sound like unvarnished Romanticism.
Truly remarkable discussion of Kant. Pinkard shows the unity of the technical, epistemological concerns of the first critique with the later philosophy of freedom, morality, aesthetics.
Part of the reason Kant casts such a long shadow is that his "solutions," such as they were, were never fully satisfying. The conundrum of reason and the thing-in-itself has been a spur to philosophers ever since. You simply cannot set up a firm limit without inviting the temptation to transgress. Arguably Kant himself gave into this in the Critique of Judgment, where he speaks of "the supersensible substrate of appearances." Art violating the bounds of reason? This starts to sound like unvarnished Romanticism.
June 4, 2022
This is a fantastic read, covering the revolutionary period of modern philosophy from Kant to Hegel, along with some tangential discussion on Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. I found the discussion of early Romantic poets like Holderlin and Novalis, and lesser known writers like Schlegel and Schleiermacher to be quite interesting. German idealism begins with a recognition of the inherent limitations of reason, and then runs wild with countless "systems" seeking to describe conscious experience. Pinkard does a commendable job in getting across admittedly confusing writers in a coherent manner. Here is the point where philosophy regains its literary flair and its fraternity with art, lost in everything since the ancient Greeks (seen, rarely, in works like Augustine's Confessions).
November 29, 2014
Hegel concluded relatively late in his career that "art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past." Although that has often been interpreted (even in Hegel's own time) as a statement asserting the "end of art," it hardly claims anything so drastic, even though its basic claim is indeed radical. It is saying, in effect, that art cannot give us the most satisfactory understanding of what matters most to us, and that the status of art in our collective lives has thereby changed. Almost paradoxically, art has brought us to the point of self-understanding where we realize that we must step outside of art in order to fulfill that need which art first awakens in us. The attractiveness of beauty "calls" us to seek what it promises, namely, freedom (not happiness), and "we moderns" have found -- once again in part paradoxically, because of the very success of modern paining and literature -- that we cannot realize what art promises if we continue to seek that goal in the realm of beauty itself. The world of freedom -- institutionalized in the prosaic, that is, non-aesthetically satisfying world of constitutional law, markets, bourgeois families and the like -- is outside the realm of beauty, and only that social and political realm coupled with philosophical reflection on it can satisfy our "highest interests."
September 11, 2019
کتاب مفصل هگلشناس امریکایی، تری پینکارد، از کانت و سه «نقد»ش آغاز میکند و میراث پساکانتی را تا حتا سورن کییرکهگارد دنبال میکند. فیشته، رمانتیکهای آلمانی (هولدرلین، نووالیس، شلایرماخر و اشلگل)، شلینگ و فریس، در این میان فصولی مربوط به خود دارند تا نوبت به هگل برسد. کتاب با فصلی در مورد کییرکهگارد و شوپنهاور، و نهایتا جمعبندی پینکارد از «میراث ایدئالیسم» به پایان میرسد
وسعت دانش پینکارد شگفتانگیز است. او احاطه به فلسفهی آلمانی را با زمینهکاویهای تاریخی همراه میکند و همهی اینها را به وضوح و صلابت روی کاغذ میآورد. ترجمهی ندا قطرویی هم فوقالعاده ست؛ و نویدبخش ظهور هرچه بیشتر مترجمان کمسروصدا و کاردانی از این دست
وسعت دانش پینکارد شگفتانگیز است. او احاطه به فلسفهی آلمانی را با زمینهکاویهای تاریخی همراه میکند و همهی اینها را به وضوح و صلابت روی کاغذ میآورد. ترجمهی ندا قطرویی هم فوقالعاده ست؛ و نویدبخش ظهور هرچه بیشتر مترجمان کمسروصدا و کاردانی از این دست
April 23, 2010
An incredibly concise and well-written history of the German idealist movement from Kant through Schopenhauer. Pinkard masterfully grounds his history in Kantian philosophy and then cages the philosophies of Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer in how they are responses to questions/concerns raised by Kant's "Copernican Revolution".
It isn't light reading by any means, but for someone looking to get their feet wet in Kantian and Hegelian philosophy this book is a good starting point because it is so clearly written and logically presented. For more advanced readers, Pinkard offers a sympathetic reading of Hegel as a natural outgrowth of Kantian philosophy. Also, he presents compelling portraits of secondary figures involved in German Romanticism like Holderlin and Novalis.
A fantastic read that I would recommend highly to anyone interested in Continental philosophy or German history.
It isn't light reading by any means, but for someone looking to get their feet wet in Kantian and Hegelian philosophy this book is a good starting point because it is so clearly written and logically presented. For more advanced readers, Pinkard offers a sympathetic reading of Hegel as a natural outgrowth of Kantian philosophy. Also, he presents compelling portraits of secondary figures involved in German Romanticism like Holderlin and Novalis.
A fantastic read that I would recommend highly to anyone interested in Continental philosophy or German history.
May 31, 2010
Probably the most readable possible introduction to the subject. In a mere 400 pages, Northwestern professor of philosophy Terry Pinkard takes us through a huge sweep of philosophy -- from Kant to Hegel and beyond -- in a rather detailed and technical fashion, while maintaining a strong connection to the cultural background of the emerging German nation.
Pinkard, while willing to delve deep into the details of each thinker's arguments (as well as giving pithy biographical sketches), is clear about centering his narrative on probably the most important question of early nineteenth century philosophy, which is how to resolve the Kantian Paradox. That is to say, Kant, in attempting to resolve what the connections are between underlying reality and the representations we hold (Pure Reason), and in figuring out a groundwork for morals and judgment, eventually arrived at the following conclusion: we are only bound by the laws of which we are ourselves the authors. This touched off a firestorm of debate, which lasts to this day.
