René Descartes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Descartes

Era 17th-century philosophy

Region Western Philosophy

School Cartesianism, Rationalism, Foundationalism

Main interests Metaphysics, Epistemology, Mathematics

Notable ideas Cogito ergo sum, method of doubt, Cartesian coordinate system, Cartesian dualism,
ontological argument for the existence of Christian God; Folium of Descartes

Influenced by

Plato, Aristotle, Alhazen, Ghazali,[2] Averroes, Avicenna, Anselm, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham,
Suarez, Mersenne, Sextus Empiricus, Michel de Montaigne, Duns Scotus[citation needed]

Influenced

Most philosophers after including: Spinoza, Hobbes, Arnauld, Malebranche, Pascal, Locke, Leibniz, More,
Kant, Husserl, Brunschvicg, Žižek, Chomsky, Stanley, Dirck Rembrantsz van Nierop, Durkheim

René Descartes French pronunciation: [ʁəne dekaʁt]; (31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) (Latinized
form: Renatus Cartesius; adjectival form: "Cartesian")[3] was a French philosopher and writer who spent
most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and
much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day.
In particular, his Meditations on First Philosophy continues to be a standard text at most university
philosophy departments. Descartes' influence in mathematics is equally apparent; the Cartesian
coordinate system — allowing algebraic equations to be expressed as geometric shapes, in a 2D
coordinate system — was named after him. He is credited as the father of analytical geometry, the
bridge between algebra and geometry, crucial to the discovery of infinitesimal calculus and analysis.
Descartes was also one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution.

Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors. In the opening section of the
Passions of the Soul, a treatise on the Early Modern version of what are now commonly called emotions,
Descartes goes so far as to assert that he will write on this topic "as if no one had written on these
matters before". Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived
Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like St. Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he
differs from the schools on two major points: First, he rejects the analysis of corporeal substance into
matter and form; second, he rejects any appeal to ends—divine or natural—in explaining natural
phenomena.[4] In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of God’s act of creation.

Descartes was a major figure in 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by Baruch Spinoza
and Gottfried Leibniz, and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes, Locke,
Berkeley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Hume. Leibniz, Spinoza and Descartes were all well versed in
mathematics as well as philosophy, and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well.

He is perhaps best known for the philosophical statement "Cogito ergo sum" (French: Je pense, donc je
suis; English: I think, therefore I am), found in part IV of Discourse on the Method (1637 – written in
French but with inclusion of "Cogito ergo sum") and §7 of part I of Principles of Philosophy (1644 –
written in Latin).

Biography

Descartes was born in La Haye en Touraine (now Descartes), Indre-et-Loire, France. When he was one
year old, his mother Jeanne Brochard died. His father Joachim was a member in the provincial
parliament. At the age of eight, he entered the Jesuit Collège Royal Henry-Le-Grand at La Flèche.[5] After
graduation, he studied at the University of Poitiers, earning a Baccalauréat and Licence in law in 1616, in
accordance with his father's wishes that he should become a lawyer.[6]

"I entirely abandoned the study of letters. Resolving to seek no knowledge other than that of which
could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth traveling,
visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of diverse temperaments and ranks, gathering various
experiences, testing myself in the situations which fortune offered me, and at all times reflecting upon
whatever came my way so as to derive some profit from it." (Descartes, Discourse on the Method).

In 1618, Descartes was engaged in the army of Maurice of Nassau in the Dutch Republic, but as a truce
had been established between Holland and Spain, Descartes used his spare time to study mathematics.
In this way he became acquainted with Isaac Beeckman, principal of Dordrecht school. Beeckman had
proposed a difficult mathematical problem, and to his astonishment, it was the young Descartes who
found the solution. Both believed that it was necessary to create a method that thoroughly linked
mathematics and physics.[7] While in the service of the Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, Descartes was
present at the Battle of the White Mountain outside Prague, in November 1620.[8]

On the night of 10–11 November 1619, while stationed in Neuburg an der Donau, Germany, Descartes
experienced a series of three powerful dreams or visions that he later claimed profoundly influenced his
life. He concluded from these visions that the pursuit of science would prove to be, for him, the pursuit
of true wisdom and a central part of his life's work.[9]. Descartes also saw very clearly that all truths
were linked with one another, so that finding a fundamental truth and proceeding with logic would open
the way to all science. This basic truth, Descartes found quite soon: his famous "I think". [7]

In 1622 he returned to France, and during the next few years spent time in Paris and other parts of
Europe. It was during a stay in Paris that he composed his first essay on method: Regulae at Directionem
Ingenii (Rules for the Direction of the Mind).[7] He arrived in La Haye in 1623, selling all of his property to
invest in bonds, which provided a comfortable income for the rest of his life. Descartes was present at
the siege of La Rochelle by Cardinal Richelieu in 1627.

He returned to the Dutch Republic in 1628, where he lived until September 1649. In April 1629 he joined
the University of Franeker, living at the Sjaerdemaslot, and the next year, under the name "Poitevin", he
enrolled at the Leiden University to study mathematics with Jacob Golius and astronomy with Martin
Hortensius.[10] In October 1630 he had a falling-out with Beeckman, whom he accused of plagiarizing
some of his ideas. In Amsterdam, he had a relationship with a servant girl, Helena Jans van der Strom,
with whom he had a daughter, Francine, who was born in 1635 in Deventer, at which time Descartes
taught at the Utrecht University. Francine Descartes died in 1640 in Amersfoort, from Scarlet Fever.

While in the Netherlands he changed his address frequently, living among other places in Dordrecht
(1628), Franeker (1629), Amsterdam (1629–30), Leiden (1630), Amsterdam (1630–32), Deventer (1632–
34), Amsterdam (1634–35), Utrecht (1635–36), Leiden (1636), Egmond (1636–38), Santpoort (1638–
1640), Leiden (1640–41), Endegeest (a castle near Oegstgeest) (1641–43), and finally for an extended
time in Egmond-Binnen (1643–49).

Despite these frequent moves he wrote all his major work during his 20-plus years in the Netherlands,
where he managed to revolutionize mathematics and philosophy. In 1633, Galileo was condemned by
the Roman Catholic Church, and Descartes abandoned plans to publish Treatise on the World, his work
of the previous four years. Nevertheless, in 1637 he published part of this work in three essays: Les
Météores (The Meteors), La Dioptrique (Dioptrics) and La Géométrie (Geometry), preceded by an
introduction, his famous Discours de la Métode (Discourse on the Method). In it Descartes lays out four
rules of thought, meant to ensure that our knowledge rests upon a firm foundation.

Descartes continued to publish works concerning both mathematics and philosophy for the rest of his
life. In 1641 he published a metaphysics work, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Meditations on First
Philosophy), written in Latin and thus addressed to the learned. It was followed, in 1644, by Principia
Philosophiæ (Principles of Philosophy), a kind of synthesis of the Meditations and the Discourse. In 1643,
Cartesian philosophy was condemned at the University of Utrecht, and Descartes began his long
correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, devoted mainly to moral and psychological subjects.
Connected with this correspondence, in 1649 he published Les Passions de l'âme (Passions of the Soul),
that he dedicated to the Princess. In 1647, he was awarded a pension by the King of France. Descartes
was interviewed by Frans Burman at Egmond-Binnen in 1648.

A French translation of Principia Philosofiæ, prepared by Abbot Claude Picot, was published in 1647. This
edition Descartes dedicated to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. In the preface Descartes praised true
philosophy as a means to attain wisdom. He identifies four ordinary sources to reach wisdom, and finally
says that there is a fifth, better and more secure, consisting in the search for first causes.[11]

René Descartes died on 11 February 1650 in Stockholm, Sweden, where he had been invited as a tutor
for Queen Christina of Sweden. The cause of death was said to be pneumonia; accustomed to working in
bed until noon, he may have suffered damage to his health from Christina's demands for early morning
study (the lack of sleep could have severely compromised his immune system). Descartes stayed at the
French ambassador Pierre Chanut. In his recent book, Der rätselhafte Tod des René Descartes (The
Mysterious Death of René Descartes),[12] the German philosopher Theodor Ebert[13] asserts that
Descartes died not through natural causes, but from an arsenic-laced communion wafer given to him by
a Catholic priest. He believes that Jacques Viogué, a missionary working in Stockholm, administered the
poison because he feared Descartes's radical theological ideas would derail an expected conversion to
Roman Catholicism by the monarch of Protestant Lutheran Sweden.[14]

In 1663, the Pope placed his works on the Index of Prohibited Books.

As a Roman Catholic in a Protestant nation, he was interred in a graveyard used mainly for unbaptized
infants in Adolf Fredriks kyrka in Stockholm. Later, his remains were taken to France and buried in the
Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris. Although the National Convention in 1792 had planned to
transfer his remains to the Panthéon, they are, two centuries later, still resting between two other
graves — those of the scholarly monks Jean Mabillon and Bernard de Montfaucon — in a chapel of the
abbey. His memorial, erected in the 18th century, remains in the Swedish church.

Philosophical work

Descartes is often regarded as the first thinker to provide a philosophical framework for the natural
sciences as these began to develop.[15]

In his Discourse on the Method, he attempts to arrive at a fundamental set of principles that one can
know as true without any doubt. To achieve this, he employs a method called hyperbolical/metaphysical
doubt, also sometimes referred to as methodological skepticism: he rejects any ideas that can be
doubted, and then reestablishes them in order to acquire a firm foundation for genuine knowledge.[16]

Initially, Descartes arrives at only a single principle: thought exists. Thought cannot be separated from
me, therefore, I exist (Discourse on the Method and Principles of Philosophy). Most famously, this is
known as cogito ergo sum (English: "I think, therefore I am"). Therefore, Descartes concluded, if he
doubted, then something or someone must be doing the doubting, therefore the very fact that he
doubted proved his existence. "The simple meaning of the phrase is that if one is skeptical of existence,
that is in and of itself proof that he does exist."[17]
René Descartes at work

Descartes concludes that he can be certain that he exists because he thinks. But in what form? He
perceives his body through the use of the senses; however, these have previously been unreliable. So
Descartes determines that the only indubitable knowledge is that he is a thinking thing. Thinking is what
he does, and his power must come from his essence. Descartes defines "thought" (cogitatio) as "what
happens in me such that I am immediately conscious of it, insofar as I am conscious of it". Thinking is
thus every activity of a person of which he is immediately conscious.[18]

To further demonstrate the limitations of the senses, Descartes proceeds with what is known as the Wax
Argument. He considers a piece of wax; his senses inform him that it has certain characteristics, such as
shape, texture, size, color, smell, and so forth. When he brings the wax towards a flame, these
characteristics change completely. However, it seems that it is still the same thing: it is still the same
piece of wax, even though the data of the senses inform him that all of its characteristics are different.
Therefore, in order to properly grasp the nature of the wax, he should put aside the senses. He must use
his mind. Descartes concludes:“ And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact
grasped solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind. ”

In this manner, Descartes proceeds to construct a system of knowledge, discarding perception as

unreliable and instead admitting only deduction as a method. In the third and fifth Meditation, he offers
an ontological proof of a benevolent God (through both the ontological argument and trademark
argument). Because God is benevolent, he can have some faith in the account of reality his senses
provide him, for God has provided him with a working mind and sensory system and does not desire to
deceive him. From this supposition, however, he finally establishes the possibility of acquiring knowledge
about the world based on deduction and perception. In terms of epistemology therefore, he can be said
to have contributed such ideas as a rigorous conception of foundationalism and the possibility that
reason is the only reliable method of attaining knowledge.

Descartes also wrote a response to skepticism about the existence of the external world. He argues that
sensory perceptions come to him involuntarily, and are not willed by him. They are external to his
senses, and according to Descartes, this is evidence of the existence of something outside of his mind,
and thus, an external world. Descartes goes on to show that the things in the external world are material
by arguing that God would not deceive him as to the ideas that are being transmitted, and that God has
given him the "propensity" to believe that such ideas are caused by material things.

Dualism

Further information: Mind-body dichotomy and dualism

Descartes in his Passions of the Soul and The Description of the Human Body suggested that the body
works like a machine, that it has the material properties of extension and motion, and that it follows the
laws of nature. The mind (or soul), on the other hand, was described as a nonmaterial entity that lacks
extension and motion, and does not follow the laws of nature. Descartes argued that only humans have
minds, and that the mind interacts with the body at the pineal gland. This form of dualism or duality
proposes that the mind controls the body, but that the body can also influence the otherwise rational
mind, such as when people act out of passion. Most of the previous accounts of the relationship
between mind and body had been uni-directional.

Descartes suggested that the pineal gland is "the seat of the soul" for several reasons. First, the soul is
unitary, and unlike many areas of the brain the pineal gland appeared to be unitary (though subsequent
microscopic inspection has revealed it is formed of two hemispheres). Second, Descartes observed that
the pineal gland was located near the ventricles. He believed the cerebrospinal fluid of the ventricles
acted through the nerves to control the body, and that the pineal gland influenced this process. Finally,
although Descartes realized that both humans and animals have pineal glands (see Passions of the Soul
Part One, Section 50, AT 369), he believed that only humans have minds. This led him to the belief that
animals cannot feel pain, and Descartes's practice of vivisection (the dissection of live animals) became
widely used throughout Europe until the Enlightenment. Cartesian dualism set the agenda for
philosophical discussion of the mind–body problem for many years after Descartes's death.

Religious beliefs

The religious beliefs of René Descartes have been rigorously debated within scholarly circles. He claimed
to be a devout Roman Catholic, claiming that one of the purposes of the Meditations was to defend the
Christian faith. However, in his own era, Descartes was accused of harboring secret deist or atheist
beliefs. Contemporary Blaise Pascal said that "I cannot forgive Descartes; in all his philosophy, Descartes
did his best to dispense with God. But Descartes could not avoid prodding God to set the world in motion
with a snap of his lordly fingers; after that, he had no more use for God."[24]

Stephen Gaukroger's biography of Descartes reports that "he had a deep religious faith as a Catholic,
which he retained to his dying day, along with a resolute, passionate desire to discover the truth."[25]
After Descartes died in Sweden, Queen Christina abdicated her throne to convert to Roman Catholicism
(Swedish law required a Protestant ruler). The only Roman Catholic with whom she had prolonged
contact was Descartes, who was her personal tutor.

Baruch Spinoza

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza

Era 17th-century philosophy

Region Western Philosophy

School Rationalism, founder of Spinozism

Main interests Ethics, Epistemology, Metaphysics

Notable ideas Panentheism, Pantheism, Determinism, Deism, neutral monism, intellectual and religious
freedom / separation of church and state, Criticism of Mosaic authorship of some books of the Hebrew
Bible, Political society derived from power, not contract

Baruch de Spinoza (Hebrew: ‫ שפינוזה ברוך‬Baruch Spinoza, Portuguese: Benedito or Bento de Espinosa,
Latin: Benedictus de Spinoza) and later Benedict de Spinoza (in all mentioned languages the given name
means "the Blessed") (November 24, 1632 – February 21, 1677) was a Dutch philosopher.[1] Revealing
considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized
until years after his death. By laying the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment[2] and modern
biblical criticism,[2] he came to be considered one of the great rationalists[2] of the 17th-century
philosophy. And his magnum opus, the posthumous Ethics, in which he opposed Descartes' mind–body
dualism, has also earned him recognition as one of Western philosophy's most important contributors.
Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said of all contemporary philosophers, "You are either a
Spinozist or not a philosopher at all."[3]

Spinoza was raised in the Dutch Jewish community. In time he developed highly controversial ideas
regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the nature of the Divine. The Jewish religious
authorities issued a cherem (Hebrew: ‫חרם‬, a kind of excommunication) against him, effectively
dismissing him from Jewish society at age 23. His books were also later put on the Catholic Church's
Index of Forbidden Books.

Spinoza lived quietly as a lens grinder, turning down rewards and honors throughout his life, including
prestigious teaching positions, and gave his family inheritance to his sister. Spinoza's philosophical
accomplishments and moral character prompted 20th century philosopher Gilles Deleuze to name him
"the 'prince' of philosophers."[4]

Spinoza died at the age of 44 allegedly of a lung illness, perhaps tuberculosis or silicosis exacerbated by
fine glass dust inhaled while grinding optical lenses. Spinoza is buried in the churchyard of the Christian
Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague.

Biography

Family origins

Spinoza's ancestors were of Sephardic Jewish descent, and were a part of the community of Portuguese
Jews that grew in the city of Amsterdam after the Alhambra Decree in Spain (1492) and the Portuguese
Inquisition (1536) had led to forced conversions and expulsions from the Iberian peninsula.[6]
Some historians argue the Spinoza family ("Espinosa" in Portuguese) had its origins in Espinosa de los
Monteros, near Burgos, Spain.[7] Others claim they were Portuguese Jews who had moved to Spain and
then were expelled back to their home country in 1492, only to be forcibly converted to Catholicism in
1498[citation needed]. Spinoza's father was born roughly a century after this forced conversion in the
small Portuguese city of Vidigueira, near Beja in Alentejo. When Spinoza's father was still a child,
Spinoza's grandfather, Isaac de Spinoza (who was from Lisbon), took his family to Nantes in France. They
were expelled in 1615 and moved to Rotterdam, where Isaac died in 1627. Spinoza's father, Miguel, and
his uncle, Manuel, then moved to Amsterdam where they reassumed their Judaism. Manuel changed his
name to Abraão de Spinoza, though his "commercial" name was still the same.[citation needed]

Early life and career

Baruch de Spinoza was born in the Jodenbuurt in Amsterdam, Netherlands. His mother Ana Débora,
Miguel's second wife, died when Baruch was only six years old. Miguel was a successful
importer/merchant and Baruch had a traditional Jewish upbringing.

Spinoza attended the Keter Torah yeshiva headed by Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira, and maintained a
connection with Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel, whose home was a center for Jewish scholars in
Amsterdam.[3] In time, however, his critical, curious nature would come into conflict with the Jewish
community.

Wars with England and France[vague] took the life of his father and decimated his family's fortune but
he was eventually able to relinquish responsibility for the business and its debts to his brother, Gabriel,
and devote himself to philosophy and optics.

Controversial ideas and Jewish reaction

On 27 July 1656, the Jewish community issued him the writ of cherem (Hebrew: ‫חרם‬, a kind of
excommunication).

While the language of the cherem is unusually harsh, the exact reason for expelling Spinoza is not
stated.[8] However, according to philosopher Steven Nadler an educated guess is quite straightforward:
"No doubt he was giving utterance to just those ideas that would soon appear in his philosophical
treatises. In those works, Spinoza denies the immortality of the soul; strongly rejects the notion of a
providential God—the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and claims that the Law was neither literally
given by God nor any longer binding on Jews. Can there be any mystery as to why one of history's
boldest and most radical thinkers was sanctioned by an orthodox Jewish community?"[9]

Spinoza's cherem was effected by way of public denunciation; the following document translates the
official record of that denunciation:[10]
The Lords of the ma’amad, having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Espinoza, have
endeavord by various means and promises, to turn him from his evil ways. But having failed to make him
mend his wicked ways, and, on the contrary, daily receiving more and more serious information about
the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds, and having for
this numerous trustworthy witnesses who have deposed and born witness to this effect in the presence
of the said Espinoza, they became convinced of the truth of the matter; and after all of this has been
investigated in the presence of the honorable chachamin, they have decided, with their consent, that the
said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel. By the decree of the
angels, and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de
Espinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of all the Holy Congregation, in
front of these holy Scrolls with the six-hundred-and-thirteen precepts which are written therein, with the
excommunication with which Joshua banned Jericho, with the curse with which Elisha cursed the boys,
and with all the curses which are written in the Book of the Law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he
by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he
goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him; the anger and wrath of the
Lord will rage against this man, and bring upon him all the curses which are written in this book, and the
Lord will blot out his name from under heaven, and the Lord will separate him to his injury from all the
tribes of Israel with all the curses of the covenant, which are written in the Book of the Law. But you who
cleave unto the Lord God are all alive this day. We order that no one should communicate with him
orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells of
him, or read anything composed or written by him.

After his cherem, it is reported that Spinoza lived and worked in the school of Franciscus van den Enden,
who taught him Latin in his youth and may have introduced him to modern philosophy, although Spinoza
never mentions Van den Enden anywhere in his books or letters. In the early 1660s Van den Enden was
considered to be a Cartesian and atheist[11] who was forbidden by the city government to propagate his
doctrines publicly[citation needed]. His books were put on the Catholic Index of banned books.

The philosopher Richard Popkin questions the historical veracity of the cherem, which Popkin claims
emerged close to 300 years after Spinoza's death.[12][why?]

During the 1650s, Spinoza Latinized his name to become "Benedictus".[13]

During this period Spinoza also became acquainted with several Collegiants, members of an eclectic sect
with tendencies towards rationalism. Many of his friends belonged to dissident Christian groups which
met regularly as discussion groups and which typically rejected the authority of established churches as
well as traditional dogmas.[1] Textbooks and encyclopedias often depict Spinoza as a solitary soul who
eked out a living as a lens grinder; in reality, he had many friends but kept his needs to a minimum.[1]
The reviewer M. Stuart Phelps noted "No one has ever come nearer to the ideal life of the philosopher
than Spinoza."[14] Another reviewer, Harold Bloom, wrote: "As a teacher of reality, he practiced his own
wisdom, and was surely one of the most exemplary human beings ever to have lived."[15] According to
the New York Times "In outward appearance he was unpretending, but not careless. His way of living
was exceedingly modest and retired; often he did not leave his room for many days together. He was
likewise almost incredibly frugal; his expenses sometimes amounted only to a few pence a day."[16]
According to Harold Bloom and the Chicago Tribune "He appears to have had no sexual life."[15][17]
Spinoza also corresponded with Peter Serrarius, a radical Protestant and millennarian merchant.
Serrarius is believed to have been a patron of Spinoza at some point after his conversion.[citation
needed] By the beginning of the 1660s, Spinoza's name became more widely known, and eventually
Gottfried Leibniz[18] and Henry Oldenburg paid him visits, as stated in Matthew Stewart's The Courtier
and the Heretic.[18] Spinoza corresponded with Oldenburg for the rest of his short life.

