r0b’s Reviews > The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism > Status Update

...value of our own work and thus, simultaneously, over our relation to other persons (class colleagues and class enemies) as well as ourselves, we are above all alienated in our species being. We have turned the “freedom” of our own non-necessitated activity into something taken to be necessary.

As German Idealism had already stressed, alienation is fundamentally a matter of our treating as independent something that is of our own making. Marx appropriates this point by turning to economics in a Feuerbachian way: in losing control over the concrete products of our labor, as well as over the very activity and...

... (for Hegel, basic Notions are essentially self-actualizing, very much like the concept of God in traditional ontological arguments).

In Hegel’s three- part system, there is an ultimate source for both life (nature) and consciousness (spirit), namely the domain of Notions (treated in the Logic), which fulfills itself as what Hegel calls the “Idea.” This is not a mental entity, but rather the rational realization of the Notion in actuality...

Schelling claims that “[v]ery few people reflect upon the fact that even the lan- guage in which they express themselves is the most complete work of art,” and the implications of this remark can reveal the basic idea of his whole text. Language, Schelling explains, is “the direct expression of an ideal – of knowledge, thought, feeling, will, etc. – in something real, and, as such, a work of art.”

In the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View Kant suggests that the difference in a child before and after it learns to refer to itself as “I” is that “Previously it just felt itself, now it thinks itself.”

...continually drives me to the opinion of the unhappiness of all being, a conviction which has been voiced in so many pained expressions in past and present. It is precisely man who drives me to the last despairing question: Why is there anything at all? Why is there not nothing?”

In reflections on the groundlessness of reason, the traces of subjectivity become unrecognizable. This sets Schelling apart from Hegel, who held on to the form of subjectivity in every aspect of his work. In the end, the unsolvable mystery is human existence itself:

“Far from making the world, man, and his actions comprehensible, he is himself what is most incomprehensible, and this...

...from Kierkegaard (a one-time student of the late Schelling), through Nietzsche (Schopenhauer’s heir), to Heidegger (who owes more to Fichte and Schelling than he lets on).

...the seriousness and perseverance with which Fichte, Schelling, and Schopenhauer undertook the idealist self-critique contrasts remarkably with the strategies of piecemeal adoption and selective recycling practiced by some of their self-appointed heirs in the late twentieth century.