Different successors of Kant attacked the question from various angles. There were the Romantics (who, Pinkard underlines, were philosophers before they were artists) like Holderlin, and early Schelling, who emphasized the role of human sensitivity to beauty (natural forms revealing truth). There were ridiculously obscure sophists like Fichte and Jacobi whom I can't even hope to summarize here. There were revolutionaries and atheists on the one hand, and the most orthodox Protestant theologians. All the while, generations of younger Germans were trying to figure out their place in the overly strictured society of the German-speaking personalities, followed in turn by the next generation, who reacted to the French revolution and the Napoleonic occupation.
Of course, Pinkard ends up devoting a lot of time to Hegel as well, who attempted to resolve Kant's Paradox by positing the idea of the society (or its Geist) with its agents mutually respecting their abilities to posit their own laws. It's worth emphasizing that Hegel himself spawned a lot of ambiguities, but he introduced the idea of "radical freedom," where each of us is trying to realize our own vision of what it means to be oneself. Pinkard also does an excellent job of covering subsequent thinkers (like Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer), as well as the debate over whether Hegel was even an orthodox Christian or not.
A brilliantly done survey in all aspects -- readable, technical, historical, not bogged down in unnecessary detail while also providing the room to consider how all these ideas might be expressed in our own modern lives.
Pinkard, while willing to delve deep into the details of each thinker's arguments (as well as giving pithy biographical sketches), is clear about centering his narrative on probably the most important question of early nineteenth century philosophy, which is how to resolve the Kantian Paradox. That is to say, Kant, in attempting to resolve what the connections are between underlying reality and the representations we hold (Pure Reason), and in figuring out a groundwork for morals and judgment, eventually arrived at the following conclusion: we are only bound by the laws of which we are ourselves the authors. This touched off a firestorm of debate, which lasts to this day.
Different successors of Kant attacked the question from various angles. There were the Romantics (who, Pinkard underlines, were philosophers before they were artists) like Holderlin, and early Schelling, who emphasized the role of human sensitivity to beauty (natural forms revealing truth). There were ridiculously obscure sophists like Fichte and Jacobi whom I can't even hope to summarize here. There were revolutionaries and atheists on the one hand, and the most orthodox Protestant theologians. All the while, generations of younger Germans were trying to figure out their place in the overly strictured society of the German-speaking personalities, followed in turn by the next generation, who reacted to the French revolution and the Napoleonic occupation.
Of course, Pinkard ends up devoting a lot of time to Hegel as well, who attempted to resolve Kant's Paradox by positing the idea of the society (or its Geist) with its agents mutually respecting their abilities to posit their own laws. It's worth emphasizing that Hegel himself spawned a lot of ambiguities, but he introduced the idea of "radical freedom," where each of us is trying to realize our own vision of what it means to be oneself. Pinkard also does an excellent job of covering subsequent thinkers (like Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer), as well as the debate over whether Hegel was even an orthodox Christian or not.
A brilliantly done survey in all aspects -- readable, technical, historical, not bogged down in unnecessary detail while also providing the room to consider how all these ideas might be expressed in our own modern lives.
November 25, 2025
Extremely dense in places. Pinkard is a Hegel scholar used to explaining Hegel, and the sections on Hegelian thought are accordingly the strongest and most comprehensible.
September 2, 2023
Banger
May 6, 2025
I haven't read the entire book, but the chapter on Schelling and chapters on Hegel are truly amazing. Especially if you are learning for an exam and have questions regarding phases of thought or some more general questions. Pinkard also does a great analysis of key points of philosophers and tries not to be too technical which makes this book that more helpfull because if I am already reading Hegel whom I barely understand, I do not need someone writing about Hegel in even more confusing way. I found this book on German Idealism to be far better than any Companion that I have chance reading or scamming. Highly recommended.
October 9, 2019
اُدیسۀ شگفتانگیزی بود خواندنش...
April 8, 2019
This text and Eckart Forster’s “twenty-five years of philosophy” are probably the best texts on this period that I have discovered. Smooth and comprehensive reading. These texts aren’t overwhelming.
May 3, 2020
It all makes sense now.
September 5, 2021
Some e-highlights
*
At the middle of the eighteenth century, “Germany” was undergoing a sharp population increase, it was experiencing a changeover to commercialized agriculture, and its economy was beginning to feel the first faint tugs of the expansionist forces already at work in other parts of Europe. Its political and social reality was, however, something different and quite unstable at its core… “Germany” thus found itself in a revolutionary situation, even though virtually nobody was calling for revolution. There was a palpable sense that things had to change, but nobody was sure what form the change should take or where the change should lead. Feeling that the past was no longer an independently adequate guide, they had to make up the answers to their unprecedented questions as they went along.”
*
what is the relation of representations to the object they represent?
*
For Kant, our own freedom is a presupposition that we must make about ourselves but which we cannot theoretically defend; it is a necessary condition for conceiving of ourselves as spontaneous beings, as not merely having a point of view of ourselves as physical beings in the world but as having a subjective point of view on the world. Thus, on practical grounds, we must presuppose a belief about ourselves that on theoretical grounds we cannot prove (and which from the point of view of our experience of nature actually seems to be false).
Kant’s picture of agency was thus that of a subject acting in accordance with laws – since a being that did not act in accordance with laws would not be free but only be chaotic, random, pushed around by the laws of chance like a hapless ball in a roulette wheel – and these laws had to be self-imposed, that is, the agent was moved only by the laws of which he first formed a representation and then applied to himself.
The linchpin of that view was not, however, a conception of public order as a means of securing private advantage, but a conception of a rule of law as an end in itself, as something that we as members of the “kingdom of ends” are obligated to achieve.
*
To act according to the moral law and to seek the improvement of man’s lot, we must have some practical faith that doing so makes a difference, that the seeds we sow now are not in vain, that nature does not conspire against our highest ideals. If we do not, then we ultimately have to see all of history and humanity’s role in it, as Kant phrases it, as a “farce” – to which Kant adds, “and even if the actors do not tire of it – for they are fools – the spectator does, for any single act will be enough for him if he can reasonably conclude from it that the never-ending play will go on in the same way forever.”
*
Many in Germany began thinking of the French Revolution as a new “Reformation,” a harbinger of a new spiritual order destined for German life.