The writings of Rene Descartes have been described as "Spinoza's starting point."[15] Spinoza's first
publication was his geometric exposition (formal math proofs) of Descartes, Parts I and II of Descartes'
Principles of Philosophy (1663). Spinoza has been associated with Leibniz and Descartes as "rationalists"
in contrast to "empiricists".[19] From December 1664 to June 1665, Spinoza engaged in correspondence
with Blyenbergh, an amateur Calvinist theologian, who questioned Spinoza on the definition of evil. Later
in 1665, Spinoza notified Oldenburg that he had started to work on a new book, the Theologico-Political
Treatise, published in 1670. Leibniz disagreed harshly with Spinoza in Leibniz's own published Refutation
of Spinoza, but he is also known to have met with Spinoza on at least one occasion[18][19] (as
mentioned above), and his own work bears some striking resemblances to specific important parts of
Spinoza's philosophy (see: Monadology).

When the public reactions to the anonymously published Theologico-Political Treatise were extremely
unfavourable to his brand of Cartesianism, Spinoza was compelled to abstain from publishing more of his
works. Wary and independent, he wore a signet ring engraved with his initials, a rose,[citation needed]
and the word "caute" (Latin for "cautiously"). The Ethics and all other works, apart from the Descartes'
Principles of Philosophy and the Theologico-Political Treatise, were published after his death, in the
Opera Posthuma edited by his friends in secrecy to avoid confiscation and destruction of manuscripts.
The Ethics contains many still-unresolved obscurities and is written with a forbidding mathematical
structure modeled on Euclid's geometry [1] and has been described as a "superbly cryptic
masterwork."[15]

Later life and career

Spinoza spent his remaining 21 years writing and studying as a private scholar.[1] He preached a
philosophy of tolerance and benevolence. Anthony Gottlieb described him as living "a saintly life."[1]

Spinoza relocated from Amsterdam to Rijnsburg (near Leiden) around 1661 and later lived in Voorburg
and The Hague. He earned a comfortable living from lens-grinding. While the lens-grinding aspect of
Spinoza's work is uncontested, the type of lenses he made is in question. Many have said he produced
excellent magnifying glasses, while some historians describe him as a maker of lenses for eyeglasses. He
was also supported by small, but regular, donations from close friends.[1]
He died in 1677 while still working on a political thesis. His premature death was said to be due to lung
illness, possibly Silicosis as a result of breathing in glass dust from the lenses he ground. Later, a shrine
was made of his home in The Hague.[20]

Only a year earlier, Spinoza had met with Leibniz at The Hague for a discussion of his principal
philosophical work, Ethics, which had been completed in 1676. Leibniz then began to plagiarize the as-
yet unpublished work when he returned to Germany.[21] This meeting was described in Matthew
Stewart's The Courtier and the Heretic.[18] Spinoza never married, nor did he father any children. When
he died, he was considered a saint by the general Christian population, and was buried in holy ground.

Philosophy

Spinoza believed God exists and is abstract and impersonal.[1] Spinoza's system imparted order and
unity to the tradition of radical thought, offering powerful weapons for prevailing against "received
authority." As a youth he first subscribed to Descartes's dualistic belief that body and mind are two
separate substances, but later changed his view and asserted that they were not separate, being a single
identity. He contended that everything that exists in Nature (i.e., everything in the Universe) is one
Reality (substance) and there is only one set of rules governing the whole of the reality which surrounds
us and of which we are part. Spinoza viewed God and Nature as two names for the same reality,[15]
namely the single substance (meaning "that which stands beneath" rather than "matter") that is the
basis of the universe and of which all lesser "entities" are actually modes or modifications, that all things
are determined by Nature to exist and cause effects, and that the complex chain of cause and effect is
understood only in part. His identification of God with nature was more fully explained in his
posthumously published Ethics.[1] That humans presume themselves to have free will, he argues, is a
result of their awareness of appetites while being unable to understand the reasons why they want and
act as they do. Spinoza has been described by one writer as an "Epicurean materialist."[15]

Spinoza contends that "Deus sive Natura" ("God or Nature") is a being of infinitely many attributes, of
which thought and extension are two. His account of the nature of reality, then, seems to treat the
physical and mental worlds as one and the same. The universal substance consists of both body and
mind, there being no difference between these aspects. This formulation is a historically significant
solution to the mind-body problem known as neutral monism. Spinoza's system also envisages a God
that does not rule over the universe by providence, but a God which itself is the deterministic system of
which everything in nature is a part. Thus, according to this understanding of Spinoza's system, God
would be the natural world and have no personality.

In addition to substance, the other two fundamental concepts Spinoza presents and develops in the
Ethics are attribute – that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance, and
mode – the modifications of substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through, something
other than itself.
Spinoza was a thoroughgoing determinist who held that absolutely everything that happens occurs
through the operation of necessity. For him, even human behaviour is fully determined, with freedom
being our capacity to know we are determined and to understand why we act as we do. So freedom is
not the possibility to say "no" to what happens to us but the possibility to say "yes" and fully understand
why things should necessarily happen that way. By forming more "adequate" ideas about what we do
and our emotions or affections, we become the adequate cause of our effects (internal or external),
which entails an increase in activity (versus passivity). This means that we become both more free and
more like God, as Spinoza argues in the Scholium to Prop. 49, Part II. However, Spinoza also held that
everything must necessarily happen the way that it does. Therefore, humans have no free will. They
believe, however, that their will is free. In his letter to G. H. Schuller (Letter 58), he wrote: " men are
conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes by which [their desires] are determined."[23]

Spinoza's philosophy has much in common with Stoicism inasmuch as both philosophies sought to fulfill
a therapeutic role by instructing people how to attain happiness. However, Spinoza differed sharply from
the Stoics in one important respect: he utterly rejected their contention that reason could defeat
emotion. On the contrary, he contended, an emotion can only be displaced or overcome by a stronger
emotion. For him, the crucial distinction was between active and passive emotions, the former being
those that are rationally understood and the latter those that are not. He also held that knowledge of
true causes of passive emotion can transform it to an active emotion, thus anticipating one of the key
ideas of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis.[24]

Some of Spinoza's philosophical positions are:

The natural world is infinite.

Good and evil are related to human pleasure and pain.

Everything done by humans and other animals is excellent and divine.

All rights are derived from the State.

Animals can be used in any way by people for the benefit of the human race, according to a rational
consideration of the benefit as well as the animal's status in nature.[25][26]

Ethical philosophy

Encapsulated at the start in his Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding (Tractatus de
intellectus emendatione) is the core of Spinoza's ethical philosophy, what he held to be the true and final
good. Spinoza held good and evil to be relative concepts, claiming that nothing is intrinsically good or
bad except relative to a particular individual. Things that had classically been seen as good or evil,
Spinoza argued, were simply good or bad for humans. Spinoza believes in a deterministic universe in
which "All things in nature proceed from certain [definite] necessity and with the utmost perfection."
Nothing happens by chance in Spinoza's world, and nothing is contingent.

Spinoza's Ethics

In the universe anything that happens comes from the essential nature of objects, or of God/Nature.
According to Spinoza, reality is perfection. If circumstances are seen as unfortunate it is only because of
our inadequate conception of reality. While components of the chain of cause and effect are not beyond
the understanding of human reason, human grasp of the infinitely complex whole is limited because of
the limits of science to empirically take account of the whole sequence. Spinoza also asserted that sense
perception, though practical and useful for rhetoric, is inadequate for discovering universal truth;
Spinoza's mathematical and logical approach to metaphysics, and therefore ethics, concluded that
emotion is formed from inadequate understanding. His concept of "conatus" states that human beings'
natural inclination is to strive toward preserving an essential being and an assertion that virtue/human
power is defined by success in this preservation of being by the guidance of reason as one's central
ethical doctrine. According to Spinoza, the highest virtue is the intellectual love or knowledge of
God/Nature/Universe.

In the final part of the "Ethics", his concern with the meaning of "true blessedness", and his explanation
of how emotions must be detached from external cause and so master them, give some prediction of
psychological techniques developed in the 1900s. His concept of three types of knowledge – opinion,
reason, intuition – and his assertion that intuitive knowledge provides the greatest satisfaction of mind,
lead to his proposition that the more we are conscious of ourselves and Nature/Universe, the more
perfect and blessed we are (in reality) and that only intuitive knowledge is eternal. His unique
contribution to understanding the workings of mind is extraordinary, even during this time of radical
philosophical developments, in that his views provide a bridge between religions' mystical past and
psychology of the present day.

Given Spinoza's insistence on a completely ordered world where "necessity" reigns, Good and Evil have
no absolute meaning. Human catastrophes, social injustices, etc., are merely apparent. The world as it
exists looks imperfect only because of our limited perception.

However, Schopenhauer contended that Spinoza's book is the opposite of ethics. "…[I]t is precisely ethics
on which all pantheism is wrecked. If the world is a theophany, then everything that man does, and
indeed every animal does, is equally divine; nothing can be censurable and nothing can be more
praiseworthy than anything else."[27] According to Schopenhauer, Spinoza's "teaching amounts to
saying; 'The world is because it is; and it is as it is because it is so.'…Yet the deification of the world…did
not admit of any true ethics; moreover, it was in flagrant contradiction with the physical evils and moral
wickedness of this world."[28
Panentheist, pantheist, or atheist?

It is a widespread belief that Spinoza equated God with the material universe. However, in a letter to
Henry Oldenburg he states that: "as to the view of certain people that I identify god with nature (taken
as a kind of mass or corporeal matter), they are quite mistaken".[29] For Spinoza, our universe (cosmos)
is a mode under two attributes of Thought and Extension. God has infinitely many other attributes which
are not present in our world. According to German philosopher Karl Jaspers, when Spinoza wrote "Deus
sive Natura" (God or Nature) Spinoza meant God was Natura naturans not Natura naturata, and Jaspers
believed that Spinoza, in his philosophical system, did not mean to say that God and Nature are
interchangeable terms, but rather that God's transcendence was attested by his infinitely many
attributes, and that two attributes known by humans, namely Thought and Extension, signified God's
immanence.[30] Even God under the attributes of thought and extension cannot be identified strictly
with our world. That world is of course "divisible"; it has parts. But Spinoza insists that "no attribute of a
substance can be truly conceived from which it follows that the substance can be divided" (Which means
that one cannot conceive an attribute in a way that leads to division of substance), and that "a substance
which is absolutely infinite is indivisible" (Ethics, Part I, Propositions 12 and 13).[31] Following this logic,
our world should be considered as a mode under two attributes of thought and extension. Therefore the
pantheist formula "One and All" would apply to Spinoza only if the "One" preserves its transcendence
and the "All" were not interpreted as the totality of finite things.[30]

Martial Guéroult suggested the term "Panentheism", rather than "Pantheism" to describe Spinoza’s view
of the relation between God and the world. The world is not God, but it is, in a strong sense, "in" God.
Not only do finite things have God as their cause; they cannot be conceived without God.[31] In other
words, the world is a subset of God.

In 1785, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi published a condemnation of Spinoza's pantheism, after Lessing was
thought to have confessed on his deathbed to being a "Spinozist", which was the equivalent in his time
of being called an atheist. Jacobi claimed that Spinoza's doctrine was pure materialism, because all
Nature and God are said to be nothing but extended substance. This, for Jacobi, was the result of
Enlightenment rationalism and it would finally end in absolute atheism. Moses Mendelssohn disagreed
with Jacobi, saying that there is no actual difference between theism and pantheism. The issue became a
major intellectual and religious concern for European civilization at the time.

The attraction of Spinoza's philosophy to late 18th-century Europeans was that it provided an alternative
to materialism, atheism, and deism. Three of Spinoza's ideas strongly appealed to them:

the unity of all that exists;

the regularity of all that happens; and

the identity of spirit and nature.

Spinoza's "God or Nature" [Deus sive Natura] provided a living, natural God, in contrast to the
Newtonian mechanical "First Cause" or the dead mechanism of the French "Man Machine." Coleridge
and Shelley saw in Spinoza's philosophy a religion of nature[1] and called him the "God-intoxicated
Man."[15][32] Spinoza inspired the poet Shelley to write his essay "The Necessity of Atheism."[15]

Spinoza was considered to be an atheist because he used the word "God" [Deus] to signify a concept that
was different from that of traditional Judeo–Christian monotheism. "Spinoza expressly denies
personality and consciousness to God; he has neither intelligence, feeling, nor will; he does not act
according to purpose, but everything follows necessarily from his nature, according to law...."[33] Thus,
Spinoza's cool, indifferent God [34] is the antithesis to the concept of an anthropomorphic, fatherly God
who cares about humanity.

Spinoza's political theory

Late 20th century Europe demonstrated a greater philosophical interest in Spinoza, often from a left-
wing or Marxist perspective. Karl Marx liked his materialistic account of the universe.[1] Notable
philosophers Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Étienne Balibar and Marilena Chaui have
each drawn upon Spinoza's philosophy. Deleuze's doctoral thesis, published in 1968, refers to him as
"the prince of philosophers."[35] Other philosophers heavily influenced by Spinoza include Constantin
Brunner and John David Garcia. Stuart Hampshire wrote a major English language study of Spinoza,
though H. H. Joachim's work is equally valuable. Unlike most philosophers, Spinoza and his work were
highly regarded by Nietzsche.

Spinoza was an important philosophical inspiration for George Santayana. When Santayana graduated
from college, he published an essay, “The Ethical Doctrine of Spinoza,” in The Harvard Monthly.[36]
Later, he wrote an introduction to Spinoza’s Ethics and ‘De intellectus emendatione’.[37] In 1932,
Santayana was invited to present an essay (published as "Ultimate Religion,")[38] at a meeting at The
Hague celebrating the tricentennial of Spinoza's birth. In Santayana's autobiography, he characterized
Spinoza as his “master and model” in understanding the naturalistic basis of morality.[39]

Spinoza's religious criticism and its effect on the philosophy of language

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein evoked Spinoza with the title (suggested to him by G. E. Moore) of the
English translation of his first definitive philosophical work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, an allusion to
Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Elsewhere, Wittgenstein deliberately borrowed the expression
sub specie aeternitatis from Spinoza (Notebooks, 1914-16, p. 83). The structure of his Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus does have some structural affinities with Spinoza's Ethics (though, admittedly, not with the
latter's own Tractatus) in erecting complex philosophical arguments upon basic logical assertions and
principles. Furthermore, in propositions 6.4311 and 6.45 he alludes to a Spinozian understanding of
eternity and interpretation of the religious concept of eternal life, stating that "If by eternity is
understood not eternal temporal duration, but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the
present." (6.4311) "The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited
whole." (6.45) Furthermore, Wittgenstein's interpretation of religious language, in both his early and
later career, may be said to bear a family resemblance to Spinoza's pantheism.

Leo Strauss dedicated his first book ("Spinoza's Critique of Religion") to an examination of the latter's
ideas. In the book, Strauss identified Spinoza as part of the tradition of Enlightenment rationalism that
eventually produced Modernity. Moreover, he identifies Spinoza and his works as the beginning of
Jewish Modernity.[15] More recently Jonathan Israel, Professor of Modern European History at
Princeton, has made a detailed case that from 1650-1750 Spinoza was "the chief challenger of the
fundamentals of revealed religion, received ideas, tradition, morality, and what was everywhere
regarded, in absolutist and non-absolutist states alike, as divinely constituted political authority."[40]

The events leading to Spinoza's excommunication are the basis for a 2010 play by David Ives. The play
"New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch De Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam,
July 27, 1656" was first performed at Theater J in Washington, D.C.[41]

Spinoza in literature

Spinoza has had influence beyond the confines of philosophy. The 19th century novelist George Eliot
produced her own translation of the Ethics, the first known English translation of it. Eliot liked Spinoza's
vehement attacks on superstition.[1] In his Autobiography 'From My Life: Poetry and Truth", Goethe
recounts the way in which Spinoza's Ethics calmed the sometimes unbearable emotional turbulence of
his youth. Goethe later displayed his grasp of Spinoza's metaphysics in a fragmentary elucidation of
some Spinozist ontological principles entitled Study After Spinoza.[42] Moreover, he cited Spinoza
alongside Shakespeare and Carl Linnaeus as one of the three strongest influences on his life and
work.[43] The 20th century novelist, W. Somerset Maugham, alluded to one of Spinoza's central
concepts with the title of his novel, Of Human Bondage. Albert Einstein named Spinoza as the
philosopher who exerted the most influence on his world view (Weltanschauung). Spinoza equated God
(infinite substance) with Nature, consistent with Einstein's belief in an impersonal deity. In 1929, Einstein
was asked in a telegram by Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein whether he believed in God. Einstein responded
by telegram: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in
a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."[44][45] Spinoza's pantheism
has also influenced environmental theory; Arne Næss, the father of the deep ecology movement,
acknowledged Spinoza as an important inspiration.

Moreover, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges was greatly influenced by Spinoza's world view.
Borges makes allusions to the philosopher's work in many of his poems and short stories, as does Isaac
Bashevis Singer in his short story The Spinoza of Market Street.[46] The title character of Hoffman’s
Hunger, the fifth novel by the Dutch novelist Leon de Winter, reads and comments upon the Tractatus de
Intellectus Emendatione over the course of the novel. Spinoza has been the subject of numerous
biographies and scholarly treatises.[32][47][48][49]
Spinoza is an important historical figure in the Netherlands, where his portrait was featured prominently
on the Dutch 1000-guilder banknote, legal tender until the euro was introduced in 2002. The highest and
most prestigious scientific award of the Netherlands is named the Spinoza prijs (Spinoza prize). Spinoza
was included in a 50 theme canon that attempts to summarise the history of the Netherlands.[50]

Spinoza's work is also mentioned as the favourite reading material for Bertie Wooster's valet Jeeves in
the P. G. Wodehouse novels.[51] Spinoza's life has been the subject of plays and has been honored by
educators.[2][12]

Gottfried Leibniz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Leibniz

Era 17th-century philosophy

18th-century philosophy

Region Western Philosophy

Main interests Mathematics, metaphysics, logic, theodicy

Notable ideas Infinitesimal calculus

Monads

Best of all possible worlds

Principle of sufficient reason

Diagrammatic reasoning

Notation for differentiation

Entscheidungsproblem

Influenced by

Holy Scripture, Plato, Confucius, Aristotle, Augustine of Hippo, Scholasticism, Ramon Llull, Thomas
Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Suárez, Descartes, Hobbes, Pico della Mirandola, Jakob Thomasius, Gassendi,
Spinoza, Bossuet, Pascal, Malebranche, Huygens, Steno

Influenced

Christian Wolff, Maupertuis, Vico, Boscovich, David Hume, Kant, Bonald, Russell, Varisco, Kurt Gödel,
Heidegger, LaRouche, Nietzsche, Olavo de Carvalho
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (sometimes von Leibniz) (German pronunciation: [ˈɡɔtfʁiːt ˈvɪlhɛlm fɔn
ˈlaɪbnɪts][1] or [ˈlaɪpnɪts][2]) (July 1, 1646 – November 14, 1716) was a German philosopher and
mathematician. He wrote in multiple languages, primarily in Latin (~40%), French (~30%) and German
(~15%).[3]

Leibniz occupies a prominent place in the history of mathematics and the history of philosophy. He
developed the infinitesimal calculus independently of Isaac Newton, and Leibniz's mathematical notation
has been widely used ever since it was published. He became one of the most prolific inventors in the
field of mechanical calculators. While working on adding automatic multiplication and division to Pascal's
calculator, he was the first to describe a pinwheel calculator in 1685[4] and invented the Leibniz wheel,
used in the arithmometer, the first mass-produced mechanical calculator. He also refined the binary
number system, which is at the foundation of virtually all digital computers. In philosophy, Leibniz is
mostly noted for his optimism, e.g., his conclusion that our Universe is, in a restricted sense, the best
possible one that God could have created. Leibniz, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, was
one of the three great 17th century advocates of rationalism. The work of Leibniz anticipated modern
logic and analytic philosophy, but his philosophy also looks back to the scholastic tradition, in which
conclusions are produced by applying reason to first principles or prior definitions rather than to
empirical evidence. Leibniz made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions
that surfaced much later in biology, medicine, geology, probability theory, psychology, linguistics, and
information science. He wrote works on politics, law, ethics, theology, history, philosophy, and philology.
Leibniz's contributions to this vast array of subjects were scattered in various learned journals, in tens of
thousands of letters, and in unpublished manuscripts. As of 2011, there is no complete gathering of the
writings of Leibniz.[5]

Biography

Early life

Gottfried Leibniz was born on July 1, 1646 in Leipzig, Saxony (at the end of the Thirty Years' War), to
Friedrich Leibnütz (Leibniz changed his name) and Catherina Schmuck. Friedrich noted in his family
journal: "On Sunday 21 June [NS: 1 July] 1646, my son Gottfried Wilhelm is born into the world after six
in the evening, ¾ to seven [ein Viertel uff sieben], Aquarius rising."[6] Leibniz's father, who was of
Sorbian ancestry,[7][8] died when he was six years old, and from that point on, he was raised by his
mother. Her teachings influenced Leibniz's philosophical thoughts in his later life.

Leibniz's father had been a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Leipzig, so Leibniz inherited
his father's personal library. He was given free access to this from the age of seven and thereafter. While
Leibniz's schoolwork focused on a small canon of authorities, his father's library enabled him to study a
wide variety of advanced philosophical and theological works – ones that he would not have otherwise
been able to read until his college years.[citation needed] Access to his father's library, largely written in
Latin, also led to his proficiency in the Latin language. Leibniz was proficient in Latin by the age of 12, and
he composed three hundred hexameters of Latin verse in a single morning for a special event at school
at the age of 13.[citation needed]

He enrolled in his father's former university at age 14, and he completed his bachelor's degree in
philosophy in December of 1662. He defended his Disputatio Metaphysica de Principio Individui, which
addressed the Principle of individuation, on June 9, 1663. Leibniz earned his master's degree in
philosophy on February 7, 1664. He published and defended a dissertation Specimen Quaestionum
Philosophicarum ex Jure collectarum, arguing for both a theoretical and a pedagogical relationship
between philosophy and law, in December 1664. After one year of legal studies, he was awarded his
bachelor's degree in Law on September 28, 1665.[citation needed]

In 1666, (at age 20), Leibniz published his first book, On the Art of Combinations, the first part of which
was also his habilitation thesis in philosophy. His next goal was to earn his license and doctorate in Law,
which normally required three years of study then. In 1666, the University of Leipzig turned down
Leibniz's doctoral application and refused to grant him a doctorate in law, most likely due to his relative
youth (he was 21 years old at the time).[9] Leibniz subsequently left Leipzig.

