German idealism and the defense of reason

Following Hegel’s death in 1831, disenchantment with his philosophy, as well as with the speculative orientation of German philosophy as a whole, was rapid and widespread. F.W.J. Schelling (1775–1854), Hegel’s successor at the University of Berlin, emphatically rejected the idea that reason was capable of grasping reality. He insisted that thought and being belonged to two entirely separate ontological categories. In the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), an early work that was profoundly influenced by Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) as well as by the aesthetic writings of Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), Schelling recommended that philosophy “flow back…into the universal ocean of poetry.” He simultaneously prophesied the advent of “a new mythology…which shall be the creation, not of some individual author, but of a new race.” Schelling’s summons, and his insistence on the superiority of the aesthetic faculty to cognition or intellection, found a sympathetic reception among his German romantic contemporaries. In Schelling’s view, knowledge could not be obtained by recourse to logic. Instead, it was an affair of a quasi-mystical “intellectual intuition”—only thereby could one grasp the absolute, or the ultimate reality of things, as the primordial “one” or “world-soul.” The retreat from reason was in full swing.

Kierkegaard

A young Dane named Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) attended Schelling’s lectures during the 1830s. He was soon disappointed by what he considered the residual Hegelianism of Schelling’s absolute idealism. For Kierkegaard, speculative philosophy remained at odds with the demands of “existence”—the particular qualities and requirements of an individual life. It was this dimension of individuality, Kierkegaard argued, that remained alien to the generalizing character of abstract thought. Kierkegaard found Hegel’s influence in particular to be baneful and irresponsible; it seemed characteristic of German idealism in its Hegelian form to care more about perfecting lifeless and convoluted ideational systems than about the details of human existence. Renouncing the metaphysical quest for certainty or Hegelian absolute knowledge, Kierkegaard became a self-avowed advocate of subjectivity. As he remarked in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846)—whose very title is a jibe at the Hegelian ideal of philosophy as science—“The task of the subjective thinker is to transform himself into that which clearly and definitely expresses in existence whatever is essentially human.”

Kierkegaard frequently wrote pseudonymously and ironically, self-consciously adopted a literary rather than a scientific idiom, and, in works such as Attack upon Christendom (1854–55), mercilessly indicted his contemporaries for their faithlessness and ethical conformity. As a Protestant thinker, Kierkegaard believed that he was returning to the concerns of Pauline Christianity, and he viewed the Confessions of St. Augustine (354–430) as an important literary precedent. Only by probing the recesses of his own inner self or subjectivity can the individual accede to truth. In one of his best-known works, Fear and Trembling (1843), he reconstructed the biblical tale of Abraham, praising the protagonist’s “teleological suspension of the ethical” for his willingness to sacrifice his only son on the basis of his unshakable faith. Kierkegaard’s stress on the forlornness of the human condition, as well as on the absence of certainty concerning the possibility of salvation, made him an important forerunner of 20th-century existentialism.

Schopenhauer

A further example of the revolt against the rationalist ethos of German idealism was the “philosophy of will” developed by Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). Schopenhauer, too, felt that Hegel had prematurely proclaimed the finality of his own system, and, like Schelling, he believed that life’s most important truths defied comprehension by reason.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy returned to the Kantian distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves, or between phenomena and noumena, in order to stress the limitations of reason. In his major philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation (1819), Schopenhauer reiterated Kant’s claim that, given the structure of human cognition, knowledge of things as they really are is impossible; the best that can be obtained are comparatively superficial representations of things.

But the most influential aspect of Schopenhauer’s philosophy was his recasting of the concept of the will. He viewed the will as a quasi-mystical life force that underlay all of reality: “This word [will] indicates that which is the being-in-itself of everything in the world, and is the sole kernel of every phenomenon.” Although the will remained inaccessible to ideas or concepts, its nature could be fathomed or glimpsed through nonrational aesthetic experience—an insight that was clearly indebted to Schelling’s philosophy as well as to the romantic concept of “genius.”

Although The World as Will and Representation had little impact when it was first published, Schopenhauer’s pessimism—his devaluation of the capacities of the intellect and his corresponding conviction that reality is ultimately unknowable—became a virtual credo for a subsequent generation of European intellectuals whose hopes for democratic reform across the continent were dashed by the failure of the Revolutions of 1848. His belief in the ability of art, particularly music, to afford metaphysical insight profoundly influenced the aesthetic theories of the German composer Richard Wagner. And his philosophy of the will, as well as his stark view of reason as incapable of grasping the true nature of reality, had a considerable impact on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.