*
Jacobi’s thought was in effect a protest against and rejection of any concept of “religion within the limits of reason alone” and in particular against the idea that a rational “system” of philosophy could adequately capture what was at stake in human existence.
*
“piece of whimsy, a pipe-dream, a non-thought.”
*
In his attempt at a popular presentation of his system in 1801 – carrying the ponderous and somewhat comical title, A Crystal Clear Report to the General Public Concerning the Actual Essence of the Newest Philosophy: An Attempt to Force the Reader to Understand – Fichte emphasized this point: our knowledge of a first principle can only occur, he said, “in a fortunate flash of insight, which, however, when found, neither requires nor is capable of further proof, but makes itself immediately clear,” and “is incapable of being proven. It is “immediately evident” – it is the “absolute intuition of reason through itself.”
*
Holderlin: “Such is man; when the wealth is at hand, and a god in person provides him with gifts, he neither knows nor sees it.”
*
In fact, so Schelling was to argue, the distinction between subjective and objective was itself neither subjective nor objective but relative to something else, the “absolute,” and available therefore only to a form of “intuition,” as a way of seeing things in terms of how both subjectivity and objectivity were points of view stemming from something deeper than themselves. Beginning philosophy with the distinction between subjects and objects was already starting too late in the game, and all the problems of post- Kantian philosophy stemmed from beginning with the subject/object division being taken for granted. Both should be seen instead as viewpoints arising together, co-equally….
Thus, we separate “representations” from the objects that they seem to represent, and we then wonder how it is that they are supposed to be brought back together. What such “reflective” modes of thought necessarily fail to grasp (because they are reflective) is that, unless there were already a pre-reflective unity of thought and being, reflection could not do its work, that without our already “being in touch” with things, we could not begin to reflect on the conditions for our making true assertions. However, this original unity, as pre-reflective, cannot thereby itself be reflectively established; it can only be apprehended in an “intellectual intuition.”...
This emphasis on “intuition” – Anschauung, “viewing,” or “seeing” – remained with Schelling for his whole life; central to this thought was his conviction that there was no way of ultimately arguing for the basic ways we interpreted the world, since all forms of argument presupposed a basic “take” on the ultimate structure of things which could not be demonstrated within that form of argument itself; instead, at the level of basic ways of comprehending the world, we re- solved basic problems and contradictions by learning to “see” or “view” things – to “intuit” them – in a different way, to adopt a different basic “picture” of things.
*
Although Hegel’s first published (philosophical) book appeared in 1811, he had already been at work for quite some time on unsuccessful drafts of various other philosophical works. The guiding question behind almost all of them was one that had been nagging at him since he was a student at the Protestant Seminary in Tubingen: what would a modern religion look like, and was it possible to have a modern religion that would satisfy our needs in the way that classical religions seemed to have satisfied the needs of the ancients?
*
Hegel’s thesis in the Phenomenology is that the claims of reason as making a universal demand on us are themselves historical achievements and could not thus emerge on the scene in their full form until they had gone through a long and somewhat painful process of historical development, with various candidates for such claims (and counter-claims) proving themselves to be unsatisfactory in the course of that development – their authority “dissolving” in the same way that the authority of the putative “truth-makers” of consciousness had dissolved…
As it became more and more clear that both noble and bourgeois were interested primarily in wealth, not in glory, the fiction became more obvious, and the laws decreed by the nobility appeared as what they were: the contingent expressions of interest and power by a group interested only in preserving its advantages and privileges, not part of reasons that could be given to all. The only remaining embodiment of being a “law unto himself ” was the monarch, exemplified by the Sun King, Louis XIV, presiding over his court of crafty real-estate- dealing aristocrats. The monarch, so it was said, was the nation…
The French Revolution brought this to a close and completed, at least in principle, that line of development. Faced with the collapse of all other forms of authority, the “people,” now describing themselves and not the monarch as the “nation of France,” declared themselves “as the people” to be the “law” and to be engaged therefore in attaining an unconditional freedom normatively unconstrained by the past or the contingent features of human nature, but instead to be constrained only by what was necessarily involved in that freedom’s being sought for its own sake, keeping faith with nothing outside of its own changing dictates – in short, claiming to be “absolute” freedom. However, without anything more definite to determine what counted as such self-determination, any government of the “nation” could only be a faction, a particular group with its own agenda, renaming its own interests as those of “the people” and characterizing those other factions opposed to it as a danger to the nation.
*
Behind the “moral worldview” is a stress therefore on purity of motive and purity of self, of cleansing the agent of all contaminants to his ability to be a law unto himself, and it is that commitment to purity that plays the determinative normative role in the “moral worldview.”…
In their pursuit of purity in the face of the fragmented, modern world, such beautiful souls fragment themselves into those who act out of conviction, knowing that they cannot know all the possible morally salient features of a situation but remain convinced that the purity of their conviction carries over into their acts; and those who cannot tolerate being contaminated by any compromises with the real world and thus refuse to play along, preserving their inner purity by inaction and condemning all those who act as complicit with the evil of the world. Since evil in that post-Kantian world is identified with subordinating the moral law to self-love and personal advantage, each of these beautiful souls necessarily sees the other as evil, since each sees the other as not really being pure but only substituting their own individual take on things for the real demands of the moral law. In the eyes of the other, the judgmental purist, who refuses to soil his hands with action that might compromise what his “pure” conscience requires, is a hypocrite, pretending to be good but actually concerned only with himself; in the eyes of the judgmental purist, the agent who acts according to what the purity of his conscience tells him is also a hypocrite, for the same reason. Each claims to be a law unto himself, but, as constrained only by an abstract appeal to the purity of his own conscience, each seems to the other only to be substituting his own personal outlook for the demands of the universal “law.” What seems to one of them as pure conscientiousness only seems to the other as fully colored by personal ambition, desire for advantage, or some other less than morally pure motive….