Leibniz then enrolled in the University of Altdorf, and almost immediately he submitted a thesis, which
he had probably been working on earlier in Leipzig. The title of his thesis was Disputatio de Casibus
perplexis in Jure. Leibniz earned his license to practice law and his Doctorate in Law in November of
1666. He next declined the offer of an academic appointment at Altdorf, and he spent the rest of his life
in the paid service of two main German noble families.[citation needed]

As an adult, Leibniz often introduced himself as "Gottfried von Leibniz". Also many posthumously-
published editions of his writings presented his name on the title page as "Freiherr G. W. von Leibniz."
However, no document has ever been found from any contemporary government that stated his
appointment to any form of nobility.[10]

1666–74

Leibniz's first position was as a salaried alchemist in Nuremberg, even though he knew nothing about the
subject. He soon met Johann Christian von Boineburg (1622–1672), the dismissed chief minister of the
Elector of Mainz, Johann Philipp von Schönborn. Von Boineburg hired Leibniz as an assistant, and shortly
thereafter reconciled with the Elector and introduced Leibniz to him. Leibniz then dedicated an essay on
law to the Elector in the hope of obtaining employment. The stratagem worked; the Elector asked
Leibniz to assist with the redrafting of the legal code for his Electorate. In 1669, Leibniz was appointed
Assessor in the Court of Appeal. Although von Boineburg died late in 1672, Leibniz remained under the
employment of his widow until she dismissed him in 1674.
Von Boineburg did much to promote Leibniz's reputation, and the latter's memoranda and letters began
to attract favorable notice. Leibniz's service to the Elector soon followed a diplomatic role. He published
an essay, under the pseudonym of a fictitious Polish nobleman, arguing (unsuccessfully) for the German
candidate for the Polish crown. The main European geopolitical reality during Leibniz's adult life was the
ambition of Louis XIV of France, backed by French military and economic might. Meanwhile, the Thirty
Years' War had left German-speaking Europe exhausted, fragmented, and economically backward.
Leibniz proposed to protect German-speaking Europe by distracting Louis as follows. France would be
invited to take Egypt as a stepping stone towards an eventual conquest of the Dutch East Indies. In
return, France would agree to leave Germany and the Netherlands undisturbed. This plan obtained the
Elector's cautious support. In 1672, the French government invited Leibniz to Paris for discussion, but the
plan was soon overtaken by the outbreak of the Franco-Dutch War and became irrelevant. Napoleon's
failed invasion of Egypt in 1798 can be seen as an unwitting implementation of Leibniz's plan.

Thus Leibniz began several years in Paris. Soon after arriving, he met Dutch physicist and mathematician
Christiaan Huygens and realised that his own knowledge of mathematics and physics was patchy. With
Huygens as mentor, he began a program of self-study that soon pushed him to making major
contributions to both subjects, including inventing his version of the differential and integral calculus. He
met Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld, the leading French philosophers of the day, and studied
the writings of Descartes and Pascal, unpublished as well as published. He befriended a German
mathematician, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus; they corresponded for the rest of their lives. In
1675 he was admitted as a foreign honorary member of the French Academy of Sciences, which he
continued to follow mostly by correspondence.

When it became clear that France would not implement its part of Leibniz's Egyptian plan, the Elector
sent his nephew, escorted by Leibniz, on a related mission to the English government in London, early in
1673. There Leibniz came into acquaintance of Henry Oldenburg and John Collins. After demonstrating a
calculating machine he had been designing and building since 1670 to the Royal Society, the first such
machine that could execute all four basic arithmetical operations, the Society made him an external
member. The mission ended abruptly when news reached it of the Elector's death, whereupon Leibniz
promptly returned to Paris and not, as had been planned, to Mainz.

The sudden deaths of Leibniz's two patrons in the same winter meant that Leibniz had to find a new
basis for his career. In this regard, a 1669 invitation from the Duke of Brunswick to visit Hanover proved
fateful. Leibniz declined the invitation, but began corresponding with the Duke in 1671. In 1673, the
Duke offered him the post of Counsellor which Leibniz very reluctantly accepted two years later, only
after it became clear that no employment in Paris, whose intellectual stimulation he relished, or with the
Habsburg imperial court was forthcoming.

Personal life

Leibniz never married. He complained on occasion about money, but the fair sum he left to his sole heir,
his sister's stepson, proved that the Brunswicks had, by and large, paid him well. In his diplomatic
endeavors, he at times verged on the unscrupulous, as was all too often the case with professional
diplomats of his day. On several occasions, Leibniz backdated and altered personal manuscripts, actions
which put him in a bad light during the calculus controversy. On the other hand, he was charming, well-
mannered, and not without humor and imagination.[13] He had many friends and admirers all over
Europe.

Philosopher

Leibniz's philosophical thinking appears fragmented, because his philosophical writings consist mainly of
a multitude of short pieces: journal articles, manuscripts published long after his death, and many letters
to many correspondents. He wrote only two philosophical treatises, of which only the Théodicée of 1710
was published in his lifetime.

Leibniz dated his beginning as a philosopher to his Discourse on Metaphysics, which he composed in
1686 as a commentary on a running dispute between Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld. This led
to an extensive and valuable correspondence with Arnauld;[14] it and the Discourse were not published
until the 19th century. In 1695, Leibniz made his public entrée into European philosophy with a journal
article titled "New System of the Nature and Communication of Substances".[15] Between 1695 and
1705, he composed his New Essays on Human Understanding, a lengthy commentary on John Locke's
1690 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, but upon learning of Locke's 1704 death, lost the
desire to publish it, so that the New Essays were not published until 1765. The Monadologie, composed
in 1714 and published posthumously, consists of 90 aphorisms.

Leibniz met Spinoza in 1676, read some of his unpublished writings, and has since been suspected of
appropriating some of Spinoza's ideas. While Leibniz admired Spinoza's powerful intellect, he was also
forthrightly dismayed by Spinoza's conclusions,[16] especially when these were inconsistent with
Christian orthodoxy.

Unlike Descartes and Spinoza, Leibniz had a thorough university education in philosophy. His lifelong
scholastic and Aristotelian turn of mind betrayed the strong influence of one of his Leipzig professors,
Jakob Thomasius, who also supervised his BA thesis in philosophy. Leibniz also eagerly read Francisco
Suárez, a Spanish Jesuit respected even in Lutheran universities. Leibniz was deeply interested in the
new methods and conclusions of Descartes, Huygens, Newton, and Boyle, but viewed their work through
a lens heavily tinted by scholastic notions. Yet it remains the case that Leibniz's methods and concerns
often anticipate the logic, and analytic and linguistic philosophy of the 20th century.

The Principles

Leibniz variously invoked one or another of seven fundamental philosophical Principles:[17]

Identity/contradiction. If a proposition is true, then its negation is false and vice versa.
Identity of indiscernibles. Two things are identical if and only if they share the same and only the same
properties. Frequently invoked in modern logic and philosophy. The "identity of indiscernibles" is often
referred to as Leibniz's Law. It has attracted the most controversy and criticism, especially from
corpuscular philosophy and quantum mechanics.

Sufficient reason. "There must be a sufficient reason [often known only to God] for anything to exist, for
any event to occur, for any truth to obtain."[18]

Pre-established harmony.[19] "[T]he appropriate nature of each substance brings it about that what
happens to one corresponds to what happens to all the others, without, however, their acting upon one
another directly." (Discourse on Metaphysics, XIV) A dropped glass shatters because it "knows" it has hit
the ground, and not because the impact with the ground "compels" the glass to split.

Law of Continuity. Natura non saltum facit. A mathematical analog to this principle would proceed as
follows: if a function describes a transformation of something to which continuity applies, then its
domain and range are both dense sets.

Optimism. "God assuredly always chooses the best."[20]

Plenitude. "Leibniz believed that the best of all possible worlds would actualize every genuine possibility,
and argued in Théodicée that this best of all possible worlds will contain all possibilities, with our finite
experience of eternity giving no reason to dispute nature's perfection."

Leibniz would on occasion give a speech for a specific principle, but more often took them for
granted.[21]

The monads

Leibniz's best known contribution to metaphysics is his theory of monads, as exposited in Monadologie.
Monads are to the metaphysical realm what atoms are to the physical/phenomenal.[citation needed]
They can also be compared to the corpuscles of the Mechanical Philosophy of René Descartes and
others. Monads are the ultimate elements of the universe. The monads are "substantial forms of being"
with the following properties: they are eternal, indecomposable, individual, subject to their own laws,
un-interacting, and each reflecting the entire universe in a pre-established harmony (a historically
important example of panpsychism). Monads are centers of force; substance is force, while space,
matter, and motion are merely phenomenal.

The ontological essence of a monad is its irreducible simplicity. Unlike atoms, monads possess no
material or spatial character. They also differ from atoms by their complete mutual independence, so
that interactions among monads are only apparent. Instead, by virtue of the principle of pre-established
harmony, each monad follows a preprogrammed set of "instructions" peculiar to itself, so that a monad
"knows" what to do at each moment. (These "instructions" may be seen as analogs of the scientific laws
governing subatomic particles.) By virtue of these intrinsic instructions, each monad is like a little mirror
of the universe. Monads need not be "small"; e.g., each human being constitutes a monad, in which case
free will is problematic. God, too, is a monad, and the existence of God can be inferred from the
harmony prevailing among all other monads; God wills the pre-established harmony.

Monads are purported to having gotten rid of the problematic:

Interaction between mind and matter arising in the system of Descartes;

Lack of individuation inherent to the system of Spinoza, which represents individual creatures as merely
accidental.

Theodicy and optimism

(Note that the word "optimism" here is used in the classic sense of optimal, not in the mood-related
sense, as being positively hopeful.)

The Theodicy[22] tries to justify the apparent imperfections of the world by claiming that it is optimal
among all possible worlds. It must be the best possible and most balanced world, because it was created
by an all powerful and all knowing God, who would not choose to create an imperfect world if a better
world could be known to him or possible to exist. In effect, apparent flaws that can be identified in this
world must exist in every possible world, because otherwise God would have chosen to create the world
that excluded those flaws.

Leibniz asserted that the truths of theology (religion) and philosophy cannot contradict each other, since
reason and faith are both "gifts of God" so that their conflict would imply God contending against
himself. The Theodicy is Leibniz's attempt to reconcile his personal philosophical system with his
interpretation of the tenets of Christianity.[23] This project was motivated in part by Leibniz's belief,
shared by many conservative philosophers and theologians during the Enlightenment, in the rational and
enlightened nature of the Christian religion, at least as this was defined in tendentious comparisons
between Christian and non Western or "primitive" religious practices and beliefs. It was also shaped by
Leibniz's belief in the perfectibility of human nature (if humanity relied on correct philosophy and
religion as a guide), and by his belief that metaphysical necessity must have a rational or logical
foundation, even if this metaphysical causality seemed inexplicable in terms of physical necessity (the
natural laws identified by science).

Because reason and faith must be entirely reconciled, any tenet of faith which could not be defended by
reason must be rejected. Leibniz then approached one of the central criticisms of Christian theism:[24] if
God is all good, all wise and all powerful, how did evil come into the world? The answer (according to
Leibniz) is that, while God is indeed unlimited in wisdom and power, his human creations, as creations,
are limited both in their wisdom and in their will (power to act). This predisposes humans to false beliefs,
wrong decisions and ineffective actions in the exercise of their free will. God does not arbitrarily inflict
pain and suffering on humans; rather he permits both moral evil (sin) and physical evil (pain and
suffering) as the necessary consequences of metaphysical evil (imperfection), as a means by which
humans can identify and correct their erroneous decisions, and as a contrast to true good.

Further, although human actions flow from prior causes that ultimately arise in God, and therefore are
known as a metaphysical certainty to God, an individual's free will is exercised within natural laws, where
choices are merely contingently necessary, to be decided in the event by a "wonderful spontaneity" that
provides individuals an escape from rigorous predestination.

The Theodicy was deemed illogical by the philosopher Bertrand Russell.[25] Russell points out that moral
and physical evil must result from metaphysical evil (imperfection). But imperfection is merely finitude or
limitation; if existence is good, as Leibniz maintains, then the mere existence of evil requires that evil
also be good. In addition, Christian theology defines sin as not necessary but contingent, the result of
free will. Russell maintains that Leibniz failed logically to show that metaphysical necessity (divine will)
and human free will are not incompatible or contradictory.

The mathematician Paul du Bois-Reymond, in his "Leibnizian Thoughts in Modern Science", wrote that
Leibniz thought of God as a mathematician:

As is well known, the theory of the maxima and minima of functions was indebted to him for the
greatest progress through the discovery of the method of tangents. Well, he conceives God in the
creation of the world like a mathematician who is solving a minimum problem, or rather, in our modern
phraseology, a problem in the calculus of variations – the question being to determine among an infinite
number of possible worlds, that for which the sum of necessary evil is a minimum.

The statement that "we live in the best of all possible worlds" drew scorn, most notably from Voltaire,
who lampooned it in his comic novella Candide by having the character Dr. Pangloss (a parody of Leibniz
and Maupertuis) repeat it like a mantra. From this, the adjective "Panglossian" describes a person who
believes that the world about us is the best possible one.

Symbolic thought

Leibniz believed that much of human reasoning could be reduced to calculations of a sort, and that such
calculations could resolve many differences of opinion:

The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so
that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say:
Let us calculate [calculemus], without further ado, to see who is right.[26]

Leibniz's calculus ratiocinator, which resembles symbolic logic, can be viewed as a way of making such
calculations feasible. Leibniz wrote memoranda[27] that can now be read as groping attempts to get
symbolic logic—and thus his calculus—off the ground. But Gerhard and Couturat did not publish these
writings until modern formal logic had emerged in Frege's Begriffsschrift and in writings by Charles
Sanders Peirce and his students in the 1880s, and hence well after Boole and De Morgan began that logic
in 1847.

Leibniz thought symbols were important for human understanding. He attached so much importance to
the invention of good notations that he attributed all his discoveries in mathematics to this. His notation
for the infinitesimal calculus is an example of his skill in this regard. C.S. Peirce, a 19th-century pioneer of
semiotics, shared Leibniz's passion for symbols and notation, and his belief that these are essential to a
well-running logic and mathematics.

But Leibniz took his speculations much further. Defining a character as any written sign, he then defined
a "real" character as one that represents an idea directly and not simply as the word embodying the
idea. Some real characters, such as the notation of logic, serve only to facilitate reasoning. Many
characters well known in his day, including Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese characters, and the symbols
of astronomy and chemistry, he deemed not real.[28] Instead, he proposed the creation of a
characteristica universalis or "universal characteristic", built on an alphabet of human thought in which
each fundamental concept would be represented by a unique "real" character:

It is obvious that if we could find characters or signs suited for expressing all our thoughts as clearly and
as exactly as arithmetic expresses numbers or geometry expresses lines, we could do in all matters
insofar as they are subject to reasoning all that we can do in arithmetic and geometry. For all
investigations which depend on reasoning would be carried out by transposing these characters and by a
species of calculus.[29]

Complex thoughts would be represented by combining characters for simpler thoughts. Leibniz saw that
the uniqueness of prime factorization suggests a central role for prime numbers in the universal
characteristic, a striking anticipation of Gödel numbering. Granted, there is no intuitive or mnemonic
way to number any set of elementary concepts using the prime numbers. Leibniz's idea of reasoning
through a universal language of symbols and calculations however remarkably foreshadows great 20th
century developments in formal systems, such as Turing completeness, where computation was used to
define equivalent universal languages (see Turing degree).

Because Leibniz was a mathematical novice when he first wrote about the characteristic, at first he did
not conceive it as an algebra but rather as a universal language or script. Only in 1676 did he conceive of
a kind of "algebra of thought", modeled on and including conventional algebra and its notation. The
resulting characteristic included a logical calculus, some combinatorics, algebra, his analysis situs
(geometry of situation), a universal concept language, and more.

What Leibniz actually intended by his characteristica universalis and calculus ratiocinator, and the extent
to which modern formal logic does justice to the calculus, may never be established.[30]

Formal logic
Leibniz is the most important logician between Aristotle and 1847, when George Boole and Augustus De
Morgan each published books that began modern formal logic. Leibniz enunciated the principal
properties of what we now call conjunction, disjunction, negation, identity, set inclusion, and the empty
set. The principles of Leibniz's logic and, arguably, of his whole philosophy, reduce to two:

All our ideas are compounded from a very small number of simple ideas, which form the alphabet of
human thought.

Complex ideas proceed from these simple ideas by a uniform and symmetrical combination, analogous
to arithmetical multiplication.

With regard to the first point, the number of simple ideas is much greater than Leibniz thought.[citation
needed] As for the second, logic can indeed be grounded in a symmetrical combining operation, but that
operation is analogous to either of addition or multiplication.[citation needed] The formal logic that
emerged early in the 20th century also requires, at minimum, unary negation and quantified variables
ranging over some universe of discourse.

Leibniz published nothing on formal logic in his lifetime; most of what he wrote on the subject consists of
working drafts. In his book History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell went so far as to claim that
Leibniz had developed logic in his unpublished writings to a level which was reached only 200 years later

Social science

In psychology,[41] he anticipated the distinction between conscious and unconscious states. In public
health, he advocated establishing a medical administrative authority, with powers over epidemiology
and veterinary medicine. He worked to set up a coherent medical training programme, oriented towards
public health and preventive measures. In economic policy, he proposed tax reforms and a national
insurance scheme, and discussed the balance of trade. He even proposed something akin to what much
later emerged as game theory. In sociology he laid the ground for communication theory.

Philologist

Leibniz the philologist was an avid student of languages, eagerly latching on to any information about
vocabulary and grammar that came his way. He refuted the belief, widely held by Christian scholars in his
day, that Hebrew was the primeval language of the human race. He also refuted the argument, advanced
by Swedish scholars in his day, that a form of proto-Swedish was the ancestor of the Germanic
languages. He puzzled over the origins of the Slavic languages, was aware of the existence of Sanskrit,
and was fascinated by classical Chinese.

He published the princeps editio (first modern edition) of the late medieval Chronicon Holtzatiae, a Latin
chronicle of the County of Holstein.
Sinophile

Leibniz was perhaps the first major European intellect to take a close interest in Chinese civilization,
which he knew by corresponding with, and reading other works by, European Christian missionaries
posted in China. Having read Confucius Sinicus Philosophus on the first year of its publication,[52] he
concluded that Europeans could learn much from the Confucian ethical tradition. He mulled over the
possibility that the Chinese characters were an unwitting form of his universal characteristic. He noted
with fascination how the I Ching hexagrams correspond to the binary numbers from 0 to 111111, and
concluded that this mapping was evidence of major Chinese accomplishments in the sort of philosophical
mathematics he admired.[53]

Leibniz's attraction to Chinese philosophy originates from his perception that Chinese philosophy was
similar to his own.[52] The historian E.R. Hughes suggests that Leibniz's ideas of "simple substance" and
"pre-established harmony" were directly influenced by Confucianism, pointing to the fact that they were
conceived during the period that he was reading Confucius Sinicus Philosophus.[52]

When Leibniz died, his reputation was in decline. He was remembered for only one book, the Théodicée,
whose supposed central argument Voltaire lampooned in his Candide. Voltaire's depiction of Leibniz's
ideas was so influential that many believed it to be an accurate description. Thus Voltaire and his
Candide bear some of the blame for the lingering failure to appreciate and understand Leibniz's ideas.
Leibniz had an ardent disciple, Christian Wolff, whose dogmatic and facile outlook did Leibniz's
reputation much harm. He also influenced David Hume who read his Théodicée and used some of his
ideas.[55] In any event, philosophical fashion was moving away from the rationalism and system building
of the 17th century, of which Leibniz had been such an ardent proponent. His work on law, diplomacy,
and history was seen as of ephemeral interest. The vastness and richness of his correspondence went
unrecognized.

In 1900, Bertrand Russell published a critical study of Leibniz's metaphysics.[56] Shortly thereafter, Louis
Couturat published an important study of Leibniz, and edited a volume of Leibniz's heretofore
unpublished writings, mainly on logic. They made Leibniz somewhat respectable among 20th-century
analytical and linguistic philosophers in the English-speaking world (Leibniz had already been of great
influence to many Germans such as Bernhard Riemann). For example, Leibniz's phrase salva veritate,
meaning interchangeability without loss of or compromising the truth, recurs in Willard Quine's writings.
Nevertheless, the secondary English-language literature on Leibniz did not really blossom until after
World War II. This is especially true of English speaking countries; in Gregory Brown's bibliography fewer
than 30 of the English language entries were published before 1946. American Leibniz studies owe much
to Leroy Loemker (1904–85) through his translations and his interpretive essays in LeClerc (1973).

Nicholas Jolley has surmised that Leibniz's reputation as a philosopher is now perhaps higher than at any
time since he was alive.[57] Analytic and contemporary philosophy continue to invoke his notions of
identity, individuation, and possible worlds, while the doctrinaire contempt for metaphysics,
characteristic of analytic and linguistic philosophy, has faded[citation needed]. Work in the history of
17th- and 18th-century ideas has revealed more clearly the 17th-century "Intellectual Revolution" that
preceded the better-known Industrial and commercial revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. The
17th- and 18th-century belief that natural science, especially physics, differs from philosophy mainly in
degree and not in kind, is no longer dismissed out of hand. That modern science includes a "scholastic"
as well as a "radical empiricist" element is more accepted now than in the early 20th century. Leibniz's
thought is now seen as a major prolongation of the mighty endeavor begun by Plato and Aristotle: the
universe and man's place in it are amenable to human reason.

Immanuel Kant

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Era 18th-century philosophy

Region Western Philosophy

School Kantianism, enlightenment philosophy

Main interests Epistemology, Metaphysics, Ethics, Logic

Notable ideas Categorical imperative, Transcendental Idealism, Synthetic a priori, Noumenon, Sapere
aude, Nebular hypothesis

Immanuel Kant (German pronunciation: [ɪˈmaːnu̯ eːl ˈkant]; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a
German philosopher from Königsberg (today Kaliningrad of Russia), researching, lecturing and writing on
philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment.[1]

At the time, there were major successes and advances in the sciences (for example, Isaac Newton, Carl
Friedrich Gauss, and Robert Boyle) using reason and logic. But this stood in sharp contrast to the
scepticism and lack of agreement or progress in empiricist philosophy.