The solution to this, so Hegel argues, arises out of the same practice that produces the appeal to conscience in the first place, namely, Christian culture. In particular, it is the practice of forgiveness, the Christian recognition that we are all “sinners” in the eyes of God, transmuted into a secular practice of forgiveness and reconciliation that brings out what is really normatively in play in the appeal to conscience: an appeal not to “beautiful souls,” but to the recognition that, in Hegel’s terms, our sociality fundamentally commits us to being the “masters” and “slaves” to each other – we are authors of the law to ourselves only as others co-author the law for us. The “ethical world” – the “I that is We, and the We that is I” – exists only in terms of each holding ourselves to the law by holding others to the law, while at the same time they hold us to the law and hold themselves to the law… The freedom sought by “beautiful souls” is thus to be found not in a striving for independence, but in a recognition of our crucial mutual dependencies on each other.
*
If anything, not “youth” but disillusionment and resignation became the emotional background against which much of philosophy and intellectual life in general began to be cast. “Materialism,” not “idealism” was the new motto. The Russian author, Ivan Turgenev – who was a student in Berlin in the 1840s – has one of the characters in his story, “Fathers and Sons,” exclaim: “Yes, there used to be Hegelians and now there are nihilists. We shall see how you will manage to exist in the empty airless void; and now ring, please, brother Nikolai, it’s time for me to drink my cocoa.”
*
Schelling’s (and Hegel’s) attempts at providing an account of agency and nature that presented a “unified” conception were, so Schopenhauer said, nothing but “atrocious, and what is more extremely wearisome humbug.”
Other objects are inert, but we grasp ourselves as moving ourselves around in the world (instead of “being moved” around in the world). In grasping one’s body in this way as the expression of one’s will, one is thereby grasping what one really is as a thing-in-itself, as a “will” that is not a member of the causal order even though it is capable of initiating its own string of causal connections (from action to consequence)… On the basis of that, Schopenhauer proposed that we understand the nature of things-in-themselves as therefore being that of “will” (or at least analogous to the will)… Using our immediate experience of our own willing, we can analogically determine that the world-in-itself is a case of “will,” of groundless striving that has various different empirical manifestations.
*
Since music, as Schopenhauer put it, “passes over the Ideas, it is also quite independent of the phenomenal world, positively ignores it, and, to a certain extent, could still exist even if there were no world at all, which cannot be said of the other arts . . . [Music] is as immediate an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself is. Therefore music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but is a copy of the will itself…
*
Kierkegaard took one of the paradigms of the aesthetic way of life to be the Don Juan style of seducer, who is so caught up in his own fragmented, fleeting romantic passions that he avoids seeing how he is avoiding any sense of selfhood. The aesthetic way of life breaks down on its own terms, since the aesthete is, in Kantian terms, electing maxims that he denies he is electing – or, in Kierkegaard’s terms, choosing himself as not choosing himself. If it dawns on him that he is caught in this paradox, his only response can be that of despair, the feeling of the impossibility of leading one’s life in the only way that it matters to you. What matters the most to the aesthete is leading his own life, which he confuses with not leading it, and the self-consciousness of the impossibility of doing that precisely is despair.
*
On Kierkegaard’s view, the fate of the modern world was not the establishment of reconciliation in Sittlichkeit and free politics, but a social world of puffed-up conformism populated by despairing individuals engaged in efforts to deny and repress their despair. What modernity had done, in Kierkegaard’s view, was make it clear that what people made of their lives was entirely up to them, although, in a strangely paradoxical way, not up to them at all. Modernity itself, so it seemed to Kierkegaard, had simply failed.
*
In terms of the more general intellectual culture, philosophy, which from Kant to Hegel had been at the leading edge of the way educated Germans tried to come to grips with what things meant to them, had by the 1860s been replaced by the natural sciences – at first by chemistry and physiology, then later in the century by physics and biology… In one obvious sense, placing faith in the normative authority of natural (and later, social) science did not disappoint the architects and participants of that mid-century shift in allegiance. The advances in physics, chemistry, and biology during the latter half of the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany, were spectacular, and the concurrent rise of industrialization in Germany was just as dramatic…
Not everything, though, was a movement upwards. Alongside the voices of imperial triumphalism in Germany after the very non-liberal unification of 1871, and the smug assertions of superiority by the increasingly wealthy industrial bourgeoisie, ran also the increasingly nervous expressions of spiritual emptiness, and the now familiar refrains about the blankness of our shoddy, new bourgeois world. In the arts and in literature, other movements took root, and more and more the theme of modernity, not as freedom actualized but as a form of spiritual exhaustion, began to become a regular feature of modern life. Among those attracted to socialism, this was interpreted as the last gasp of a dying order before its rebirth in a new and more glorious form in the future; for others, it signified, as Nietzsche was later famously to call it, the nihilistic rule of the “last men”; for yet others it seemed to call for some new act of heroism, perhaps an “art of the future” that would liberate humanity from the stifling corner into which it had painted itself.
*
To see idealism as exhausted or defeated or even overcome is to miss the most important part of its legacy and how its central themes continued to contest those emerging after its heyday, even by those who most emphatically held it to have been decisively surmounted by what followed it. After the Kantian revolution, it was no longer possible to conceive of experience without also conceiving of the ways in which that experience is “taken up” by us and the ways in which we interpret it, in which the meaning of experience cannot be merely given but, in part at least, spontaneously construed or constructed by us.
*
In a recent influential study of Beethoven, Scott Burnham has argued that, in the case of Beethoven’s so-called “heroic” music (such as the “Eroica” symphony, and some of the well-known early piano sonatas, such as the “Pathe ́tique”), our responses to it involve our own pre-reflective sense of how and why it would matter to us that we are or become self-legislating beings. As Burnham rather convincingly shows, throughout the history of the reception of Beethoven’s “heroic” music, from the most programmatic interpretations to the most formal analyses, there has been a relative constancy in the descriptions of it: it “expresses” (to use a relatively neutral word) a sense of something not fully formed that is encountering complexity, which then provokes a crisis (expressed again purely in musical terms), which, in turn, renews itself, then integrates the surrounding complexity within itself, and finally ends “triumphantly.”
*
At the middle of the eighteenth century, “Germany” was undergoing a sharp population increase, it was experiencing a changeover to commercialized agriculture, and its economy was beginning to feel the first faint tugs of the expansionist forces already at work in other parts of Europe. Its political and social reality was, however, something different and quite unstable at its core… “Germany” thus found itself in a revolutionary situation, even though virtually nobody was calling for revolution. There was a palpable sense that things had to change, but nobody was sure what form the change should take or where the change should lead. Feeling that the past was no longer an independently adequate guide, they had to make up the answers to their unprecedented questions as they went along.”
*
what is the relation of representations to the object they represent?
*
For Kant, our own freedom is a presupposition that we must make about ourselves but which we cannot theoretically defend; it is a necessary condition for conceiving of ourselves as spontaneous beings, as not merely having a point of view of ourselves as physical beings in the world but as having a subjective point of view on the world. Thus, on practical grounds, we must presuppose a belief about ourselves that on theoretical grounds we cannot prove (and which from the point of view of our experience of nature actually seems to be false).
Kant’s picture of agency was thus that of a subject acting in accordance with laws – since a being that did not act in accordance with laws would not be free but only be chaotic, random, pushed around by the laws of chance like a hapless ball in a roulette wheel – and these laws had to be self-imposed, that is, the agent was moved only by the laws of which he first formed a representation and then applied to himself.
The linchpin of that view was not, however, a conception of public order as a means of securing private advantage, but a conception of a rule of law as an end in itself, as something that we as members of the “kingdom of ends” are obligated to achieve.
*
To act according to the moral law and to seek the improvement of man’s lot, we must have some practical faith that doing so makes a difference, that the seeds we sow now are not in vain, that nature does not conspire against our highest ideals. If we do not, then we ultimately have to see all of history and humanity’s role in it, as Kant phrases it, as a “farce” – to which Kant adds, “and even if the actors do not tire of it – for they are fools – the spectator does, for any single act will be enough for him if he can reasonably conclude from it that the never-ending play will go on in the same way forever.”
*
Many in Germany began thinking of the French Revolution as a new “Reformation,” a harbinger of a new spiritual order destined for German life.
*
Jacobi’s thought was in effect a protest against and rejection of any concept of “religion within the limits of reason alone” and in particular against the idea that a rational “system” of philosophy could adequately capture what was at stake in human existence.
*
“piece of whimsy, a pipe-dream, a non-thought.”
*
In his attempt at a popular presentation of his system in 1801 – carrying the ponderous and somewhat comical title, A Crystal Clear Report to the General Public Concerning the Actual Essence of the Newest Philosophy: An Attempt to Force the Reader to Understand – Fichte emphasized this point: our knowledge of a first principle can only occur, he said, “in a fortunate flash of insight, which, however, when found, neither requires nor is capable of further proof, but makes itself immediately clear,” and “is incapable of being proven. It is “immediately evident” – it is the “absolute intuition of reason through itself.”
*
Holderlin: “Such is man; when the wealth is at hand, and a god in person provides him with gifts, he neither knows nor sees it.”
*
In fact, so Schelling was to argue, the distinction between subjective and objective was itself neither subjective nor objective but relative to something else, the “absolute,” and available therefore only to a form of “intuition,” as a way of seeing things in terms of how both subjectivity and objectivity were points of view stemming from something deeper than themselves. Beginning philosophy with the distinction between subjects and objects was already starting too late in the game, and all the problems of post- Kantian philosophy stemmed from beginning with the subject/object division being taken for granted. Both should be seen instead as viewpoints arising together, co-equally….
Thus, we separate “representations” from the objects that they seem to represent, and we then wonder how it is that they are supposed to be brought back together. What such “reflective” modes of thought necessarily fail to grasp (because they are reflective) is that, unless there were already a pre-reflective unity of thought and being, reflection could not do its work, that without our already “being in touch” with things, we could not begin to reflect on the conditions for our making true assertions. However, this original unity, as pre-reflective, cannot thereby itself be reflectively established; it can only be apprehended in an “intellectual intuition.”...
This emphasis on “intuition” – Anschauung, “viewing,” or “seeing” – remained with Schelling for his whole life; central to this thought was his conviction that there was no way of ultimately arguing for the basic ways we interpreted the world, since all forms of argument presupposed a basic “take” on the ultimate structure of things which could not be demonstrated within that form of argument itself; instead, at the level of basic ways of comprehending the world, we re- solved basic problems and contradictions by learning to “see” or “view” things – to “intuit” them – in a different way, to adopt a different basic “picture” of things.
*
Although Hegel’s first published (philosophical) book appeared in 1811, he had already been at work for quite some time on unsuccessful drafts of various other philosophical works. The guiding question behind almost all of them was one that had been nagging at him since he was a student at the Protestant Seminary in Tubingen: what would a modern religion look like, and was it possible to have a modern religion that would satisfy our needs in the way that classical religions seemed to have satisfied the needs of the ancients?
*
Hegel’s thesis in the Phenomenology is that the claims of reason as making a universal demand on us are themselves historical achievements and could not thus emerge on the scene in their full form until they had gone through a long and somewhat painful process of historical development, with various candidates for such claims (and counter-claims) proving themselves to be unsatisfactory in the course of that development – their authority “dissolving” in the same way that the authority of the putative “truth-makers” of consciousness had dissolved…
As it became more and more clear that both noble and bourgeois were interested primarily in wealth, not in glory, the fiction became more obvious, and the laws decreed by the nobility appeared as what they were: the contingent expressions of interest and power by a group interested only in preserving its advantages and privileges, not part of reasons that could be given to all. The only remaining embodiment of being a “law unto himself ” was the monarch, exemplified by the Sun King, Louis XIV, presiding over his court of crafty real-estate- dealing aristocrats. The monarch, so it was said, was the nation…
The French Revolution brought this to a close and completed, at least in principle, that line of development. Faced with the collapse of all other forms of authority, the “people,” now describing themselves and not the monarch as the “nation of France,” declared themselves “as the people” to be the “law” and to be engaged therefore in attaining an unconditional freedom normatively unconstrained by the past or the contingent features of human nature, but instead to be constrained only by what was necessarily involved in that freedom’s being sought for its own sake, keeping faith with nothing outside of its own changing dictates – in short, claiming to be “absolute” freedom. However, without anything more definite to determine what counted as such self-determination, any government of the “nation” could only be a faction, a particular group with its own agenda, renaming its own interests as those of “the people” and characterizing those other factions opposed to it as a danger to the nation.