Kant’s magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781),[2] aimed to unite
reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and
metaphysics. He hoped to end an age of speculation where objects outside experience were used to
support what he saw as futile theories, while opposing the scepticism and idealism of thinkers such as
Descartes, Berkeley and Hume.
He said that it always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of
things outside us ... should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt
it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof.[3]

Kant proposed a ‘Copernican Revolution’, saying that Up to now it has been assumed that all our
cognition must conform to the objects; but ... let us once try whether we do not get farther with the
problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition.[4]

Kant published other important works on religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy and history. These
included the Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1788), which deals with ethics,
and the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), which looks at aesthetics and teleology. He
aimed to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches. The former asserted that all
knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintained that reason and innate ideas were prior.
Kant argued that experience is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason. He also
said that using reason without applying it to experience will only lead to theoretical illusions. The free
and proper exercise of reason by the individual was both a theme of the Enlightenment, and of Kant's
approaches to the various problems of philosophy.

His ideas influenced many thinkers in Germany during his lifetime. He settled and moved philosophy
beyond the debate between the rationalists and empiricists. The philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Hegel
and Schopenhauer amended and developed the Kantian system, thus bringing about various forms of
German idealism. He is seen as a major figure in the history and development of philosophy. German and
European thinking progressed after his time, and his influence still inspires philosophical work today.[

Biography

Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, the capital of Prussia at that time, today the city of
Kaliningrad in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast. He was the fourth of nine children (four of them
reached adulthood). Baptized 'Emanuel', he changed his name to 'Immanuel'[6] after learning Hebrew. In
his entire life, he never traveled more than ten miles from Königsberg.[7] His father, Johann Georg Kant
(1682–1746), was a German harnessmaker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city
(now Klaipėda, Lithuania). His mother, Regina Dorothea Reuter (1697–1737), was born in Nuremberg.[8]
Kant's paternal grandfather had emigrated from Scotland to East Prussia, and his father still spelled their
family name "Cant".[9] In his youth, Kant was a solid, albeit unspectacular, student. He was brought up in
a Pietist household that stressed intense religious devotion, personal humility, and a literal
interpretation of the Bible. Consequently, Kant received a stern education – strict, punitive, and
disciplinary – that preferred Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science.[10] The
common myths concerning Kant's personal mannerisms are enumerated, explained, and refuted in
Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and
Sublime.[11] It is often held that Kant lived a very strict and predictable life, leading to the oft-repeated
story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but did not seem to lack
a rewarding social life - he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting
on his major philosophical works.

The young scholar

Kant showed a great aptitude to study at an early age. He was first sent to Collegium Fredericianum and
then enrolled at the University of Königsberg (where he would spend his entire career) in 1740, at the
age of 16.[12] He studied the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff under Martin Knutzen, a rationalist who
was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and who introduced Kant to the
new mathematical physics of Newton. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established
harmony, which he regarded as "the pillow for the lazy mind". He also dissuaded the young scholar from
idealism, which was negatively regarded by most philosophers in the 18th century. (The theory of
transcendental idealism that Kant developed in the Critique of Pure Reason is not traditional idealism,
i.e. the idea that reality is purely mental. In fact, Kant produced arguments against traditional idealism in
the second part of the Critique of Pure Reason.) His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746
interrupted his studies. Kant became a private tutor in the smaller towns surrounding Königsberg, but
continued his scholarly research. 1749 saw the publication of his first philosophical work, Thoughts on
the True Estimation of Living Forces.

Early work

Kant is best known for his transcendental idealist philosophy that time and space are not materially real
but merely the ideal a priori condition of our internal intuition. But he worked in other areas as well. He
made an important astronomical discovery, namely the discovery of the retardation of the rotation of
the Earth, for which he won the Berlin Academy Prize in 1754. Even more importantly, from this Kant
concluded that time is not a thing in itself determined from experience, objects, motion, and change, but
rather an unavoidable framework of the human mind that preconditions possible experience.[citation
needed]

According to Lord Kelvin:

Kant pointed out in the middle of last century, what had not previously been discovered by
mathematicians or physical astronomers, that the frictional resistance against tidal currents on the
earth's surface must cause a diminution of the earth's rotational speed. This immense discovery in
Natural Philosophy seems to have attracted little attention,--indeed to have passed quite unnoticed, --
among mathematicians, and astronomers, and naturalists, until about 1840, when the doctrine of energy
began to be taken to heart.

—Lord Kelvin, physicist, 1897

He became a university lecturer in 1755. The subject on which he lectured was "Metaphysics"; the
course textbook was written by A.G. Baumgarten.

According to Thomas Huxley:

"The sort of geological speculation to which I am now referring (geological aetiology, in short) was
created as a science by that famous philosopher, Immanuel Kant, when, in 1775, he wrote his General
Natural History and Theory of the Celestial Bodies; or, an Attempt to Account for the Constitutional and
Mechanical Origin of the Universe, upon Newtonian Principles." --

—Thomas H. Huxley, 1869

In the General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie
des Himmels) (1755), Kant laid out the Nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System
formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. He thus attempted to explain the order of the solar system,
seen previously by Newton as being imposed from the beginning by God. Kant also correctly deduced
that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized also formed from a (much larger)
spinning cloud of gas. He further suggested the possibility that other nebulae might also be similarly
large and distant disks of stars. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy: for the first time
extending astronomy beyond the solar system to galactic and extragalactic realms.[13]

From this point on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on
the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in
philosophy. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two
more works appeared the following year: Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into
Philosophy and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. In
1764, Kant wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and then was second to
Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness
of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (often referred to as "the Prize Essay"). In 1770, at the
age of 45, Kant was finally appointed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg.
Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation in defence of this appointment. This work saw the emergence of
several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual
thought and sensible receptivity. Not to observe this distinction would mean to commit the error of
subreption, and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoidance of this error will
metaphysics flourish.

The issue that vexed Kant was central to what twentieth century scholars termed "the philosophy of
mind." The flowering of the natural sciences had led to an understanding of how data reaches the brain.
Sunlight may fall upon a distant object, whereupon light is reflected from various parts of the object in a
way that maps the surface features (color, texture, etc.) of the object. The light reaches the eye of a
human observer, passes through the cornea, is focused by the lens upon the retina where it forms an
image similar to that formed by light passing through a pinhole into a camera obscura. The retinal cells
next send impulses through the optic nerve and thereafter they form a mapping in the brain of the visual
features of the distant object. The interior mapping is not the exterior thing being mapped, and our
belief that there is a meaningful relationship between the exterior object and the mapping in the brain
depends on a chain of reasoning that is not fully grounded. But the uncertainty aroused by these
considerations, the uncertainties raised by optical illusions, misperceptions, delusions, etc., are not the
end of the problems.

Kant saw that the mind could not function as an empty container that simply receives data from the
outside. Something had to be giving order to the incoming data. Images of external objects have to be
kept in the same sequence in which they were received. This ordering occurs through the mind's
intuition of time. The same considerations apply to the mind's function of constituting space for ordering
mappings of visual and tactile signals arriving via the already described chains of physical causation.

It is often held that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-
50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in
life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has
devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with
his mature work.[14]

The silent decade

At the age of 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher. Much was
expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in
the Inaugural Dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation and connection between our sensible
and intellectual faculties—he needed to explain how we combine sensory knowledge with reasoned
knowledge, these being related but very different processes. He also credited David Hume with
awakening him from "dogmatic slumber" (circa 1771).[15] Hume had stated that experience consists
only of sequences of feelings, images or sounds. Ideas such as 'cause', goodness, or objects were not
evident in experience, so why do we believe in the reality of these? Kant felt that reason could remove
this scepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. He did not publish any work in philosophy
for the next eleven years.

Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself. He resisted friends'
attempts to bring him out of his isolation. In 1778, in response to one of these offers by a former pupil,
Kant wrote:

"Any change makes me apprehensive, even if it offers the greatest promise of improving my condition,
and I am persuaded by this natural instinct of mine that I must take heed if I wish that the threads which
the Fates spin so thin and weak in my case to be spun to any length. My great thanks, to my well-wishers
and friends, who think so kindly of me as to undertake my welfare, but at the same time a most humble
request to protect me in my current condition from any disturbance."[16]
When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the Critique of Pure Reason. Although now
uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this Critique was largely
ignored upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition,
and written in what some considered a convoluted style. It received few reviews, and these granted no
significance to the work. Its density made it, as Johann Gottfried Herder put it in a letter to Johann Georg
Hamann, a "tough nut to crack," obscured by "all this heavy gossamer".[17] Its reception stood in stark
contrast to the praise Kant had received for earlier works such as his "Prize Essay" and other shorter
works that precede the first Critique. These well-received and readable tracts include one on the
earthquake in Lisbon which was so popular that it was sold by the page.[18] Prior to the change in course
documented in the first Critique, his books sold well, and by the time he published Observations On the
Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime in 1764 he had become a popular author of some note.[19] Kant
was disappointed with the first Critique's reception. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise,
Kant wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views. He also
encouraged his friend, Johann Schultz, to publish a brief commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason.

Kant's reputation gradually rose through the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784
essay, "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"; 1785's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of
Morals (his first work on moral philosophy); and, from 1786, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science. But Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Reinhold began to
publish a series of public letters on the Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's
philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the Pantheism Dispute.
Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased G. E. Lessing (a distinguished dramatist and
philosophical essayist) of Spinozism. Such a charge, tantamount to atheism, was vigorously denied by
Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, and a bitter public dispute arose among partisans. The controversy
gradually escalated into a general debate over the values of the Enlightenment and the value of reason
itself. Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could settle this dispute by
defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the
most famous philosopher of his era.

Mature work

Kant published a second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft) in 1787,
heavily revising the first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of
philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's Critique of Practical Reason
(known as the second Critique) and 1797’s Metaphysics of Morals. The 1790 Critique of Judgment (the
third Critique) applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology.

In 1792, Kant's attempt to publish the Second of the four Pieces of Religion within the Bounds of Bare
Reason, in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift, met with opposition from the King's censorship
commission, which had been established that same year in the context of 1789 French Revolution.[20]
Kant then arranged to have all four pieces published as a book, routing it through the philosophy
department at the University of Jena to avoid the need for theological censorship.[citation needed] Kant
got a now famous reprimand from the King,[20] for this action of insubordination. When he nevertheless
published a second edition in 1794, the censor was so irate that he arranged for a royal order that
required Kant never to publish or even speak publicly about religion.[citation needed] Kant then
published his response to the King's reprimand and explained himself, in the preface of The Conflict of
the Faculties.[20]

He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics and other topics. These
works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in eighteenth
century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing the Kantian
philosophy. But despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. Many of
Kant's most important disciples (including Reinhold, Beck and Fichte) transformed the Kantian position
into increasingly radical forms of idealism. The progressive stages of revision of Kant's teachings marked
the emergence of German Idealism. Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in
an open letter in 1799.[21] It was one of his final acts expounding a stance on philosophical questions. In
1800 a student of Kant, Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche, published a manual of logic for teachers called Logik,
which he had prepared at Kant's request. Jäsche prepared the Logik using a copy of a textbook in logic by
Georg Freidrich Meier entitled Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre, in which Kant had written copious notes
and annotations. The Logik has been considered to be of fundamental importance to Kant's philosophy,
and the understanding of it. The great nineteenth century logician Charles Sanders Peirce remarked, in
an incomplete review of Thomas Kingsmill Abbott's English translation of the introduction to the Logik,
that "Kant's whole philosophy turns upon his logic."[22] Also, Robert Schirokauer Hartman and Wolfgang
Schwarz, wrote in the translators' introduction to their English translation of the Logik, "Its importance
lies not only in its significance for the Critique of Pure Reason, the second part of which is a restatement
of fundamental tenets of the Logic, but in its position within the whole of Kant's work."[23] Kant's health,
long poor, took a turn for the worse and he died at Königsberg on 12 February 1804, uttering "Genug"
("Enough") before expiring.[24] His unfinished final work, the fragmentary Opus Postumum, was, as its
title suggests, published posthumously.

Philosophy

In Kant's essay "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?", Kant defined the Enlightenment as
an age shaped by the Latin motto Sapere aude ("Dare to Know"). Kant maintained that one ought to
think autonomously, free of the dictates of external authority. His work reconciled many of the
differences between the rationalist and empiricist traditions of the 18th century. He had a decisive
impact on the Romantic and German Idealist philosophies of the 19th century. His work has also been a
starting point for many 20th century philosophers.

Kant asserted that, because of the limitations of argumentation in the absence of irrefutable evidence,
no one could really know whether there is a God and an afterlife or not. For the sake of society and
morality, Kant asserted, people are reasonably justified in believing in them, even though they could
never know for sure whether they are real or not. He explained:
All the preparations of reason, therefore, in what may be called pure philosophy, are in reality directed
to those three problems only [God, the soul, and freedom]. However, these three elements in
themselves still hold independent, proportional, objective weight individually. Moreover, in a collective
relational context; namely, to know what ought to be done: if the will is free, if there is a God, and if
there is a future world. As this concerns our actions with reference to the highest aims of life, we see
that the ultimate intention of nature in her wise provision was really, in the constitution of our reason,
directed to moral interests only.[25]

The sense of an enlightened approach and the critical method required that "If one cannot prove that a
thing is, he may try to prove that it is not. And if he succeeds in doing neither (as often occurs), he may
still ask whether it is in his interest to accept one or the other of the alternatives hypothetically, from the
theoretical or the practical point of view. Hence the question no longer is as to whether perpetual peace
is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the
former alternative, but we must act on the supposition of its being real."[26] The presupposition of God,
soul, and freedom was then a practical concern, for "Morality, by itself, constitutes a system, but
happiness does not, unless it is distributed in exact proportion to morality. This, however, is possible in
an intelligible world only under a wise author and ruler. Reason compels us to admit such a ruler,
together with life in such a world, which we must consider as future life, or else all moral laws are to be
considered as idle dreams... ."[27]

Kant claimed to have created a "Copernican revolution" in philosophy. This involved two interconnected
foundations of his "critical philosophy":

the epistemology of Transcendental Idealism and

the moral philosophy of the autonomy of practical reason.

These teachings placed the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral
worlds. Kant argued that the rational order of the world as known by science was not just the fortuitous
accumulation of sense perceptions.

Conceptual unification and integration is carried out by the mind through concepts or the "categories of
the understanding" operating on the perceptual manifold within space and time. The latter are not
concepts,[28] but are forms of sensibility that are a priori necessary conditions for any possible
experience. Thus the objective order of nature and the causal necessity that operates within it are
dependent upon the mind's processes, the product of the rule-based activity which Kant called
"synthesis". There is much discussion among Kant scholars on the correct interpretation of this train of
thought.

The 'two-world' interpretation regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, that
we are not able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, meaning that we cannot access the "thing-in-
itself". Kant, however, also speaks of the thing in itself or transcendental object as a product of the
(human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of
sensibility. Following this line of thought, some interpreters have argued that the thing in itself does not
represent a separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the
understanding alone – this is known as the two-aspect view.

The notion of the "thing in itself" was much discussed by those who came after Kant. It was argued that
since the "thing in itself" was unknowable its existence could not simply be assumed. Rather than
arbitrarily switching to an account that was ungrounded in anything supposed to be the "real," as did the
German Idealists, another group arose to ask how our (presumably reliable) accounts of a coherent and
rule-abiding universe were actually grounded. This new kind of philosophy became known as
Phenomenology, and its founder was Edmund Husserl.

With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human
subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather is only the good will itself. A good will is one that
acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely
gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanity – understood as rational agency, and represented
through oneself as well as others – as an end in itself rather than (merely) as means to other ends the
individual might hold.

These ideas have largely framed or influenced all subsequent philosophical discussion and analysis. The
specifics of Kant's account generated immediate and lasting controversy. Nevertheless, his theses – that
the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to its knowledge, that this contribution is
transcendental rather than psychological, that philosophy involves self-critical activity, that morality is
rooted in human freedom, and that to act autonomously is to act according to rational moral principles –
have all had a lasting effect on subsequent philosophy.

Theory of perception

Kant defines his theory of perception in his influential 1781 work The Critique of Pure Reason, which has
often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy.
Kant maintains that our understanding of the external world had its foundations not merely in
experience, but in both experience and a priori concepts, thus offering a non-empiricist critique of
rationalist philosophy, which is what he and others referred to as his "Copernican revolution".[29]

Firstly, Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions:

Analytic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is contained in its subject concept; e.g., "All
bachelors are unmarried," or, "All bodies take up space."

Synthetic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is not contained in its subject concept ;
e.g., "All bachelors are happy," or, "All bodies have weight."

Analytic propositions are true by nature of the meaning of the words involved in the sentence—we
require no further knowledge than a grasp of the language to understand this proposition. On the other
hand, synthetic statements are those that tell us something about the world. The truth or falsehood of
synthetic statements derives from something outside of their linguistic content. In this instance, weight
is not a necessary predicate of the body; until we are told the heaviness of the body we do not know that
it has weight. In this case, experience of the body is required before its heaviness becomes clear. Before
Kant's first Critique, empiricists (cf. Hume) and rationalists (cf. Leibniz) assumed that all synthetic
statements required experience in order to be known.

Kant, however, contests this: he claims that elementary mathematics, like arithmetic, is synthetic a
priori, in that its statements provide new knowledge, but knowledge that is not derived from experience.
This becomes part of his over-all argument for transcendental idealism. That is, he argues that the
possibility of experience depends on certain necessary conditions—which he calls a priori forms—and
that these conditions structure and hold true of the world of experience. In so doing, his main claims in
the "Transcendental Aesthetic" are that mathematic judgments are synthetic a priori and in addition,
that Space and Time are not derived from experience but rather are its preconditions.

Once we have grasped the concepts of addition, subtraction or the functions of basic arithmetic, we do
not need any empirical experience to know that 100 + 100 = 200, and in this way it would appear that
arithmetic is in fact analytic. However, that it is analytic can be disproved thus: if the numbers five and
seven in the calculation 5 + 7 = 12 are examined, there is nothing to be found in them by which the
number 12 can be inferred. Such it is that "5 + 7" and "the cube root of 1,728" or "12" are not analytic
because their reference is the same but their sense is not—that the mathematic judgment "5 + 7 = 12"
tells us something new about the world. It is self-evident, and undeniably a priori, but at the same time it
is synthetic. And so Kant proves a proposition can be synthetic and known a priori.

Kant asserts that experience is based both upon the perception of external objects and a priori
knowledge.[30] The external world, he writes, provides those things which we sense. It is our mind,
though, that processes this information about the world and gives it order, allowing us to comprehend it.
Our mind supplies the conditions of space and time to experience objects. According to the
"transcendental unity of apperception", the concepts of the mind (Understanding) and the perceptions
or intuitions that garner information from phenomena (Sensibility) are synthesized by comprehension.
Without the concepts, intuitions are nondescript; without the intuitions, concepts are meaningless—thus
the famous statement, "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind."[31]

Categories of the Faculty of Understanding

In studying the work of Kant one must realize that there is a distinction between "understanding" as the
general concept (in German, das Verstehen) and the "understanding" as a faculty of the human mind (in
German, der Verstand, "the intellect"). In much English language scholarship, the word "understanding"
is used in both senses.

Kant deemed it obvious that we have some objective knowledge of the world, such as, say, Newtonian
physics. But this knowledge relies on synthetic, a priori laws of nature, like causality and substance. The
problem, then, is how this is possible. Kant’s solution was to reason that the subject must supply laws
that make experience of objects possible, and that these laws are the synthetic, a priori laws of nature
which we can know all objects are subject to prior to experiencing them. So to deduce all these laws,
Kant examined experience in general, dissecting in it what is supplied by the mind from what is supplied
by the given intuitions. This which has just been explicated is commonly called a transcendental
reduction.[32]

To begin with, Kant’s distinction between the a posteriori being contingent and particular knowledge,
and the a priori being universal and necessary knowledge, must be kept in mind. For if we merely
connect two intuitions together in a perceiving subject, the knowledge will always be subjective because
it is derived a posteriori, when what is desired is for the knowledge to be objective, that is, for the two
intuitions to refer to the object and hold good of it necessarily universally for anyone at anytime, not just
the perceiving subject in its current condition. What else is equivalent to objective knowledge besides
the a priori, that is to say, universal and necessary knowledge? Nothing else, and hence before
knowledge can be objective, it must be incorporated under an a priori category of the
understanding.[32][33]

For example, say a subject says, “The sun shines on the stone; the stone grows warm”, which is all he
perceives in perception. His judgment is contingent and holds no necessity. But if he says, “The sunshine
causes the stone to warm”, he subsumes the perception under the category of causality, which is not
found in the perception, and necessarily synthesizes the concept sunshine with the concept heat,
producing a necessarily universally true judgment.[32]

To explain the categories in more detail, they are the preconditions of the construction of objects in the
mind. Indeed, to even think of the sun and stone presupposes the category of subsistence, that is,
substance. For the categories synthesize the random data of the sensory manifold into intelligible
objects. This means that the categories are also the most abstract things one can say of any object
whatsoever, and hence one can have an a priori cognition of the totality of all objects of experience if
one can list all of them. To do so, Kant formulates another transcendental deduction.[32]

Judgments are, for Kant, the preconditions of any thought. Man thinks via judgments, so all possible
judgments must be listed and the perceptions connected within them put aside, so as to make it possible
to examine the moments when the understanding is engaged in constructing judgments. For the
categories are equivalent to these moments, in that they are concepts of intuitions in general, so far as
they are determined by these moments universally and necessarily. Thus by listing all the moments, one
can deduce from them all of the categories.[32]

One may now ask: How many possible judgments are there? Kant believed that all the possible
propositions within Aristotle’s syllogistic logic are equivalent to all possible judgments, and that all the
logical operators within the propositions are equivalent to the moments of the understanding within
judgments. Thus he listed Aristotle’s system in four groups of three: quantity (universal, particular,
singular), quality (affirmative, negative, infinite), relation (categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive) and
modality (problematic, assertoric, apodeictic). The parallelism with Kant’s categories is obvious: quantity
(unity, plurality, totality), quality (reality, negation, limitation), relation (substance, cause, community)
and modality (possibility, existence, necessity).[32]
The fundamental building blocks of experience, i.e. objective knowledge, are now in place. First there is
the sensibility, which supplies the mind with intuitions, and then there is the understanding, which
produces judgments of these intuitions and can subsume them under categories. These categories lift
the intuitions up out of the subject’s current state of consciousness and place them within consciousness
in general, producing universally necessary knowledge. For the categories are innate in any rational
being, so any intuition thought within a category in one mind will necessarily be subsumed and
understood identically in any mind. In other words we filter what we see and hear.[32]

Schema

Kant ran into a problem with his theory that the mind plays a part in producing objective knowledge.
Intuitions and categories are entirely disparate, so how can they interact? Kant’s solution is the schema:
a priori principles by which the transcendental imagination connects concepts with intuitions through
time. All the principles are temporally bound, for if a concept is purely a priori, as the categories are,
then they must apply for all times. Hence there are principles such as substance is that which endures
through time, and the cause must always be prior to the effect.[34][35]

Moral philosophy

Kant developed his moral philosophy in three works: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals
(1785),[36] Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797) .

In the Groundwork, Kant's method involves trying to convert our everyday, obvious, rational[37]
knowledge of morality into philosophical knowledge. The latter two works followed a method of using
"practical reason", which is based only upon things about which reason can tell us, and not deriving any
principles from experience, to reach conclusions which are able to be applied to the world of experience
(in the second part of The Metaphysic of Morals).

Kant is known for his theory that there is a single moral obligation, which he called the "Categorical
Imperative", and is derived from the concept of duty. Kant defines the demands of the moral law as
"categorical imperatives". Categorical imperatives are principles that are intrinsically valid; they are good
in and of themselves; they must be obeyed in all, and by all, situations and circumstances if our behavior
is to observe the moral law. It is from the Categorical Imperative that all other moral obligations are
generated, and by which all moral obligations can be tested. Kant also stated that the moral means and
ends can be applied to the categorical imperative, that rational beings can pursue certain "ends" using
the appropriate "means". Ends that are based on physical needs or wants will always give merely
hypothetical imperatives. The categorical imperative, however, may be based only on something that is
an "end in itself". That is, an end that is a means only to itself and not to some other need, desire, or
purpose.[38] He believed that the moral law is a principle of reason itself, and is not based on contingent
facts about the world, such as what would make us happy, but to act upon the moral law which has no
other motive than "worthiness of being happy".[39] Accordingly, he believed that moral obligation
applies to all, but only, rational agents.[40]

A categorical imperative is an unconditional obligation; that is, it has the force of an obligation regardless
of our will or desires (Contrast this with hypothetical imperative)[41] In Groundwork of the Metaphysic
of Morals (1785) Kant enumerated three formulations of the categorical imperative which he believed to
be roughly equivalent.[42]

Kant believed that if an action is not done with the motive of duty, then it is without moral value. He
thought that every action should have pure intention behind it; otherwise it was meaningless. He did not
necessarily believe that the final result was the most important aspect of an action, but that how the
person felt while carrying out the action was the time at which value was set to the result.

In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant also posited the "counter-utilitarian idea that there is
a difference between preferences and values and that considerations of individual rights temper
calculations of aggregate utility", a concept that is an axiom in economics:[43]

Everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its
equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a
dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself
does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity. (p. 53, italics in
original).

A phrase quoted by Kant, which is used to summarize the counter-utilitarian nature of his moral
philosophy, is Fiat justitia, pereat mundus, ("Let justice be done, though the world perish"), which he
translates loosely as "Let justice reign even if all the rascals in the world should perish from it". This
appears in his 1795 Perpetual Peace (Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf.), Appendix
1.[44][45][46]

The first formulation

The first formulation (Formula of Universal Law) of the moral imperative "requires that the maxims be
chosen as though they should hold as universal laws of nature" .[42] This formulation in principle has as
its supreme law the creed "Always act according to that maxim whose universality as a law you can at
the same time will" and is the "only condition under which a will can never come into conflict with itself
[....]"[47]

One interpretation of the first formulation is called the "universalizability test".[48] An agent's maxim,
according to Kant, is his "subjective principle of human actions": that is, what the agent believes is his
reason to act.[49] The universalisability test has five steps:
Find the agent's maxim (i.e., an action paired with its motivation). Take for example the declaration "I
will lie for personal benefit". Lying is the action; the motivation is to fulfill some sort of desire. Paired
together, they form the maxim.

Imagine a possible world in which everyone in a similar position to the real-world agent followed that
maxim. With no exception of one's self. This is in order for you to hold people to the same principle, that
is required of yourself.

Decide whether any contradictions or irrationalities arise in the possible world as a result of following
the maxim.

If a contradiction or irrationality arises, acting on that maxim is not allowed in the real world.

If there is no contradiction, then acting on that maxim is permissible, and in some instances required.

(For a modern parallel, see John Rawls' hypothetical situation, the original position.)

The second formulation

The second formulation (or Formula of the End in Itself) holds that "the rational being, as by its nature an
end and thus as an end in itself, must serve in every maxim as the condition restricting all merely relative
and arbitrary ends".[42] The principle dictates that you "[a]ct with reference to every rational being
(whether yourself or another) so that it is an end in itself in your maxim", meaning that the rational
being is "the basis of all maxims of action" and "must be treated never as a mere means but as the
supreme limiting condition in the use of all means, i.e., as an end at the same time".[50]

The third formulation

The third formulation (Formula of Autonomy) is a synthesis of the first two and is the basis for the
"complete determination of all maxims". It says "that all maxims which stem from autonomous
legislation ought to harmonize with a possible realm of ends as with a realm of nature".[42] In principle,
"So act as if your maxims should serve at the same time as the universal law (of all rational beings)",
meaning that we should so act that we may think of ourselves as "a member in the universal realm of
ends", legislating universal laws through our maxims (that is, a code of conduct), in a "possible realm of
ends".[51] None may elevate themselves above the universal law, therefore it is one's duty to follow the
maxim(s).

Idea of God

Kant stated the practical necessity for a belief in God in his Critique of Practical Reason. As an idea of
pure reason, "we do not have the slightest ground to assume in an absolute manner ... the object of this
idea",[52] but adds that the idea of God cannot be separated from the relation of happiness with
morality as the "ideal of the supreme good". The foundation of this connection is an intelligible moral
world, and "is necessary from the practical point of view";[53] compare Voltaire: "If God did not exist, it
would be necessary to invent him."[54] In the Jäsche Logic (1800) he wrote "One cannot provide
objective reality for any theoretical idea, or prove it, except for the idea of freedom, because this is the
condition of the moral law, whose reality is an axiom. The reality of the idea of God can only be proved
by means of this idea, and hence only with a practical purpose, i.e., to act as though (als ob) there is a
God, and hence only for this purpose" (9:93, trans. J. Michael Young, Lectures on Logic, p. 590-91).

Along with this idea over reason and God, Kant places thought over religion and nature, i.e. the idea of
religion being natural or naturalistic. Kant saw reason as natural, and as some part of Christianity is
based on reason and morality, as Kant points out this is major in the scriptures, it is inevitable that
Christianity is 'natural'. However, it is not 'naturalistic' in the sense that the religion does include
supernatural or transcendent belief. Aside from this, a key point is that Kant saw that the Bible should be
seen as a source of natural morality no matter whether there is/was any truth behind the supernatural
factor, meaning that it is not necessary to know whether the supernatural part of Christianity has any
truth to abide by and use the core Christian moral code.

Kant articulates in Book Four some of his strongest criticisms of the organization and practices of
Christianity that encourage what he sees as a religion of counterfeit service to God. Among the major
targets of his criticism are external ritual, superstition and a hierarchical church order. He sees all of
these as efforts to make oneself pleasing to God in ways other than conscientious adherence to the
principle of moral rightness in the choice of one's actions. The severity of Kant's criticisms on these
matters, along with his rejection of the possibility of theoretical proofs for the existence of God and his
philosophical re-interpretation of some basic Christian doctrines, have provided the basis for
interpretations that see Kant as thoroughly hostile to religion in general and Christianity in particular
(e.g., Walsh 1967).[55]

Kant had exposure to Islam as well and reflected about the role of reason therein.[56]

Idea of freedom

In the Critique of Pure Reason,[57] Kant distinguishes between the transcendental idea of freedom,
which as a psychological concept is "mainly empirical" and refers to "the question whether we must
admit a power of spontaneously beginning a series of successive things or states" as a real ground of
necessity in regard to causality,[58] and the practical concept of freedom as the independence of our will
from the "coercion" or "necessitation through sensuous impulses". Kant finds it a source of difficulty that
the practical concept of freedom is founded on the transcendental idea of freedom,[59] but for the sake
of practical interests uses the practical meaning, taking "no account of... its transcendental meaning",
which he feels was properly "disposed of" in the Third Antinomy, and as an element in the question of
the freedom of the will is for philosophy "a real stumbling-block" that has "embarrassed speculative
reason".[58]

Kant calls practical "everything that is possible through freedom", and the pure practical laws that are
never given through sensuous conditions but are held analogously with the universal law of causality are
moral laws. Reason can give us only the "pragmatic laws of free action through the senses", but pure
practical laws given by reason a priori[60] dictate "what ought to be done".[61][62]

Aesthetic philosophy

Kant discusses the subjective nature of aesthetic qualities and experiences in Observations on the
Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, (1764). Kant's contribution to aesthetic theory is developed in the
Critique of Judgment (1790) where he investigates the possibility and logical status of "judgments of
taste." In the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment," the first major division of the Critique of Judgment, Kant
used the term "aesthetic" in a manner that is, according to Kant scholar W.H. Walsh, its modern
sense.[63] Prior to this, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had, in order to note the essential
differences between judgments of taste, moral judgments, and scientific judgments, abandoned the use
of the term "aesthetic" as "designating the critique of taste," noting that judgments of taste could never
be "directed" by "laws a priori".[64] After A. G. Baumgarten, who wrote Aesthetica (1750–58),[65] Kant
was one of the first philosophers to develop and integrate aesthetic theory into a unified and
comprehensive philosophical system, utilizing ideas that played an integral role throughout his
philosophy.[66]

In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" of the Critique of Judgment, Kant states that beauty is not a
property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead a consciousness of the pleasure which
attends the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding. Even though it appears that we are
using reason to decide that which is beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive judgment,[67] "and is
consequently not logical, but aesthetical" (§ 1). A pure judgement of taste is in fact subjective insofar as
it refers to the emotional response of the subject and is based upon nothing but esteem for an object
itself: it is a disinterested pleasure, and we feel that pure judgements of taste, i.e. judgements of beauty,
lay claim to universal validity (§§20–22). It is important to note that this universal validity is not derived
from a determinate concept of beauty but from common sense [source?]. Kant also believed that a
judgement of taste shares characteristics engaged in a moral judgement: both are disinterested, and we
hold them to be universal. In the chapter "Analytic of the Sublime" Kant identifies the sublime as an
aesthetic quality which, like beauty, is subjective, but unlike beauty refers to an indeterminate
relationship between the faculties of the imagination and of reason, and shares the character of moral
judgments in the use of reason. The feeling of the sublime, itself divided into two distinct modes (the
mathematical sublime and the dynamical sublime), describe two subjective moments both of which
concern the relationship of the faculty of the imagination to reason. The mathematical sublime is
situated in the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects which appear boundless and
formless, or which appear "absolutely great" (§ 23–25). This imaginative failure is then recuperated
through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept of infinity. In this move the faculty of
reason proves itself superior to our fallible sensible self (§§ 25–26). In the dynamical sublime there is the
sense of annihilation of the sensible self as the imagination tries to comprehend a vast might. This power
of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such sensible annihilation, the subject
feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral vocation. This appreciation of moral feeling through
exposure to the sublime helps to develop moral character.

Kant had developed the distinction between an object of art as a material value subject to the
conventions of society and the transcendental condition of the judgment of taste as a "refined" value in
the propositions of his Idea of A Universal History (1784). In the Fourth and Fifth Theses of that work he
identified all art as the "fruits of unsociableness" due to men's "antagonism in society",[68] and in the
Seventh Thesis asserted that while such material property is indicative of a civilized state, only the ideal
of morality and the universalization of refined value through the improvement of the mind of man
"belongs to culture".[69]

Political philosophy

In Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch[70] Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary
for ending wars and creating a lasting peace. They included a world of constitutional republics.[71] His
classical republican theory was extended in the Science of Right', the first part of the Metaphysics of
Morals (1797).[72]

He opposed "democracy," which at his time meant direct democracy, believing that majority rule posed
a threat to individual liberty. He stated, "...democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism,
because it establishes an executive power in which 'all' decide for or even against one who does not
agree; that is, 'all,' who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself
and with freedom."[73] As most writers at the time he distinguished three forms of government i.e.
democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy with mixed government as the most ideal form of it.

Anthropology

Kant lectured on anthropology for over 25 years. His Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View was
published in 1798. (This was the subject of Michel Foucault's doctoral dissertation.) Kant's Lectures on
Anthropology were published for the first time in 1997 in German. The former was translated into
English and published by the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series in 2006.[74]

Influence

Kant's influence on Western thought has been profound.[75] Over and above his influence on specific
thinkers, Kant changed the framework within which philosophical inquiry has been carried out. He
accomplished a paradigm shift: very little philosophy is now carried out as an extension, or in the style of
pre-Kantian philosophy. This shift consists in several closely related innovations that have become
axiomatic, in philosophy itself and in the social sciences and humanities generally:

Kant's "Copernican revolution", that placed the role of the human subject or knower at the center of
inquiry into our knowledge, such that it is impossible to philosophize about things as they are
independently of us or of how they are for us;[76]

his invention of critical philosophy, that is of the notion of being able to discover and systematically
explore possible inherent limits to our ability to know through philosophical reasoning;

his creation of the concept of "conditions of possibility", as in his notion of "the conditions of possible
experience" – that is that things, knowledge, and forms of consciousness rest on prior conditions that
make them possible, so that to understand or know them we have to first understand these conditions;

his theory that objective experience is actively constituted or constructed by the functioning of the
human mind;

his notion of moral autonomy as central to humanity;

his assertion of the principle that human beings should be treated as ends rather than as means.

Some or all of these Kantian ideas can be seen in schools of thought as different from one another as
German Idealism, Marxism, positivism, phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, linguistic
philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism.[77][dubious – discuss]

Historical influence

During his own life, there was much critical attention paid to his thought . He did have a positive
influence on Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Novalis during the 1780s and 1790s. The school of
thinking known as German Idealism developed from his writings. The German Idealists Fichte and
Schelling, for example, tried to bring traditional "metaphysically" laden notions like "the Absolute,"
"God," or "Being" into the scope of Kant's critical thought.[78] In so doing, the German Idealists tried to
reverse Kant's view that we cannot know that which we cannot observe.

Hegel was one of his first major critics. In response to what he saw as Kant's abstract and formal account,
Hegel brought about an ethic focused on the "ethical life" of the community.[79] But Hegel's notion of
"ethical life" is meant to subsume, rather than replace, Kantian ethics. And Hegel can be seen as trying to
defend Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite "desires," by means of reason. Thus, in contrast to
later critics like Nietzsche or Russell, Hegel shares some of Kant's most basic concerns.[80]

Many British Catholic writers, notably G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, seized on Kant and promoted
his work. This was with a view to restoring support for a belief in God. Reaction against this, and an
attack on Kant's use of language, is found in Ronald Englefield's article,[81] reprinted in Englefield[82]
These criticisms of Kant were common in the realist views of the new positivism.
Arthur Schopenhauer was strongly influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism. He, like G. E. Schulze,
Jacobi and Fichte before him, was critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Things in themselves, they
argued, are neither the cause of what we observe nor are they completely beyond our access. Ever since
the first Critique of Pure Reason philosophers have been critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself.
Many have argued, if such a thing exists beyond experience then one cannot posit that it affects us
causally, since that would entail stretching the category 'causality' beyond the realm of experience. For a
review of this problem and the relevant literature see The Thing in Itself and the Problem of Affection in
the revised edition of Henry Allison's Kant's Transcendental Idealism. For Schopenhauer things in
themselves do not exist outside the non-rational will. The world, as Schopenhauer would have it, is the
striving and largely unconscious will.

With the success and wide influence of Hegel's writings, Kant's influence began to wane, though there
was in Germany a movement that hailed a return to Kant in the 1860s, beginning with the publication of
Kant und die Epigonen in 1865 by Otto Liebmann. His motto was "Back to Kant", and a re-examination of
his ideas began (See Neo-Kantianism). During the turn of the 20th century there was an important revival
of Kant's theoretical philosophy, known as the Marburg School, represented in the work of Hermann
Cohen, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer,[83] and anti-Neo-Kantian Nicolai Hartmann.[84]

Kant's notion of "Critique" or criticism has been quite influential. The Early German Romantics, especially
Friedrich Schlegel in his "Athenaeum Fragments", used Kant's self-reflexive conception of criticism in
their Romantic theory of poetry.[85] Also in Aesthetics, Clement Greenberg, in his classic essay
"Modernist Painting", uses Kantian criticism, what Greenberg refers to as "immanent criticism", to justify
the aims of Abstract painting, a movement Greenberg saw as aware of the key limitiaton—flatness—that
makes up the medium of painting.[86] French philosopher Michel Foucault was also greatly influenced
by Kant's notion of "Critique" and wrote several pieces on Kant for a re-thinking of the Enlightenment as
a form of "critical thought". He went so far as to classify his own philosophy as a "critical history of
modernity, rooted in Kant".[87]

Kant believed that mathematical truths were forms of synthetic a priori knowledge, which means they
are necessary and universal, yet known through intuition.[88] Kant’s often brief remarks about
mathematics influenced the mathematical school known as intuitionism, a movement in philosophy of
mathematics opposed to Hilbert’s formalism, and the logicism of Frege and Bertrand Russell.[89]

Influence on modern thinkers

With his Perpetual Peace, Kant is considered to have foreshadowed many of the ideas that have come to
form the democratic peace theory, one of the main controversies in political science.[90]

The Kantian paradigm shift in philosophy and metaphysics has been sustained. Some British and
American philosophers trace their intellectual origins to Hume:[91] however, Kant acknowledged Hume
as awakening him from his 'dogmatic slumbers', and his work articulated and clarified the issues looked
at by Hume.[92] (See The silent decade section, above).
Prominent recent Kantians include the British philosopher P. F. Strawson,[93] the American philosophers
Wilfrid Sellars[94] and Christine Korsgaard.[95]

Due to the influence of Strawson and Sellars, among others, there has been a renewed interest in Kant's
view of the mind. Central to many debates in philosophy of psychology and cognitive science is Kant's
conception of the unity of consciousness.[96]

Kant's work on mathematics and synthetic a priori knowledge is also cited by theoretical physicist Albert
Einstein as an early influence on his intellectual development.[97]

Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are two significant political and moral philosophers whose work is
strongly influenced by Kant's moral philosophy.[98] They have each argued against relativism,[99]
supporting the Kantian view that universality is essential to any viable moral philosophy.

Ayn Rand was a critic of Kant. She referred to him as a "monster" and "the most evil man in
history".[100] Rand was strongly opposed to the view that reason is unable to know reality "as it is in
itself", which she ascribed to Kant, and she considered her philosophy to be the "exact opposite" of
Kant's on "every fundamental issue".[100]

Kant's influence also has extended to the social and behavioral sciences, as in the sociology of Max
Weber, the psychology of Jean Piaget, and the linguistics of Noam Chomsky. Because of the
thoroughness of the Kantian paradigm shift, his influence extends to thinkers who neither specifically
refer to his work nor use his terminology.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._W._F._Hegel

Era 19th-century philosophy

Region Western Philosophy

School German Idealism; Founder of Hegelianism; Historicism

Main interests Logic, Philosophy of history, Aesthetics, Religion, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Political
Philosophy,

Notable ideas Absolute idealism, Dialectic, Sublation, master-slave dialectic

Influenced by[hide]

Aristotle, Plato, Heraclitus, Neoplatonism, Anselm, Descartes, Goethe, Spinoza, Leibniz, Rousseau,
Böhme, Kant, Smith, Fichte, Hölderlin, Vico, Herder, Schelling
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (German pronunciation: [ˈɡeɔɐ̯k ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈheːɡəl]) (August 27,
1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His
historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an
important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.

Hegel developed a comprehensive philosophical framework, or "system", of Absolute idealism to

account in an integrated and developmental way for the relation of mind and nature, the subject and
object of knowledge, and psychology, the state, history, art, religion and philosophy. In particular, he
developed the concept that mind or spirit manifested itself in a set of contradictions and oppositions
that it ultimately integrated and united, without eliminating either pole or reducing one to the other.
Examples of such contradictions include those between nature and freedom, and between immanence
and transcendence.

Hegel influenced writers of widely varying positions, including both his admirers (Strauss, Bauer,
Feuerbach, Stirner, T. H. Green, Marx, F. H. Bradley, Dewey, Sartre, Küng, Kojève, Fukuyama, Žižek,
Brandom, Iqbal) and his detractors (Schopenhauer, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Peirce, Popper,
Russell, Heidegger).[2] His influential conceptions are of speculative logic or "dialectic", "absolute
idealism", "Spirit", negativity, sublation (Aufhebung in German), the "Master/Slave" dialectic, "ethical
life" and the importance of history.

Life

Early years

Childhood

Hegel was born on August 27, 1770 in Stuttgart, in the Duchy Württemberg in southwestern Germany.
Christened Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, he was known as Wilhelm to his close family. His father, Georg
Ludwig, was Rentkammersekretär (secretary to the revenue office) at the court of Karl Eugen, Duke of
Württemberg.[3] Hegel's mother, Maria Magdalena Louisa (née Fromm), was the daughter of a lawyer at
the High Court of Justice at the Württemberg court. She died of a "bilious fever" (Gallenfieber) when
Hegel was eleven. Hegel and his father also caught the disease but narrowly survived.[4] Hegel had a
sister, Christiane Luise (1773–1832), and a brother, Georg Ludwig (1776–1812), who was to perish as an
officer in Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812.[5]

At the age of three Hegel went to the "German School". When he entered the "Latin School" aged five,
he already knew the first declension, having been taught it by his mother.