*
Behind the “moral worldview” is a stress therefore on purity of motive and purity of self, of cleansing the agent of all contaminants to his ability to be a law unto himself, and it is that commitment to purity that plays the determinative normative role in the “moral worldview.”…
In their pursuit of purity in the face of the fragmented, modern world, such beautiful souls fragment themselves into those who act out of conviction, knowing that they cannot know all the possible morally salient features of a situation but remain convinced that the purity of their conviction carries over into their acts; and those who cannot tolerate being contaminated by any compromises with the real world and thus refuse to play along, preserving their inner purity by inaction and condemning all those who act as complicit with the evil of the world. Since evil in that post-Kantian world is identified with subordinating the moral law to self-love and personal advantage, each of these beautiful souls necessarily sees the other as evil, since each sees the other as not really being pure but only substituting their own individual take on things for the real demands of the moral law. In the eyes of the other, the judgmental purist, who refuses to soil his hands with action that might compromise what his “pure” conscience requires, is a hypocrite, pretending to be good but actually concerned only with himself; in the eyes of the judgmental purist, the agent who acts according to what the purity of his conscience tells him is also a hypocrite, for the same reason. Each claims to be a law unto himself, but, as constrained only by an abstract appeal to the purity of his own conscience, each seems to the other only to be substituting his own personal outlook for the demands of the universal “law.” What seems to one of them as pure conscientiousness only seems to the other as fully colored by personal ambition, desire for advantage, or some other less than morally pure motive….
The solution to this, so Hegel argues, arises out of the same practice that produces the appeal to conscience in the first place, namely, Christian culture. In particular, it is the practice of forgiveness, the Christian recognition that we are all “sinners” in the eyes of God, transmuted into a secular practice of forgiveness and reconciliation that brings out what is really normatively in play in the appeal to conscience: an appeal not to “beautiful souls,” but to the recognition that, in Hegel’s terms, our sociality fundamentally commits us to being the “masters” and “slaves” to each other – we are authors of the law to ourselves only as others co-author the law for us. The “ethical world” – the “I that is We, and the We that is I” – exists only in terms of each holding ourselves to the law by holding others to the law, while at the same time they hold us to the law and hold themselves to the law… The freedom sought by “beautiful souls” is thus to be found not in a striving for independence, but in a recognition of our crucial mutual dependencies on each other.
*
If anything, not “youth” but disillusionment and resignation became the emotional background against which much of philosophy and intellectual life in general began to be cast. “Materialism,” not “idealism” was the new motto. The Russian author, Ivan Turgenev – who was a student in Berlin in the 1840s – has one of the characters in his story, “Fathers and Sons,” exclaim: “Yes, there used to be Hegelians and now there are nihilists. We shall see how you will manage to exist in the empty airless void; and now ring, please, brother Nikolai, it’s time for me to drink my cocoa.”
*
Schelling’s (and Hegel’s) attempts at providing an account of agency and nature that presented a “unified” conception were, so Schopenhauer said, nothing but “atrocious, and what is more extremely wearisome humbug.”
Other objects are inert, but we grasp ourselves as moving ourselves around in the world (instead of “being moved” around in the world). In grasping one’s body in this way as the expression of one’s will, one is thereby grasping what one really is as a thing-in-itself, as a “will” that is not a member of the causal order even though it is capable of initiating its own string of causal connections (from action to consequence)… On the basis of that, Schopenhauer proposed that we understand the nature of things-in-themselves as therefore being that of “will” (or at least analogous to the will)… Using our immediate experience of our own willing, we can analogically determine that the world-in-itself is a case of “will,” of groundless striving that has various different empirical manifestations.
*
Since music, as Schopenhauer put it, “passes over the Ideas, it is also quite independent of the phenomenal world, positively ignores it, and, to a certain extent, could still exist even if there were no world at all, which cannot be said of the other arts . . . [Music] is as immediate an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself is. Therefore music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but is a copy of the will itself…
*
Kierkegaard took one of the paradigms of the aesthetic way of life to be the Don Juan style of seducer, who is so caught up in his own fragmented, fleeting romantic passions that he avoids seeing how he is avoiding any sense of selfhood. The aesthetic way of life breaks down on its own terms, since the aesthete is, in Kantian terms, electing maxims that he denies he is electing – or, in Kierkegaard’s terms, choosing himself as not choosing himself. If it dawns on him that he is caught in this paradox, his only response can be that of despair, the feeling of the impossibility of leading one’s life in the only way that it matters to you. What matters the most to the aesthete is leading his own life, which he confuses with not leading it, and the self-consciousness of the impossibility of doing that precisely is despair.
*
On Kierkegaard’s view, the fate of the modern world was not the establishment of reconciliation in Sittlichkeit and free politics, but a social world of puffed-up conformism populated by despairing individuals engaged in efforts to deny and repress their despair. What modernity had done, in Kierkegaard’s view, was make it clear that what people made of their lives was entirely up to them, although, in a strangely paradoxical way, not up to them at all. Modernity itself, so it seemed to Kierkegaard, had simply failed.