In 1776 Hegel entered Stuttgart's Gymnasium Illustre. During his adolescence Hegel read voraciously,
copying lengthy extracts in his diary. Authors he read include the poet Klopstock and writers associated
with the Enlightenment such as Christian Garve and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Hegel's studies at the
Gymnasium were concluded with his Abiturrede ("graduation speech") entitled "The abortive state of art
and scholarship in Turkey."

Tübingen (1788-93)

At the age of eighteen Hegel entered the Tübinger Stift (a Protestant seminary attached to the University
of Tübingen), where two fellow students were to become vital to his development—his exact
contemporary, the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, and the younger brilliant philosopher-to-be Friedrich
Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Sharing a dislike for what they regarded as the restrictive environment of the
Seminary, the three became close friends and mutually influenced each other's ideas. They watched the
unfolding of the French Revolution with shared enthusiasm. Schelling and Hölderlin immersed
themselves in theoretical debates on Kantian philosophy, from which Hegel remained aloof. Hegel at this
time envisaged his future as that of a Popularphilosoph, i.e., a "man of letters" who serves to make the
abstruse ideas of philosophers accessible to a wider public; his own felt need to engage critically with the
central ideas of Kantianism did not come until 1800.

Bern (1793–96) and Frankfurt (1797–1801)

Having received his theological certificate (Konsistorialexamen) from the Tübingen Seminary, Hegel
became Hofmeister (house tutor) to an aristocratic family in Bern (1793–96). During this period he
composed the text which has become known as the "Life of Jesus" and a book-length manuscript entitled
"The Positivity of the Christian Religion". His relations with his employers having become strained, Hegel
gladly accepted an offer mediated by Hölderlin to take up a similar position with a wine merchant's
family in Frankfurt, where he moved in 1797. Here Hölderlin exerted an important influence on Hegel's
thought.[6] While in Frankfurt Hegel composed the essay "Fragments on Religion and Love". In 1799 he
wrote another essay entitled "The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate" which was not published during his
lifetime.

Career years

Jena, Bamberg and Nuremberg: 1801-1816

In 1801 Hegel came to Jena with the encouragement of his old friend Schelling, who was Extraordinary
Professor at the University there. Hegel secured a position at the University as a Privatdozent (unsalaried
lecturer) after submitting a Habilitationsschrift (dissertation) on the orbits of the planets. Later in the
year Hegel's first book, The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's Systems of Philosophy, appeared.
He lectured on "Logic and Metaphysics" and, with Schelling, gave joint lectures on an "Introduction to
the Idea and Limits of True Philosophy" and held a "Philosophical Disputorium". In 1802 Schelling and
Hegel founded a journal, the Kritische Journal der Philosophie ("Critical Journal of Philosophy") to which
they each contributed pieces until the collaboration was ended by Schelling's departure for Würzburg in
1803.

In 1805 the University promoted Hegel to the position of Extraordinary Professor (unsalaried), after
Hegel wrote a letter to the poet and minister of culture Johann Wolfgang von Goethe protesting at the
promotion of his philosophical adversary Jakob Friedrich Fries ahead of him.[7] Hegel attempted to enlist
the help of the poet and translator Johann Heinrich Voß to obtain a post at the newly renascent
University of Heidelberg, but failed; to his chagrin, Fries was later in the same year made Ordinary
Professor (salaried) there.[8]

His finances drying up quickly, Hegel was now under great pressure to deliver his book, the long-
promised introduction to his System. Hegel was putting the finishing touches to this book, now called the
Phenomenology of Spirit, as Napoleon engaged Prussian troops on October 14, 1806, in the Battle of
Jena on a plateau outside the city. On the day before the battle, Napoleon entered the city of Jena. Hegel
recounted his impressions in a letter to his friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer:

I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful
sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches
out over the world and masters it . . . this extraordinary man, whom it is impossible not to admire.[9]

Although Napoleon chose not to close down Jena as he had other universities, the city was devastated
and students deserted the university in droves, making Hegel's financial prospects even worse. The
following February Hegel's landlady Christiana Burkhardt (who had been abandoned by her husband)
gave birth to their son Georg Ludwig Friedrich Fischer (1807–31).[10]

In March 1807, aged 37, Hegel moved to Bamberg, where Niethammer had declined and passed on to
Hegel an offer to become editor of a newspaper, the Bamberger Zeitung. Hegel, unable to find more
suitable employment, reluctantly accepted. Ludwig Fischer and his mother (whom Hegel may have
offered to marry following the death of her husband) stayed behind in Jena.[11]

He was then, in November 1808, again through Niethammer, appointed headmaster of a Gymnasium in
Nuremberg, a post he held until 1816. While in Nuremberg Hegel adapted his recently published
Phenomenology of Mind for use in the classroom. Part of his remit being to teach a class called
"Introduction to Knowledge of the Universal Coherence of the Sciences", Hegel developed the idea of an
encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences, falling into three parts (logic, philosophy of nature, and
philosophy of spirit).[12]

Hegel married Marie Helena Susanna von Tucher (1791–1855), the eldest daughter of a Senator, in 1811.
This period saw the publication of his second major work, the Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik; 3
vols., 1812, 1813, 1816), and the birth of his two legitimate sons, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm (1813–1901) and
Immanuel Thomas Christian (1814–1891).
Heidelberg and Berlin: 1816-1831

Having received offers of a post from the Universities of Erlangen, Berlin, and Heidelberg, Hegel chose
Heidelberg, where he moved in 1816. Soon after, in April 1817, his illegitimate son Ludwig Fischer (now
ten years old) joined the Hegel household, having thus far spent his childhood in an orphanage.[13]
(Ludwig's mother had died in the meantime.)[14]

Hegel published The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817) as a summary of his
philosophy for students attending his lectures at Heidelberg.

In 1818 Hegel accepted the renewed offer of the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, which
had remained vacant since Fichte's death in 1814. Here he published his Philosophy of Right (1821).
Hegel devoted himself primarily to delivering his lectures; his lecture courses on aesthetics, the
philosophy of religion, the philosophy of history, and the history of philosophy were published
posthumously from lecture notes taken by his students. His fame spread and his lectures attracted
students from all over Germany and beyond.

Hegel was appointed Rector of the University in 1830, when he was 60. He was deeply disturbed by the
riots for reform in Berlin in that year. In 1831 Frederick William III decorated him for his service to the
Prussian state. In August 1831 a cholera epidemic reached Berlin and Hegel left the city, taking up
lodgings in Kreuzberg. Now in a weak state of health, Hegel seldom went out. As the new semester
began in October, Hegel returned to Berlin, with the (mistaken) impression that the epidemic had largely
subsided. By November 14 Hegel was dead. The physicians pronounced the cause of death as cholera,
but it is likely he died from a different gastrointestinal disease.[15] He is said to have uttered the last
words "And he didn't understand me" before expiring.[16] In accordance with his wishes, Hegel was
buried on November 16 in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery next to Fichte and Solger.

Hegel's son Ludwig Fischer had died shortly before while serving with the Dutch army in Batavia; the
news of his death never reached his father.[17] Early the following year Hegel's sister Christiane
committed suicide by drowning. Hegel's sons Karl, who became a historian, and Immanuel, who followed
a theological path, lived long lives during which they safeguarded their father's Nachlaß and produced
editions of his works.

Works

Hegel published only four books during his lifetime: the Phenomenology of Spirit (or Phenomenology of
Mind), his account of the evolution of consciousness from sense-perception to absolute knowledge,
published in 1807; the Science of Logic, the logical and metaphysical core of his philosophy, in three
volumes, published in 1811, 1812, and 1816 (revised 1831); Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, a
summary of his entire philosophical system, which was originally published in 1816 and revised in 1827
and 1830; and the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, his political philosophy, published in 1822. In the
latter, he criticized von Haller's reactionary work, which claimed that laws were not necessary. He also
published some articles early in his career and during his Berlin period. A number of other works on the
philosophy of history, religion, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy were compiled from the lecture
notes of his students and published posthumously.

The French Revolution for Hegel constitutes the introduction of real individual political freedom into
European societies for the first time in recorded history. But precisely because of its absolute novelty, it
is also unlimited with regard to everything that preceded it: on the one hand the upsurge of violence
required to carry out the revolution cannot cease to be itself, while on the other, it has already
consumed its opponent. The revolution therefore has nowhere to turn but onto its own result: the hard-
won freedom is consumed by a brutal Reign of Terror. History, however, progresses by learning from its
mistakes: only after and precisely because of this experience can one posit the existence of a
constitutional state of free citizens, embodying both the benevolent organizing power of rational
government and the revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality. Hegel's remarks on the French
revolution led German poet Heinrich Heine to label him "The Orléans of German Philosophy".

Thought

Freedom

Hegel's thinking can be understood as a constructive development within the broad tradition that
includes Plato and Kant. To this list one could add Proclus, Meister Eckhart, Leibniz, Plotinus, Jakob
Boehme, and Rousseau. What all these thinkers share, which distinguishes them from materialists like
Epicurus, the Stoics, and Thomas Hobbes, and from empiricists like David Hume, is that they regard
freedom or self-determination both as real and as having important ontological implications, for soul or
mind or divinity. This focus on freedom is what generates Plato's notion (in the Phaedo, Republic, and
Timaeus) of the soul as having a higher or fuller kind of reality than inanimate objects possess. While
Aristotle criticizes Plato's "Forms", he preserves Plato's cornerstones of the ontological implications for
self-determination: ethical reasoning, the soul's pinnacle in the hierarchy of nature, the order of the
cosmos, and an assumption with reasoned arguments for a prime mover. Plato's high esteem of
individual sovereignty Kant imports to his considerations of moral and noumenal freedom, and God. All
three find common ground on the unique position of humans in the scheme of things, known by the
discussed categorical differences from animals and inanimate objects.

In his discussion of "Spirit" in his Encyclopedia, Hegel praises Aristotle's On the Soul as "by far the most
admirable, perhaps even the sole, work of philosophical value on this topic".[18] In his Phenomenology
of Spirit and his Science of Logic, Hegel's concern with Kantian topics such as freedom and morality, and
with their ontological implications, is pervasive. Rather than simply rejecting Kant's dualism of freedom
versus nature, Hegel aims to subsume it within "true infinity", the "Concept" (or "Notion": Begriff),
"Spirit", and "ethical life" in such a way that the Kantian duality is rendered intelligible, rather than
remaining a brute "given."

The reason why this subsumption takes place in a series of concepts is that Hegel's method, in his
Science of Logic and his Encyclopedia, is to begin with ultra-basic concepts like Being and Nothing, and to
develop these through a long sequence of elaborations, including those mentioned in the previous
paragraph. In this manner, a solution that is reached, in principle, in the account of "true infinity" in the
Science of Logic's chapter on "Quality", is repeated in new guises at later stages, all the way to "Spirit"
and "ethical life", in the third volume of the Encyclopedia.

In this way, Hegel intends to defend the germ of truth in Kantian dualism against reductive or eliminative
programs like those of materialism and empiricism. Like Plato, with his dualism of soul versus bodily
appetites, Kant pursues the mind's ability to question its felt inclinations or appetites and to come up
with a standard of "duty" (or, in Plato's case, "good") which transcends bodily restrictiveness. Hegel
preserves this essential Platonic and Kantian concern in the form of infinity going beyond the finite (a
process that Hegel in fact relates to "freedom" and the "ought"[19]), the universal going beyond the
particular (in the Concept), and Spirit going beyond Nature. And Hegel renders these dualities intelligible
by (ultimately) his argument in the "Quality" chapter of the "Science of Logic." The finite has to become
infinite in order to achieve reality. The idea of the absolute excludes multiplicity so the subjective and
objective must achieve synthesis to become whole. This is because, as Hegel suggests by his introduction
of the concept of "reality",[20] what determines itself—rather than depending on its relations to other
things for its essential character—is more fully "real" (following the Latin etymology of "real": more
"thing-like") than what does not. Finite things don't determine themselves, because, as "finite" things,
their essential character is determined by their boundaries, over against other finite things. So, in order
to become "real", they must go beyond their finitude ("finitude is only as a transcending of itself"[21]).

The result of this argument is that finite and infinite—and, by extension, particular and universal, nature
and freedom—don't face one another as two independent realities, but instead the latter (in each case)
is the self-transcending of the former.[22] Rather than stress the distinct singularity of each factor that
complements and conflicts with others—without explanation—the relationship between finite and
infinite (and particular and universal, and nature and freedom) becomes intelligible as a progressively
developing and self-perfecting whole.

Progress

The obscure writings of Jakob Böhme had a strong effect on Hegel. Böhme had written that the Fall of
Man was a necessary stage in the evolution of the universe. This evolution was, itself, the result of God's
desire for complete self-awareness. Hegel was fascinated by the works of Kant, Rousseau, and Goethe,
and by the French Revolution. Modern philosophy, culture, and society seemed to Hegel fraught with
contradictions and tensions, such as those between the subject and object of knowledge, mind and
nature, self and Other, freedom and authority, knowledge and faith, the Enlightenment and
Romanticism. Hegel's main philosophical project was to take these contradictions and tensions and
interpret them as part of a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity that, in different contexts, he called
"the absolute idea" or "absolute knowledge".
According to Hegel, the main characteristic of this unity was that it evolved through and manifested itself
in contradiction and negation. Contradiction and negation have a dynamic quality that at every point in
each domain of reality—consciousness, history, philosophy, art, nature, society—leads to further
development until a rational unity is reached that preserves the contradictions as phases and sub-parts
by lifting them up (Aufhebung) to a higher unity. This whole is mental because it is mind that can
comprehend all of these phases and sub-parts as steps in its own process of comprehension. It is rational
because the same, underlying, logical, developmental order underlies every domain of reality and is
ultimately the order of self-conscious rational thought, although only in the later stages of development
does it come to full self-consciousness. The rational, self-conscious whole is not a thing or being that lies
outside of other existing things or minds. Rather, it comes to completion only in the philosophical
comprehension of individual existing human minds who, through their own understanding, bring this
developmental process to an understanding of itself.

"Mind" and "Spirit" are the common English translations of Hegel's use of the German "Geist". Some
have argued that either of these terms overly "psychologize" Hegel,[citation needed] implying a kind of
disembodied, solipsistic consciousness like ghost or "soul." Geist combines the meaning of spirit—as in
god, ghost or mind—with an intentional force. In Hegel's early philosophy of nature (draft manuscripts
written during his time at the University of Jena), Hegel's notion of "Geist" was tightly bound to the
notion of "Aether" from which Hegel also derived the concepts of space and time; however in his later
works (after Jena) Hegel did not explicitly use his old notion of "Aether" any more.[23]

Central to Hegel's conception of knowledge and mind (and therefore also of reality) was the notion of
identity in difference, that is that mind externalizes itself in various forms and objects that stand outside
of it or opposed to it, and that, through recognizing itself in them, is "with itself" in these external
manifestations, so that they are at one and the same time mind and other-than-mind. This notion of
identity in difference, which is intimately bound up with his conception of contradiction and negativity, is
a principal feature differentiating Hegel's thought from that of other philosophers.

Civil society

Hegel made the distinction between civil society and state in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right.[24]
In this work, civil society (Hegel used the term "buergerliche Gesellschaft" though it is now referred to as
Zivilgesellschaft in German to emphasize a more inclusive community) was a stage on the dialectical
relationship between Hegel's perceived opposites, the macro-community of the state and the micro-
community of the family.[25] Broadly speaking, the term was split, like Hegel's followers, to the political
left and right. On the left, it became the foundation for Karl Marx's civil society as an economic base;[26]
to the right, it became a description for all non-state aspects of society, including culture, society and
politics.[27] This liberal distinction between political society and civil society was followed by Alexis de
Tocqueville.[26]
Heraclitus

According to Hegel, "Heraclitus is the one who first declared the nature of the infinite and first grasped
nature as in itself infinite, that is, its essence as process. The origin of philosophy is to be dated from
Heraclitus. His is the persistent Idea that is the same in all philosophers up to the present day, as it was
the Idea of Plato and Aristotle."[28] For Hegel, Heraclitus's great achievements were to have understood
the nature of the infinite, which for Hegel includes understanding the inherent contradictoriness and
negativity of reality, and to have grasped that reality is becoming or process, and that "being" and
"nothingness" are mere empty abstractions. According to Hegel, Heraclitus's "obscurity" comes from his
being a true (in Hegel's terms "speculative") philosopher who grasped the ultimate philosophical truth
and therefore expressed himself in a way that goes beyond the abstract and limited nature of common
sense and is difficult to grasp by those who operate within common sense. Hegel asserted that in
Heraclitus he had an antecedent for his logic: "... there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not
adopted in my logic."[29]

Hegel cites a number of fragments of Heraclitus in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy.[30] One to
which he attributes great significance is the fragment he translates as "Being is not more than Non-
being", which he interprets to mean

Sein und Nichts sei dasselbe

Being and non-being are the same.

Heraclitus does not form any abstract nouns from his ordinary use of "to be" and "to become" and in
that fragment seems to be opposing any identity A to any other identity B, C, etc., which is not-A. Hegel,
however, interprets not-A as not existing at all, not nothing at all, which cannot be conceived, but
indeterminate or "pure" being without particularity or specificity.[31] Pure being and pure non-being or
nothingness are for Hegel pure abstractions from the reality of becoming, and this is also how he
interprets Heraclitus. This interpretation of Heraclitus cannot be ruled out, but even if present is not the
main gist of his thought.

For Hegel, the inner movement of reality is the process of God thinking, as manifested in the evolution of
the universe of nature and thought; that is, Hegel argued that, when fully and properly understood,
reality is being thought by God as manifested in a person's comprehension of this process in and through
philosophy. Since human thought is the image and fulfillment of God's thought, God is not ineffable (so
incomprehensible as to be unutterable) but can be understood by an analysis of thought and reality. Just
as humans continually correct their concepts of reality through a dialectical process, so God himself
becomes more fully manifested through the dialectical process of becoming.

For his god Hegel does not take the logos of Heraclitus but refers rather to the nous of Anaxagoras,
although he may well have regarded them the same, as he continues to refer to god's plan, which is
identical to God. Whatever the nous thinks at any time is actual substance and is identical to limited
being, but more remains to be thought in the substrate of non-being, which is identical to pure or
unlimited thought.

The universe as becoming is therefore a combination of being and non-being. The particular is never
complete in itself but to find completion is continually transformed into more comprehensive, complex,
self-relating particulars. The essential nature of being-for-itself is that it is free "in itself"; that is, it does
not depend on anything else, such as matter, for its being. The limitations represent fetters, which it
must constantly be casting off as it becomes freer and more self-determining.[32]

Although Hegel began his philosophizing with commentary on the Christian religion and often expresses
the view that he is a Christian, his ideas of God are not at home among some Christians, although he has
had a major influence on 19th- and 20th-century theology. At the same time, an atheistic version of his
thought was adopted instead by some Marxists, who, stripping away the concepts of divinity, styled
what was left dialectical materialism, which some saw as originating in Heraclitus.

Religion

Hegel's thoughts on the person of Jesus Christ stood out from the theologies of the Enlightenment. In his
posthumous book, The Christian Religion: Lectures on Philosophy of Religion Part 3, he espouses that,
"God is not an abstraction but a concrete God...God, considered in terms of his eternal Idea, has to
generate the Son, has to distinguish himself from himself; he is the process of differentiating, namely,
love and Spirit". This means that Jesus as the Son of God is posited by God over against himself as other.
Hegel sees both a relational unity and a metaphysical unity between Jesus and God the Father. To Hegel,
Jesus is both divine and Human. Hegel further attests that God (as Jesus) not only died, but "...rather, a
reversal takes place: God, that is to say, maintains himself in the process, and the latter is only the death
of death. God rises again to life, and thus things are reversed." Hegel therefore maintains not only the
deity of Jesus, but the resurrection as a reality.

Legacy

There are views of Hegel's thought as a representation of the summit of early 19th century Germany's
movement of philosophical idealism. It would come to have a profound impact on many future
philosophical schools, including schools that opposed Hegel's specific dialectical idealism, such as
Existentialism, the historical materialism of Karl Marx, historicism, and British Idealism.

Hegel's influence was immense both within philosophy and in the other sciences. Throughout the 19th
century many chairs of philosophy around Europe were held by Hegelians, and Kierkegaard, Feuerbach,
Marx, and Engels--among many others—were all deeply influenced by, but also strongly opposed to,
many of the central themes of Hegel's philosophy. After less than a generation, Hegel's philosophy was
suppressed and even banned by the Prussian right-wing, and was firmly rejected by the left-wing in
multiple official writings.
After the period of Bruno Bauer, Hegel's influence did not make itself felt again until the philosophy of
British Idealism and the 20th century Hegelian Western Marxism that began with Georg Lukács. The
more recent movement of communitarianism has a strong Hegelian influence.

Triads

In previous modern accounts of Hegelianism (to undergraduate classes, for example), especially those
formed prior to the Hegel renaissance, Hegel's dialectic was most often characterized as a three-step
process, "thesis, antithesis, synthesis"; namely, that a "thesis" (e.g. the French Revolution) would cause
the creation of its "antithesis" (e.g. the Reign of Terror that followed), and would eventually result in a
"synthesis" (e.g. the constitutional state of free citizens). However, Hegel used this classification only
once, and he attributed the terminology to Immanuel Kant. The terminology was largely developed
earlier by Johann Fichte. It was spread by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus in a popular account of Hegelian
philosophy, and since then the misfit terms have stuck[citation needed]. What is wrong with the "thesis-
antithesis-synthesis" approach is that it gives the sense that things or ideas are contradicted or opposed
by things that come from outside them. To the contrary, the fundamental notion of Hegel's dialectic is
that things or ideas have internal contradictions. From Hegel's point of view, analysis or comprehension
of a thing or idea reveals that underneath its apparently simple identity or unity is an underlying inner
contradiction. This contradiction leads to the dissolution of the thing or idea in the simple form in which
it presented itself and to a higher-level, more complex thing or idea that more adequately incorporates
the contradiction. The triadic form that appears in many places in Hegel (e.g. being-nothingness-
becoming, immediate-mediate-concrete, abstract-negative-concrete) is about this movement from inner
contradiction to higher-level integration or unification.

Believing that the traditional description of Hegel's philosophy in terms of thesis-antithesis-synthesis was
mistaken, a few scholars, like Raya Dunayevskaya, a devout Marxist who was once Leon Trotsky's
secretary, have attempted to discard the triadic approach altogether. According to their argument,
although Hegel refers to "the two elemental considerations: first, the idea of freedom as the absolute
and final aim; secondly, the means for realising it, i.e. the subjective side of knowledge and will, with its
life, movement, and activity" (thesis and antithesis) he doesn't use "synthesis" but instead speaks of the
"Whole": "We then recognised the State as the moral Whole and the Reality of Freedom, and
consequently as the objective unity of these two elements." Furthermore, in Hegel's language, the
"dialectical" aspect or "moment" of thought and reality, by which things or thoughts turn into their
opposites or have their inner contradictions brought to the surface, what he called "aufhebung", is only
preliminary to the "speculative" (and not "synthesizing") aspect or "moment", which grasps the unity of
these opposites or contradiction. Thus for Hegel, reason is ultimately "speculative", not "dialectical".

It is widely admitted today[35] that the old-fashioned description of Hegel's philosophy in terms of
"thesis-antithesis-synthesis" is inaccurate. Nevertheless, such is the persistence of this misnomer that
the model and terminology survive in a number of scholarly works.
Renaissance

In the latter half of the 20th century, Hegel's philosophy underwent a major renaissance. This was due
to: (a) the rediscovery and reevaluation of Hegel as a possible philosophical progenitor of Marxism by
philosophically oriented Marxists; (b) a resurgence of the historical perspective that Hegel brought to
everything; and (c) an increasing recognition of the importance of his dialectical method. The book that
did the most to reintroduce Hegel into the Marxist canon was perhaps Georg Lukács' History and Class
Consciousness. This sparked a renewed interest in Hegel reflected in the work of Herbert Marcuse,
Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Raya Dunayevskaya, Alexandre Kojève and Gotthard Günther among
others. The Hegel renaissance also highlighted the significance of Hegel's early works, i.e. those
published prior to the Phenomenology of Spirit. The direct and indirect influence of Kojève's lectures and
writings (on the Phenomenology of Spirit, in particular) mean that it is not possible to understand most
French philosophers from Jean-Paul Sartre to Jacques Derrida without understanding Hegel.[citation
needed]

Beginning in the 1960s, Anglo-American Hegel scholarship has attempted to challenge the traditional
interpretation of Hegel as offering a metaphysical system: this has also been the approach of Z.A.
Pelczynski and Shlomo Avineri. This view, sometimes referred to as the 'non-metaphysical option', has
had a decided influence on many major English language studies of Hegel in the past 40 years. U.S.
neoconservative political theorist Francis Fukuyama's controversial book The End of History and the Last
Man was heavily influenced by Alexandre Kojève. Among modern scientists, the physicist David Bohm,
the mathematician William Lawvere, the logician Kurt Gödel and the biologist Ernst Mayr have been
interested in Hegel's philosophical work.[citation needed]

A late 20th century literature in Western Theology that is friendly to Hegel includes such writers as Dale
M. Schlitt (1984), Theodore Geraets (1985), Philip M. Merklinger (1991), Stephen Rocker (1995) and Cyril
O'Regan (1995). The contemporary theologian Hans Küng has also advanced contemporary scholarship
in Hegel studies.

Recently, two prominent American philosophers, John McDowell and Robert Brandom (sometimes, half-
seriously, referred to as the Pittsburgh Hegelians), have produced philosophical works exhibiting a
marked Hegelian influence. Each is avowedly influenced by the late Wilfred Sellars, also of Pittsburgh,
who referred to his seminal work, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, as a series of "incipient
Méditations Hegeliennes" (in homage to Edmund Husserl's treatise, Meditations Cartesiennes).

Beginning in the 1990s, after the fall of the USSR, a fresh reading of Hegel took place in the West. For
these scholars, fairly well represented by the Hegel Society of America and in cooperation with German
scholars such as Otto Pöggeler and Walter Jaeschke, Hegel's works should be read without
preconceptions. Marx plays a minor role in these new readings, and some contemporary scholars have
suggested that Marx's interpretation of Hegel is irrelevant to a proper reading of Hegel. Some American
philosophers associated with this movement include Clark Butler, Vince Hathaway, Daniel Shannon,
David Duquette, David MacGregor, Edward Beach, John Burbidge, Lawrence Stepelevich, Rudolph
Siebert, Randall Jackwak, Theodore Geraets and William Desmond.
Arthur Schopenhauer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer

Era 19th century philosophy

Region Western philosophy

School Kantianism, idealism

Main interests Metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, phenomenology, morality, psychology

Notable ideas Will, Fourfold root of reason, pessimism

Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher known for his
pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold
Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in
the phenomenal world.

Schopenhauer's most influential work, The World as Will and Representation, claimed that the world is
fundamentally what humans recognize in themselves as their will. His analysis of will led him to the
conclusion that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fulfilled. Consequently, he
considered that a lifestyle of negating desires, similar to the ascetic teachings of Vedanta, Buddhism and
the Church Fathers of early Christianity, was the only way to attain liberation.[2]

Schopenhauer's metaphysical analysis of will, his views on human motivation and desire, and his
aphoristic writing style influenced many well-known thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche,[3] Richard
Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein,[4] Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl
Gustav Jung, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Jorge Luis Borges.Contents

Life

Arthur Schopenhauer was born in the city of Danzig (Gdańsk), as the son of Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer
and Johanna Schopenhauer,[5] both descendants of wealthy German Patrician families. When the
Kingdom of Prussia acquired the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth city of Danzig in 1793,
Schopenhauer's family moved to Hamburg. In 1805, Schopenhauer's father may have committed
suicide.[6] Shortly thereafter, Schopenhauer's mother Johanna moved to Weimar, then the centre of
German literature, to pursue her writing career. After one year, Schopenhauer left the family business in
Hamburg to join her.
Schopenhauer became a student at the University of Göttingen in 1809. There he studied metaphysics
and psychology under Gottlob Ernst Schulze, the author of Aenesidemus, who advised him to
concentrate on Plato and Immanuel Kant. In Berlin, from 1811 to 1812, he had attended lectures by the
prominent post-Kantian philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher.

Schopenhauer as a youth

In 1814, Schopenhauer began his seminal work The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille
und Vorstellung). He would finish it in 1818 and publish it the following year. In Dresden in 1819,
Schopenhauer fathered an illegitimate child who was born and died the same year.[7][8] In 1820,
Schopenhauer became a lecturer at the University of Berlin. He scheduled his lectures to coincide with
those of the famous philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, whom Schopenhauer described as a "clumsy
charlatan".[9] However, only five students turned up to Schopenhauer's lectures, and he dropped out of
academia. A late essay, "On University Philosophy", expressed his resentment towards the work
conducted in academies.

While in Berlin, Schopenhauer was named as a defendant in an action at law initiated by a woman
named Caroline Marquet.[10] She asked for damages, alleging that Schopenhauer had pushed her.
According to Schopenhauer's court testimony, she deliberately annoyed him by raising her voice while
standing right outside his door.[11] Marquet alleged that the philosopher had assaulted and battered her
after she refused to leave his doorway. Her companion testified that she saw Marquet prostrate outside
his apartment. Because Marquet won the lawsuit, Schopenhauer made payments to her for the next
twenty years.[12] When she died, he wrote on a copy of her death certificate, Obit anus, abit onus ("The
old woman dies, the burden is lifted").[13]

In 1821, he fell in love with nineteen-year old opera singer, Caroline Richter (called Medon), and had a
relationship with her for several years. He discarded marriage plans, however, writing, "Marrying means
to halve one's rights and double one's duties", and "Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack
hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes." When he was forty-three years old, seventeen-
year old Flora Weiss recorded rejecting him in her diary.[14]

Schopenhauer had a notably strained relationship with his mother Johanna Schopenhauer. After his
father's death, Arthur Schopenhauer endured two long years of drudgery as a merchant, in honor of his
dead father. Afterward, his mother retired to Weimar, and Arthur Schopenhauer dedicated himself
wholly to studies in the gymnasium of Gotha. After he left it in disgust after seeing one of the masters
lampooned, he went to live with his mother. But by that time she had already opened her infamous
salon, and Arthur was not compatible with the vain, ceremonious ways of the salon. He was also
disgusted by the ease with which Johanna Schopenhauer had forgotten his father's memory. Therefore,
he gave university life a shot. There, he wrote his first book, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of
Sufficient Reason. His mother informed him that the book was incomprehensible and it was unlikely that
anyone would ever buy a copy. In a fit of temper Arthur Schopenhauer told her that his work would be
read long after the rubbish she wrote would have been totally forgotten.[15][16]
In 1831, a cholera epidemic broke out in Berlin and Schopenhauer left the city. Schopenhauer settled
permanently in Frankfurt in 1833, where he remained for the next twenty-seven years, living alone
except for a succession of pet poodles named Atman and Butz. The numerous notes that he made during
these years, amongst others on aging, were published posthumously under the title Senilia.

Schopenhauer had a robust constitution, but in 1860 his health began to deteriorate. He died of heart
failure on 21 September 1860, while sitting on his couch at home. He was 72.

Thought

Philosophy of the "Will"

A key focus of Schopenhauer was his investigation of individual motivation. Before Schopenhauer, Hegel
had popularized the concept of Zeitgeist, the idea that society consisted of a collective consciousness
which moved in a distinct direction, dictating the actions of its members. Schopenhauer, a reader of both
Kant and Hegel, criticized their logical optimism and the belief that individual morality could be
determined by society and reason. Schopenhauer believed that humans were motivated by only their
own basic desires, or Wille zum Leben (Will to Live), which directed all of mankind.[17] For
Schopenhauer, human desire was futile, illogical, directionless, and, by extension, so was all human
action in the world. To Schopenhauer, the Will is a metaphysical existence which controls not only the
actions of individual, intelligent agents, but ultimately all observable phenomena. Will, for
Schopenhauer, is what Kant called the "thing-in-itself."

Art and aesthetics

For Schopenhauer, human desiring, "willing," and craving cause suffering or pain. A temporary way to
escape this pain is through aesthetic contemplation (a method comparable to Zapffe's "Sublimation").
Aesthetic contemplation allows one to escape, albeit temporarily, this pain because it stops one
perceiving the world as mere presentation. Instead one no longer perceives the world as an object of
perception (therefore as subject to the Principle of Sufficient Grounds; time, space and causality) from
which one is separated; rather one becomes one with that perception:"one can thus no longer separate
the perceiver from the perception" (The World as Will and Presentation, section 34). From this
immersion with the world one no longer views oneself as an individual who suffers in the world due to
their individual will but one becomes a "subject of cognition" to a perception that is, "Pure, will-less,
timeless" (section 34) where the essence, "ideas", of the world are shown. Art is the practical
consequence of this brief aesthetic contemplation as it attempts to depict one's immersion with the
world, thus tries to depict the essence/pure ideas of the world. Music, for Schopenhauer, was the purest
form of art because it was the one that depicted the will itself without it appearing as subject to the
Principle of Sufficient Grounds, therefore as an individual object. According to Daniel Albright,
"Schopenhauer thought that music was the only art that did not merely copy ideas, but actually
embodied the will itself."[18]
Ethics

Schopenhauer's moral theory proposed that of three primary moral incentives, compassion, malice and
egoism, compassion is the major motivator to moral expression. Malice and egoism are corrupt
alternatives.[clarification needed]

Punishment

According to Schopenhauer, whenever we make a choice, "we assume as necessary that that decision
was preceded by something from which it ensued, and which we call the ground or reason, or more
accurately the motive, of the resultant action." [19] Choices are not made freely. Our actions are
necessary and determined because "every human being, even every animal, after the motive has
appeared, must carry out the action which alone is in accordance with his inborn and immutable
character." [20] A definite action inevitably results when a particular motive influences a person's given,
unchangeable character. If there is no free will, should crimes be punished?

The State, Schopenhauer claimed, punishes criminals in order to prevent future crimes. It does so by
placing "beside every possible motive for committing a wrong a more powerful motive for leaving it
undone, in the inescapable punishment. Accordingly, the criminal code is as complete a register as
possible of counter–motives to all criminal actions that can possibly be imagined…." [21]

…the law and its fulfillment, namely punishment, are directed essentially to the future, not to the past.
This distinguishes punishment from revenge, for revenge is motivated by what has happened, and hence
by the past as such. All retaliation for wrong by inflicting a pain without any object for the future is
revenge, and can have no other purpose than consolation for the suffering one has endured by the sight
of the suffering one has caused in another. Such a thing is wickedness and cruelty, and cannot be
ethically justified. …the object of punishment…is deterrence from crime…. Object and purpose for the
future distinguish punishment from revenge, and punishment has this object only when it is inflicted in
fulfillment of a law. Only in this way does it proclaim itself to be inevitable and infallible for every future
case; and thus it obtains for the law the power to deter….[21][22]

Should capital punishment be legal? "For safeguarding the lives of citizens," he asserted, "capital
punishment is therefore absolutely necessary."[23] "The murderer," wrote Schopenhauer, "who is
condemned to death according to the law must, it is true, be now used as a mere means, and with
complete right. For public security, which is the principal object of the State, is disturbed by him; indeed
it is abolished if the law remains unfulfilled. The murderer, his life, his person, must be the means of
fulfilling the law, and thus of re–establishing public security."[24] Schopenhauer disagreed with those
who would abolish capital punishment. "Those who would like to abolish it should be given the answer:
'First remove murder from the world, and then capital punishment ought to follow.' "[23]
People, according to Schopenhauer, cannot be improved. They can only be influenced by strong motives
that overpower criminal motives. Schopenhauer declared that "real moral reform is not at all possible,
but only determent from the deed…."[23]

He claimed that this doctrine was not original with him. Previously, it appeared in the writings of
Plato,[25] Seneca, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Anselm Feuerbach. Schopenhauer declared that their
teaching was corrupted by subsequent errors and therefore was in need of clarification.[21]

Psychology

Schopenhauer was perhaps even more influential in his treatment of man's psychology than he was in
the realm of philosophy.

Philosophers have not traditionally been impressed by the tribulations of sex, but Schopenhauer
addressed it and related concepts forthrightly:

...one ought rather to be surprised that a thing [sex] which plays throughout so important a part in
human life has hitherto practically been disregarded by philosophers altogether, and lies before us as
raw and untreated material.[26]

He gave a name to a force within man which he felt had invariably precedence over reason: the Will to
Live or Will to Life (Wille zum Leben), defined as an inherent drive within human beings, and indeed all
creatures, to stay alive and to reproduce.

Schopenhauer refused to conceive of love as either trifling or accidental, but rather understood it to be
an immensely powerful force lying unseen within man's psyche and dramatically shaping the world:

The ultimate aim of all love affairs ... is more important than all other aims in man's life; and therefore it
is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it.

What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation ...[27]

These ideas foreshadowed the discovery of evolution, Freud's concepts of the libido and the unconscious
mind, and evolutionary psychology in general.[28]

Political and social thought

Politics

Schopenhauer's politics were, for the most part, an echo of his system of ethics (the latter being
expressed in Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, available in English as two separate books, On the
Basis of Morality and On the Freedom of the Will). Ethics also occupies about one quarter of his central
work, The World as Will and Representation.
In occasional political comments in his Parerga and Paralipomena and Manuscript Remains,
Schopenhauer described himself as a proponent of limited government. What was essential, he thought,
was that the state should "leave each man free to work out his own salvation", and so long as
government was thus limited, he would "prefer to be ruled by a lion than one of [his] fellow rats" — i.e.,
by a monarch, rather than a democrat. Schopenhauer shared the view of Thomas Hobbes on the
necessity of the state, and of state action, to check the destructive tendencies innate to our species. He
also defended the independence of the legislative, judicial and executive branches of power, and a
monarch as an impartial element able to practice justice (in a practical and everyday sense, not a
cosmological one).[29] He declared monarchy as "that which is natural to man" for "intelligence has
always under a monarchical government a much better chance against its irreconcilable and ever-
present foe, stupidity" and disparaged republicanism as "unnatural as it is unfavourable to the higher
intellectual life and the arts and sciences."[30]

Schopenhauer, by his own admission, did not give much thought to politics, and several times he writes
proudly of how little attention he had paid "to political affairs of [his] day". In a life that spanned several
revolutions in French and German government, and a few continent-shaking wars, he did indeed
maintain his aloof position of "minding not the times but the eternities". He wrote many disparaging
remarks about Germany and the Germans. A typical example is, "For a German it is even good to have
somewhat lengthy words in his mouth, for he thinks slowly, and they give him time to reflect."[31]

Schopenhauer attributed civilizational primacy to the northern "white races" due to their sensitivity and
creativity (except for the Egyptians and Hindus whom he saw as equal):

The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively
among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste or race is fairer in colour than
the rest and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmans, the Incas, and the rulers
of the South Sea Islands. All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention because those
tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their
intellectual powers and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want and misery,
which in their many forms were brought about by the climate. This they had to do in order to make up
for the parsimony of nature and out of it all came their high civilization.[32]

Despite this, he was adamantly against differing treatment of races, was fervently anti-slavery, and
supported the abolitionist movement in the United States. He describes the treatment of "[our] innocent
black brothers whom force and injustice have delivered into [the slave-master's] devilish clutches" as
"belonging to the blackest pages of mankind's criminal record".[33]

Schopenhauer additionally maintained a marked metaphysical and political anti-Judaism. Schopenhauer

argued that Christianity constituted a revolt against the materialistic basis of Judaism, exhibiting an
Indian-influenced ethics reflecting the Aryan-Vedic theme of spiritual "self-conquest." This he saw as
opposed to what he held to be the ignorant drive toward earthly utopianism and superficiality of a
worldly Jewish spirit:
While all other religions endeavor to explain to the people by symbols the metaphysical significance of
life, the religion of the Jews is entirely immanent and furnishes nothing but a mere war-cry in the
struggle with other nations.[34]

Intellectual interests and affinities

Indology

Schopenhauer read the Latin translation of the Upanishads which had been translated by French writer
Anquetil du Perron from the Persian translation of Prince Dara Shikoh entitled Sirre-Akbar ("The Great
Secret"). He was so impressed by their philosophy that he called them "the production of the highest
human wisdom", and considered them to contain superhuman conceptions. The Upanishads was a great
source of inspiration to Schopenhauer, and writing about them he said:

It is the most satisfying and elevating reading (with the exception of the original text) which is possible in
the world; it has been the solace of my life and will be the solace of my death.[54]

It is well known that the book Oupnekhat (Upanishad) always lay open on his table, and he invariably
studied it before sleeping at night. He called the opening up of Sanskrit literature "the greatest gift of our
century", and predicted that the philosophy and knowledge of the Upanishads would become the
cherished faith of the West.[55]

Schopenhauer was first introduced to the 1802 Latin Upanishad translation through Friedrich Majer.
They met during the winter of 1813-1814 in Weimar at the home of Schopenhauer’s mother according to
the biographer Sanfranski. Majer was a follower of Herder, and an early Indologist. Schopenhauer did
not begin a serious study of the Indic texts, however, until the summer of 1814. Sansfranski maintains
that between 1815 and 1817, Schopenhauer had another important cross-pollination with Indian
Thought in Dresden. This was through his neighbor of two years, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause. Krause
was then a minor and rather unorthodox philosopher who attempted to mix his own ideas with that of
ancient Indian wisdom. Krause had also mastered Sanskrit, unlike Schopenhauer, and the two developed
a professional relationship. It was from Krause that Schopenhauer learned meditation and received the
closest thing to expert advice concerning Indian thought.[56]

Most noticeable, in the case of Schopenhauer’s work, was the significance of the Chandogya Upanishad,
whose Mahavakya, Tat Tvam Asi is mentioned throughout The World as Will and Representation.[57]

Buddhism

Schopenhauer noted a correspondence between his doctrines and the Four Noble Truths of
Buddhism.[58] Similarities centered on the principles that life involves suffering, that suffering is caused
by desire (tanha), and that the extinction of desire leads to liberation. Thus three of the four "truths of
the Buddha" correspond to Schopenhauer's doctrine of the will.[59] In Buddhism, however, while greed
and lust are always unskillful, desire is ethically variable - it can be skillful, unskillful, or neutral.[60]

For Schopenhauer, Will had ontological primacy over the intellect; in other words, desire is understood
to be prior to thought. Schopenhauer felt this was similar to notions of purushartha or goals of life in
Vedanta Hinduism.

In Schopenhauer's philosophy, denial of the will is attained by either:

personal experience of an extremely great suffering that leads to loss of the will to live; or

knowledge of the essential nature of life in the world through observation of the suffering of other
people.

However, Buddhist nirvana is not equivalent to the condition that Schopenhauer described as denial of
the will. Nirvana is not the extinguishing of the person as some Western scholars have thought, but only
the "extinguishing" (the literal meaning of nirvana) of the flames of greed, hatred, and delusion that
assail a person's character.[61] Occult historian Joscelyn Godwin (1945- ) stated, "It was Buddhism that
inspired the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and, through him, attracted Richard Wagner.[62] This
Orientalism reflected the struggle of the German Romantics, in the words of Leon Poliakov, to free
themselves from Judeo-Christian fetters".[63] In contradistinction to Godwin's claim that Buddhism
inspired Schopenhauer, the philosopher himself made the following statement in his discussion of
religions:[64]

If I wished to take the results of my philosophy as the standard of truth, I should have to concede to
Buddhism pre-eminence over the others. In any case, it must be a pleasure to me to see my doctrine in
such close agreement with a religion that the majority of men on earth hold as their own, for this
numbers far more followers than any other. And this agreement must be yet the more pleasing to me,
inasmuch as in my philosophizing I have certainly not been under its influence [emphasis added]. For up
till 1818, when my work appeared, there was to be found in Europe only a very few accounts of
Buddhism.[65]

Buddhist philosopher Nishitani Keiji, however, sought to distance Buddhism from Schopenhauer.[citation
needed] While Schopenhauer's philosophy may sound rather mystical in such a summary, his
methodology was resolutely empirical, rather than speculative or transcendental:

Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed
as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable
conclusions.[66]

Also note:

This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and
the limit of our consideration.[67]
The argument that Buddhism affected Schopenhauer’s philosophy more than any other Dharmic faith
loses more credence when viewed in light of the fact that Schopenhauer did not begin a serious study of
Buddhism until after the publication of The World as Will and Representation in 1818.[68] Scholars have
started to revise earlier views about Schopenhauer's discovery of Buddhism. Proof of early interest and
influence appears in Schopenhauer's 1815/16 notes (transcribed and translated by Urs App) about
Buddhism. They are included in a recent case study that traces Schopenhauer's interest in Buddhism and
documents its influence.[69]

Influences

Schopenhauer said he was influenced by the Upanishads, Immanuel Kant and Plato. References to
Eastern philosophy and religion appear frequently in Schopenhauer's writing. As noted above, he
appreciated the teachings of the Buddha and even called himself a "Buddhist".[70] He said[71] that his
philosophy could not have been conceived before these teachings were available.