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In terms of the more general intellectual culture, philosophy, which from Kant to Hegel had been at the leading edge of the way educated Germans tried to come to grips with what things meant to them, had by the 1860s been replaced by the natural sciences – at first by chemistry and physiology, then later in the century by physics and biology… In one obvious sense, placing faith in the normative authority of natural (and later, social) science did not disappoint the architects and participants of that mid-century shift in allegiance. The advances in physics, chemistry, and biology during the latter half of the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany, were spectacular, and the concurrent rise of industrialization in Germany was just as dramatic…
Not everything, though, was a movement upwards. Alongside the voices of imperial triumphalism in Germany after the very non-liberal unification of 1871, and the smug assertions of superiority by the increasingly wealthy industrial bourgeoisie, ran also the increasingly nervous expressions of spiritual emptiness, and the now familiar refrains about the blankness of our shoddy, new bourgeois world. In the arts and in literature, other movements took root, and more and more the theme of modernity, not as freedom actualized but as a form of spiritual exhaustion, began to become a regular feature of modern life. Among those attracted to socialism, this was interpreted as the last gasp of a dying order before its rebirth in a new and more glorious form in the future; for others, it signified, as Nietzsche was later famously to call it, the nihilistic rule of the “last men”; for yet others it seemed to call for some new act of heroism, perhaps an “art of the future” that would liberate humanity from the stifling corner into which it had painted itself.
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To see idealism as exhausted or defeated or even overcome is to miss the most important part of its legacy and how its central themes continued to contest those emerging after its heyday, even by those who most emphatically held it to have been decisively surmounted by what followed it. After the Kantian revolution, it was no longer possible to conceive of experience without also conceiving of the ways in which that experience is “taken up” by us and the ways in which we interpret it, in which the meaning of experience cannot be merely given but, in part at least, spontaneously construed or constructed by us.
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In a recent influential study of Beethoven, Scott Burnham has argued that, in the case of Beethoven’s so-called “heroic” music (such as the “Eroica” symphony, and some of the well-known early piano sonatas, such as the “Pathe ́tique”), our responses to it involve our own pre-reflective sense of how and why it would matter to us that we are or become self-legislating beings. As Burnham rather convincingly shows, throughout the history of the reception of Beethoven’s “heroic” music, from the most programmatic interpretations to the most formal analyses, there has been a relative constancy in the descriptions of it: it “expresses” (to use a relatively neutral word) a sense of something not fully formed that is encountering complexity, which then provokes a crisis (expressed again purely in musical terms), which, in turn, renews itself, then integrates the surrounding complexity within itself, and finally ends “triumphantly.”
September 11, 2024
"Idealism was conceived as a link between reason and freedom which held that modernity represents a fundamental break in human time. It was accompanied by an understanding that a lawless will was no will at all, and that “giving oneself the law” (as Kant put it) or the “concept’s giving itself actuality” (as Hegel put it) involved one in the “Kantian paradox” and in the deepest problems of the nature of subjectivity that were attendant on that paradox."
March 8, 2022
An invaluable resource, especially with regards to historical context, concerning the German currents of idealism running from Kant, through Fichte and Schelling, and ending ultimately with Hegel. As someone who has read Hegel and Kant, though only in translation, this has served as a useful text for clarifying many points of confusion.
Though Pinkard is, I think, most interested in Hegel, his biases rarely come through, and he gives a very fair treatment of Kierkegaard, something which Marcuse, in his book on Hegel, didn't even try to do. (Marcuse all but writes off Kierkegaard in Reason and Revolution, giving the renowned existentialist around two pages of reaponse!)
Obviously this book is a very brief overview of whole decades of history, but for hobby philosophers like myself, it is sufficient to get a broad grasp on some of the shaping thought movements of modernity. The prose is clear and accessible, and the historical context provided ensures that the ideas themselves are always grounded in an understanding the sweeping societal shifts of the first half of the 19th century.
Though Pinkard is, I think, most interested in Hegel, his biases rarely come through, and he gives a very fair treatment of Kierkegaard, something which Marcuse, in his book on Hegel, didn't even try to do. (Marcuse all but writes off Kierkegaard in Reason and Revolution, giving the renowned existentialist around two pages of reaponse!)
Obviously this book is a very brief overview of whole decades of history, but for hobby philosophers like myself, it is sufficient to get a broad grasp on some of the shaping thought movements of modernity. The prose is clear and accessible, and the historical context provided ensures that the ideas themselves are always grounded in an understanding the sweeping societal shifts of the first half of the 19th century.
April 9, 2025
Extraordinary introduction to German Idealism. First thing I will recommend from now on to any newcomers to philosophy. Great exposition of Kant and Hegel, with some Fichte, Schelling and others thrown in for good measure (plus historical background).
September 30, 2019
Enjoyed all except Hegel's Science of Logic. I'll keep trying but that is a tough nut to crack.
August 15, 2025
The terrain Pinkard covers is a thickly grown wood. A fuller appreciation of his achievement requires great first-hand familiarity with the thinkers and texts he discusses than I possess, which means that I do have difficulties seeing the forest for the trees, and vice versa. That doesn't prevent recognizing just what an achievement the book is. It offers a spectacular, deeply documented interpretation of what the hey-day of German idealism was about and how it continues to matter for our own understanding of ourselves.
As an example of me struggling to see forest for trees: my sense of what "Idealism" means here remains a bit foggy. I think I'm right to say that, fundamentally, it has to do with Kant's contention that reality is a sense of reality, reality for us, because an inescapable condition of experiencing anything at all is that experience be structured in accordance with forms and concepts spontaneously contributed by the nature of human mentality. "Getting things right" has to mean, then, not exactly having representations or some sort in mind that correspond correctly to causes of those representations (say, "facts") outside the mind; instead it has to mean thinking in keeping with norms of thought that are somehow implicit in thinking. Every other thinker discussed afterwards wrestles with this insight into the ideality (perhaps, to riff off Pinkard, the "mindedness"?) of what counts as real.
In the realm of theoretical knowledge, this led Kant into the speculative problem of suggesting that our experience (things for us, phenomena) is caused by causes (things in themselves, noumena) of which we can know nothing whatsoever. In the realm of practical self-understanding, this led Kant to argue that we must suppose that we really are radically free--that no cause outside of our own will satisfactorily explains what we do when we act, and, further, that this matters because since freedom does not mean lawlessness, it must mean, paradoxically, acting in obedience to a moral law that one gives to oneself. (In the realm of aesthetics and values, it led Kant to speculate on a "supersensible substrate" of experience, beneath mentality and extra-mentality. And what might that be?!)
This "Kantian paradox," and the (maybe only apparent?) divisions between thought and being, freedom and nature, that underpin it, are the main themes that Pinkard tracks through his discussions of the thinkers who follow after Kant, who try to resolve or dissolve them in one way or another.
As an example of me struggling to see forest for trees: my sense of what "Idealism" means here remains a bit foggy. I think I'm right to say that, fundamentally, it has to do with Kant's contention that reality is a sense of reality, reality for us, because an inescapable condition of experiencing anything at all is that experience be structured in accordance with forms and concepts spontaneously contributed by the nature of human mentality. "Getting things right" has to mean, then, not exactly having representations or some sort in mind that correspond correctly to causes of those representations (say, "facts") outside the mind; instead it has to mean thinking in keeping with norms of thought that are somehow implicit in thinking. Every other thinker discussed afterwards wrestles with this insight into the ideality (perhaps, to riff off Pinkard, the "mindedness"?) of what counts as real.
In the realm of theoretical knowledge, this led Kant into the speculative problem of suggesting that our experience (things for us, phenomena) is caused by causes (things in themselves, noumena) of which we can know nothing whatsoever. In the realm of practical self-understanding, this led Kant to argue that we must suppose that we really are radically free--that no cause outside of our own will satisfactorily explains what we do when we act, and, further, that this matters because since freedom does not mean lawlessness, it must mean, paradoxically, acting in obedience to a moral law that one gives to oneself. (In the realm of aesthetics and values, it led Kant to speculate on a "supersensible substrate" of experience, beneath mentality and extra-mentality. And what might that be?!)
This "Kantian paradox," and the (maybe only apparent?) divisions between thought and being, freedom and nature, that underpin it, are the main themes that Pinkard tracks through his discussions of the thinkers who follow after Kant, who try to resolve or dissolve them in one way or another.
September 23, 2025
After reading the major works of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx and Nietzsche (though there is always still more to read) on my own, this compilation by Hegelian expert Pinkard expertly threads the needle and explains how German philosophy developed in the century of German enlightenment, by not only going through the Kantian revolution, but connecting philosophy with the historical movements of the times, particularly the French Revolution, which shaped both German Romanticism (and later on mysticism and Nazism) and German Revolutionary political thought (led by the young Hegelians and later on, Marxism).
For those not engaging on a massive research project like me or are not philosophy majors tasked to read all these dense texts, this primer serves as a great summary for the philosophies of the time. Even though Pinkard is clearly a liberal academic trying to stray as far away from Marx as possible, his interest in Hegel betrays his more revolutionary-leaning thinking, particularly when it comes to how the Prussian government sought to recontextualize Hegel's writings for their own interests.
Pinkard's overview also brings my thesis into focus, that Kant was essentially the end of theocratic rule (and therefore legitimacy of monarchical rule), and the two branches from Schopenhauer and Hegel, were essentially responses to the outlook on modernity afterwards, one pessimistic that led to fascism, while the other optimistic that led to communism.
For those not engaging on a massive research project like me or are not philosophy majors tasked to read all these dense texts, this primer serves as a great summary for the philosophies of the time. Even though Pinkard is clearly a liberal academic trying to stray as far away from Marx as possible, his interest in Hegel betrays his more revolutionary-leaning thinking, particularly when it comes to how the Prussian government sought to recontextualize Hegel's writings for their own interests.
Pinkard's overview also brings my thesis into focus, that Kant was essentially the end of theocratic rule (and therefore legitimacy of monarchical rule), and the two branches from Schopenhauer and Hegel, were essentially responses to the outlook on modernity afterwards, one pessimistic that led to fascism, while the other optimistic that led to communism.
February 1, 2021
A clear exposition of German Idealism that frames it in its own historical picture. The rather short length of the book while making it accessible does make it read rather unevenly. Whereas Kant and Hegel are given their own sections, the important figures of Fichte and Schelling are only given individual chapters. This is especially notable given that Pinkard devotes more time to post-German Idealist philosophy than these German Idealists themselves although he does compelling present Schopenhauer's and Kierkegaard's philosophy as part of the Idealist legacy. Pinkard's own interpretation leans on the subjectivist elements of German Idealism as he focuses on their discussions of freedom, autonomy, and self-actualization rather than on any of their struggles against skepticism and solipsism.
4/5
4/5
February 22, 2022
An extremely good introduction to very important German philosophers including Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Certainly not an accessible text for every person, but is still invaluable, nonetheless. Each controversy these thinkers take on is expertly summarized, especially Kant's antinomies which take up a good part of this book. Pinkard also gives very informative socio-political context in small introduction parts before getting into the weeds of different philosophical concepts. A wealth of information!
Rating: 4/5
Rating: 4/5
March 11, 2025
Don’t judge a book by its cover (or name)! Cause this here was such a treat - with how utterly readable the philosophical writing was, how vividly the personages appeared within the historical context provided, I found myself reading slowly for all the right reasons, savouring the mental journey and letting the ideas sink in - despite this being the broadest of strokes of a bunch of the weightiest tomes ever produced by man, the major conclusions felt graspable, and that’s the real brilliance here. Gonna be reading and re-reading this one for a while
March 24, 2022
A great way to get yourself from Kant to wherever you'd like to go, be that Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, or even Schopenhauer. The sections on Kant and Hegel are the most extensive (or at least felt so to me), but the author certainly gives everyone involved their due, explaining not just their ideas, but where they came from, what they borrowed or adapted from other philosophers, what they were even trying to argue about, and how these ideas fit into the context of German politics of the era.
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