Concerning the Upanishads and Vedas, he writes in The World as Will and Representation:

If the reader has also received the benefit of the Vedas, the access to which by means of the Upanishads
is in my eyes the greatest privilege which this still young century (1818) may claim before all previous
centuries, if then the reader, I say, has received his initiation in primeval Indian wisdom, and received it
with an open heart, he will be prepared in the very best way for hearing what I have to tell him. It will
not sound to him strange, as to many others, much less disagreeable; for I might, if it did not sound
conceited, contend that every one of the detached statements which constitute the Upanishads, may be
deduced as a necessary result from the fundamental thoughts which I have to enunciate, though those
deductions themselves are by no means to be found there.[72]

He summarised the influence of the Upanishads thus: "It has been the solace of my life, it will be the
solace of my death!"

Among Schopenhauer's other influences were: Shakespeare,[73] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke,
Baruch Spinoza, Matthias Claudius, George Berkeley, David Hume, and René Descarte

Criticism of Kant

Schopenhauer accepted Kant's double-aspect of the universe — the phenomenal (world of experience)
and the noumenal (the true world, independent of experience). Some commentators suggest that
Schopenhauer claimed that the noumenon, or thing-in-itself, was the basis for Schopenhauer's concept
of the will. Other commentators suggest that Schopenhauer considered will to be only a subset of the
"thing-in-itself" class, namely that which we can most directly experience.[74]

Schopenhauer's identification of the Kantian noumenon (i.e., the actually existing entity) with what he
termed "will" deserves some explanation. The noumenon was what Kant called the Ding an Sich, the
"Thing in Itself", the reality that is the foundation of our sensory and mental representations of an
external world. In Kantian terms, those sensory and mental representations are mere phenomena.
Schopenhauer departed from Kant in his description of the relationship between the phenomenon and
the noumenon. According to Kant, things-in-themselves ground the phenomenal representations in our
minds; Schopenhauer, on the other hand, believed phenomena and noumena to be two different sides
of the same coin. Noumena do not cause phenomena, but rather phenomena are simply the way by
which our minds perceive the noumena, according to the Principle of Sufficient Reason. This is explained
more fully in Schopenhauer's doctoral thesis, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Schopenhauer's second major departure from Kant's epistemology concerns the body. Kant's philosophy
was formulated as a response to the radical philosophical skepticism of David Hume, who claimed that
causality could not be observed empirically. Schopenhauer begins by arguing that Kant's demarcation
between external objects, knowable only as phenomena, and the Thing in Itself of noumenon, contains a
significant omission. There is, in fact, one physical object we know more intimately than we know any
object of sense perception: our own body.

We know our human bodies have boundaries and occupy space, the same way other objects known only
through our named senses do. Though we seldom think of our body as a physical object, we know even
before reflection that it shares some of an object's properties. We understand that a watermelon cannot
successfully occupy the same space as an oncoming truck; we know that if we tried to repeat the
experiment with our own body, we would obtain similar results – we know this even if we do not
understand the physics involved.

We know that our consciousness inhabits a physical body, similar to other physical objects only known as
phenomena. Yet our consciousness is not commensurate with our body. Most of us possess the power of
voluntary motion. We usually are not aware of the breathing of our lungs or the beating of our heart
unless somehow our attention is called to them. Our ability to control either is limited. Our kidneys
command our attention on their schedule rather than one we choose. Few of us have any idea what our
liver is doing right now, though this organ is as needful as lungs, heart, or kidneys. The conscious mind is
the servant, not the master, of these and other organs; these organs have an agenda which the
conscious mind did not choose, and over which it has limited power.

When Schopenhauer identifies the noumenon with the desires, needs, and impulses in us that we name
"will," what he is saying is that we participate in the reality of an otherwise unachievable world outside
the mind through will. We cannot prove that our mental picture of an outside world corresponds with a
reality by reasoning; through will, we know – without thinking – that the world can stimulate us. We
suffer fear, or desire: these states arise involuntarily; they arise prior to reflection; they arise even when
the conscious mind would prefer to hold them at bay. The rational mind is, for Schopenhauer, a leaf
borne along in a stream of pre-reflective and largely unconscious emotion. That stream is will, and
through will, if not through logic, we can participate in the underlying reality beyond mere phenomena.
It is for this reason that Schopenhauer identifies the noumenon with what we call our will.

In his criticism of Kant, Schopenhauer claimed that sensation and understanding are separate and
distinct abilities. Yet, for Kant, an object is known through each of them. Kant wrote: "… [T]here are two
stems of human knowledge ... namely, sensibility and understanding, objects being given by the former
[sensibility] and thought by the latter [understanding]."[75] Schopenhauer disagreed. He asserted that
mere sense impressions, not objects, are given by sensibility. According to Schopenhauer, objects are
intuitively perceived by understanding and are discursively thought by reason (Kant had claimed that (1)
the understanding thinks objects through concepts and that (2) reason seeks the unconditioned or
ultimate answer to "why?"). Schopenhauer said that Kant's mistake regarding perception resulted in all
of the obscurity and difficult confusion that is exhibited in the Transcendental Analytic section of his
critique.

Lastly, Schopenhauer departed from Kant in how he interpreted the Platonic ideas. In The World as Will
and Representation Schopenhauer explicitly stated:

...Kant used the word [Idea] wrongly as well as illegitimately, although Plato had already taken
possession of it, and used it most appropriately.

Instead Schopenhauer relied upon the Neoplatonist interpretation of the biographer Diogenes Laërtius
from Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. In reference to Plato’s Ideas, Schopenhauer quotes
Laërtius verbatim in an explanatory footnote.

Diogenes Laërtius (III, 12) Plato ideas in natura velut exemplaria dixit subsistere; cetera his esse similia,
ad istarum similitudinem consistencia. (Plato teaches that the Ideas exist in nature, so to speak, as
patterns or prototypes, and that the remainder of things only resemble them, and exist as their
copies.)[76]

Criticism of Hegel

Schopenhauer expressed his dislike for the philosophy of his contemporary Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel many times in his published works. The following quotations are typical:

If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which
will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-
philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of
language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its
success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.

Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus [...] scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal
before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the
Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no
less right.[77]

At first Fichte and Schelling shine as the heroes of this epoch; to be followed by the man who is quite
unworthy even of them, and greatly their inferior in point of talent --- I mean the stupid and clumsy
charlatan Hegel.[78]
In his Foreword to the first edition of his work Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, Schopenhauer
suggested that he had shown Hegel to have fallen prey to the Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

Schopenhauer thought that Hegel used deliberately impressive but ultimately vacuous verbiage. He
suggested his works were filled with "castles of abstraction" [79] that sounded impressive but ultimately
had no content. He also thought that his glorification of church and state were designed for personal
advantage and had little to do with the search for philosophical truth.[79] For instance, the Right
Hegelians interpreted Hegel as viewing the Prussian state of his day as perfect and the goal of all history
up until then.[80]

Influence

Schopenhauer has had a massive influence upon later thinkers, though more so in the arts (especially
literature and music) and psychology than in philosophy. His popularity peaked in the early twentieth
century, especially during the Modernist era, and waned somewhat thereafter. Nevertheless, a number
of recent publications have reinterpreted and modernised the study of Schopenhauer. His theory is also
being explored by some modern philosophers as a precursor to evolutionary theory and modern
evolutionary psychology.[81]

Friedrich Nietzsche owed the awakening of his philosophical interest to reading The World as Will and
Representation and admitted that he was one of the few philosophers that he respected, dedicating to
him his essay Schopenhauer als Erzieher[82] one of his Untimely Meditations.

Jorge Luis Borges remarked that the reason he had never attempted to write a systematic account of his
world view, despite his penchant for philosophy and metaphysics in particular, was because
Schopenhauer had already written it for him.[83]

Friedrich Nietzsche

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche

Era 19th century philosophy

Region Western Philosophy

School Weimar classicism; precursor to continental philosophy, existentialism, individualism,

postmodernism, post-structuralism

Main interests Aesthetics, expressionism, ethics, herd-instinct, ontology, philosophy of history,

psychology, nihilism, poetry, value-theory, anti-foundationalism
Notable ideas Apollonian and Dionysian, death of God, eternal recurrence, master-slave morality,
Übermensch, transvaluation of values, perspectivism, will to power, ressentiment, der letzte Mensch

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (German pronunciation: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈniːtʃə]; in English /ˈniːtʃə/ [1])
(October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and
classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and
science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism.

Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism,
nihilism and postmodernism. His style and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth have
resulted in much commentary and interpretation, mostly in the continental tradition. His key ideas
include the death of God, perspectivism, the Übermensch, the eternal recurrence, and the will to power.
Central to his philosophy is the idea of "life-affirmation", which involves an honest questioning of all
doctrines that drain life's expansive energies, however socially prevalent those views might be.[2]

Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. At the age of 24 he was
appointed to the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel (the youngest individual to have
held this position), but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life. In 1889
he became mentally ill with what was then characterized as atypical general paresis attributed to tertiary
syphilis, a diagnosis that has since come into question.[3] He lived his remaining years in the care of his
mother until her death in 1897, then under the care of his sister until his death in 1900.

Life

Youth (1844–1869)

Born on October 15, 1844, Nietzsche grew up in the small town of Röcken, near Leipzig, in the Prussian
Province of Saxony. He was named after King Frederick William IV of Prussia, who turned 49 on the day
of Nietzsche's birth. (Nietzsche later dropped his given middle name, "Wilhelm".)[4] Nietzsche's parents,
Carl Ludwig Nietzsche (1813–1849), a Lutheran pastor and former teacher, and Franziska Oehler (1826–
1897), married in 1843, the year before their son's birth, and had two other children: a daughter,
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, born in 1846, and a second son, Ludwig Joseph, born in 1848. Nietzsche's
father died from a brain ailment in 1849; his younger brother died in 1850. The family then moved to
Naumburg, where they lived with Nietzsche's paternal grandmother and his father's two unmarried
sisters. After the death of Nietzsche's grandmother in 1856, the family moved into their own house.

Nietzsche attended a boys' school and then later a private school, where he became friends with Gustav
Krug, Rudolf Wagner and Wilhelm Pinder, all of whom came from very respected families.

In 1854, he began to attend Pforta in Naumburg, but after he showed particular talents in music and
language, the internationally recognised Schulpforta admitted him as a pupil, and there he continued his
studies from 1858 to 1864. Here he became friends with Paul Deussen and Carl von Gersdorff. He also
found time to work on poems and musical compositions. At Schulpforta, Nietzsche received an
important introduction to literature, particularly that of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and for the first
time experienced a distance from his family life in a small-town Christian environment. His end of
semester exams in March of 1864 showed a "straight I" in Religion and German, a 2a in Greek and Latin,
2b in French, History and Physics, and a "lackluster" 3 in Hebrew and Mathematics.[5][clarification
needed]

After graduation in 1864 Nietzsche commenced studies in theology and classical philology at the
University of Bonn. For a short time he and Deussen became members of the Burschenschaft Frankonia.
After one semester (and to the anger of his mother) he stopped his theological studies and lost his
faith.[6] This may have happened in part because of his reading around this time of David Strauss's Life
of Jesus, which had a profound effect on the young Nietzsche,[6] though in an essay entitled Fate and
History written in 1862, Nietzsche had already argued that historical research had discredited the central
teachings of Christianity.[7] Nietzsche then concentrated on studying philology under Professor Friedrich
Wilhelm Ritschl, whom he followed to the University of Leipzig the next year. There he became close
friends with fellow-student Erwin Rohde. Nietzsche's first philological publications appeared soon after.

In 1865 Nietzsche thoroughly studied the works of Arthur Schopenhauer. He owed the awakening of his
philosophical interest to reading his Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and
Representation) and later admitted that he was one of the few thinkers that he respected, dedicating to
him his essay Schopenhauer als Erzieher (Schopenhauer as Educator), one of his Untimely Meditations.

In 1866 he read Friedrich Albert Lange's History of Materialism. Schopenhauer and Lange influenced him.
Schopenhauer was especially significant in the development of Nietzsche's later thought. Lange's
descriptions of Kant's anti-materialistic philosophy, the rise of European Materialism, Europe's increased
concern with science, Darwin's theory, and the general rebellion against tradition and authority greatly
intrigued Nietzsche. The cultural environment encouraged him to expand his horizons beyond philology
and to continue his study of philosophy.

In 1867 Nietzsche signed up for one year of voluntary service with the Prussian artillery division in
Naumburg. However, a riding accident in March 1868 left him unfit for service.[8] Consequently
Nietzsche turned his attention to his studies again, completing them and first meeting with Richard
Wagner later that year.[9]

Professor at Basel (1869–1879)

In part because of Ritschl's support, Nietzsche received a remarkable offer to become professor of
classical philology at the University of Basel. He was only 24 years old and had neither completed his
doctorate nor received his teaching certificate. Despite the fact that the offer came at a time when he
was considering giving up philology for science, he accepted.[10] To this day, Nietzsche is still among the
youngest of the tenured Classics professors on record.[11] Before moving to Basel, Nietzsche renounced
his Prussian citizenship: for the rest of his life he remained officially stateless.[12]

Nevertheless, Nietzsche served in the Prussian forces during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871 as
a medical orderly. In his short time in the military he experienced much, and witnessed the traumatic
effects of battle. He also contracted diphtheria and dysentery. Walter Kaufmann speculates that he
might also have contracted syphilis along with his other infections at this time, and some biographers
speculate that syphilis caused his eventual dementia, though there is some disagreement on this
matter.[13][14] On returning to Basel in 1870 Nietzsche observed the establishment of the German
Empire and the following era of Otto von Bismarck as an outsider and with a degree of skepticism
regarding its genuineness. At the University, he delivered his inaugural lecture, "Homer and Classical
Philology". Nietzsche also met Franz Overbeck, a professor of theology, who remained his friend
throughout his life; Afrikan Spir,[15] a little-known Russian philosopher and author of Denken und
Wirklichkeit (1873); and his colleague the historian Jacob Burckhardt, whose lectures Nietzsche
frequently attended, began to exercise significant influence on Nietzsche during this time.

Nietzsche had already met Richard Wagner in Leipzig in 1868, and (some time later) Wagner's wife
Cosima. Nietzsche admired both greatly, and during his time at Basel frequently visited Wagner's house
in Tribschen in the Canton of Lucerne. The Wagners brought Nietzsche into their most intimate circle,
and enjoyed the attention he gave to the beginning of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre. In 1870 he gave
Cosima Wagner the manuscript of 'The Genesis of the Tragic Idea' as a birthday gift. In 1872 Nietzsche
published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. However, his colleagues in the field of classical philology,
including Ritschl, expressed little enthusiasm for the work, in which Nietzsche eschewed the classical
philologic method in favor of a more speculative approach. In a polemic, Philology of the Future, Ulrich
von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff dampened the book's reception and increased its notoriety. In response,
Rohde (by now a professor in Kiel) and Wagner came to Nietzsche's defense. Nietzsche remarked freely
about the isolation he felt within the philological community and attempted to attain a position in
philosophy at Basel, though unsuccessfully.

Between 1873 and 1876, Nietzsche published separately four long essays: David Strauss: the Confessor
and the Writer, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Schopenhauer as Educator, and Richard
Wagner in Bayreuth. (These four later appeared in a collected edition under the title, Untimely
Meditations.) The four essays shared the orientation of a cultural critique, challenging the developing
German culture along lines suggested by Schopenhauer and Wagner. In 1873, Nietzsche also began to
accumulate notes that would be posthumously published as Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.
During this time, in the circle of the Wagners, Nietzsche met Malwida von Meysenbug and Hans von
Bülow, and also began a friendship with Paul Rée, who in 1876 influenced him in dismissing the
pessimism in his early writings. However, he was deeply disappointed by the Bayreuth Festival of 1876,
where the banality of the shows and the baseness of the public repelled him. He was also alienated by
Wagner's championing of 'German culture', which Nietzsche thought a contradiction in terms, as well as
by Wagner's celebration of his fame among the German public. All this contributed to Nietzsche's
subsequent decision to distance himself from Wagner.
With the publication of Human, All Too Human in 1878 (a book of aphorisms on subjects ranging from
metaphysics to morality and from religion to the sexes) Nietzsche's reaction against the pessimistic
philosophy of Wagner and Schopenhauer became evident, as well as the influence of Afrikan Spir's
Denken und Wirklichkeit.[16] Nietzsche's friendship with Deussen and Rohde cooled as well. In 1879,
after a significant decline in health, Nietzsche had to resign his position at Basel. (Since his childhood,
various disruptive illnesses had plagued him, including moments of shortsightedness that left him nearly
blind, migraine headaches, and violent indigestion. The 1868 riding accident and diseases in 1870 may
have aggravated these persistent conditions, which continued to affect him through his years at Basel,
forcing him to take longer and longer holidays until regular work became impractical.)

Independent philosopher (1879–1888)

Because his illness drove him to find climates more conducive to his health, Nietzsche traveled
frequently, and lived until 1889 as an independent author in different cities. He spent many summers in
Sils Maria, near St. Moritz in Switzerland, and many winters in the Italian cities of Genoa, Rapallo and
Turin and in the French city of Nice. In 1881, when France occupied Tunisia, he planned to travel to Tunis
to view Europe from the outside, but later abandoned that idea (probably for health reasons).[17] While
in Genoa, Nietzsche's failing eyesight prompted him to explore the use of typewriters as a means of
continuing to write. He is known to have tried using the Hansen Writing Ball, a contemporary typewriter
device.

Nietzsche occasionally returned to Naumburg to visit his family, and, especially during this time, he and
his sister had repeated periods of conflict and reconciliation. He lived on his pension from Basel, but also
received aid from friends.

A past student of his, Peter Gast (born Heinrich Köselitz), became a sort of private secretary to Nietzsche.
In 1876, Koselitz transcribed the crabbed, nearly illegible handwriting of Nietzsche for the first time with
Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.[18] He would go on to both transcribe and proofread the galleys for almost
all of Nietzsche's work from there on. On at least one occasion, February 23, 1880, the usually broke
Koselitz received 200 marks from their mutual friend, Paul Ree.[19] Koselitz was one of the very few
friends Nietzsche allowed to criticize him. In responding most enthusiastically to "Zarathusa," Koselitz did
feel it necessary to point out that what were described as "superfluous" people were in fact quite
necessary. He went on to list the number of people Epicurus, for example, had to rely on -- even with his
simple diet of goat cheese.[20]

To the end of his life, Gast and Overbeck remained consistently faithful friends. Malwida von Meysenbug
remained like a motherly patron even outside the Wagner circle. Soon Nietzsche made contact with the
music-critic Carl Fuchs. Nietzsche stood at the beginning of his most productive period. Beginning with
Human, All Too Human in 1878, Nietzsche would publish one book (or major section of a book) each year
until 1888, his last year of writing, during which he completed five.
In 1882 Nietzsche published the first part of The Gay Science. That year he also met Lou Andreas
Salomé,[21] through Malwida von Meysenbug and Paul Rée. Nietzsche and Salomé spent the summer
together in Tautenburg in Thuringia, often with Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth as a chaperone. Nietzsche,
however, regarded Salomé less as an equal partner than as a gifted student. Salomé reports that he
asked her to marry him and that she refused, though the reliability of her reports of events has come
into question.[22] Nietzsche's relationship with Rée and Salomé broke up in the winter of 1882/1883,
partially because of intrigues conducted by Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth. Amidst renewed bouts of illness,
living in near isolation after a falling-out with his mother and sister regarding Salomé, Nietzsche fled to
Rapallo. Here he wrote the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in only ten days.

By 1882, Nietzsche was taking huge doses of opium, but was still having trouble sleeping.[23] In 1883,
while staying in Nice, he was writing out his own prescriptions for the sleeping powder chloralhydrate,
signing them 'Dr Nietzsche'.[24]

After severing his philosophical ties with Schopenhauer and his social ties with Wagner, Nietzsche had
few remaining friends. Now, with the new style of Zarathustra, his work became even more alienating
and the market received it only to the degree required by politeness. Nietzsche recognized this and
maintained his solitude, though he often complained about it. His books remained largely unsold. In
1885 he printed only 40 copies of the fourth part of Zarathustra, and distributed only a fraction of these
among close friends, including Helene von Druskowitz.

In 1883 he tried and failed to obtain a lecturing post at the University of Leipzig. It was made clear to him
that, in view of the attitude towards Christianity and the concept of God expressed in Zarathustra, he
had become in effect unemployable at any German University. The subsequent "feelings of revenge and
resentment" embittered him. "And hence my rage since I have grasped in the broadest possible sense
what wretched means (the depreciation of my good name, my character and my aims) suffice to take
from me the trust of, and therewith the possibility of obtaining, pupils."[25]

In 1886 Nietzsche broke with his editor, Ernst Schmeitzner, disgusted by his anti-Semitic opinions.
Nietzsche saw his own writings as "completely buried and unexhumeable in this anti-Semitic dump" of
Schmeitzner—associating the editor with a movement that should be "utterly rejected with cold
contempt by every sensible mind".[26] He then printed Beyond Good and Evil at his own expense, and
issued in 1886–1887 second editions of his earlier works (The Birth of Tragedy, Human, All Too Human,
Dawn, and The Gay Science), accompanied by new prefaces in which he reconsidered his earlier works.
Thereafter, he saw his work as completed for a time and hoped that soon a readership would develop. In
fact, interest in Nietzsche's thought did increase at this time, if rather slowly and in a way hardly
perceived by him. During these years Nietzsche met Meta von Salis, Carl Spitteler, and also Gottfried
Keller. In 1886 his sister Elisabeth married the anti-Semite Bernhard Förster and traveled to Paraguay to
found Nueva Germania, a "Germanic" colony—a plan to which Nietzsche responded with mocking
laughter.[27] Through correspondence, Nietzsche's relationship with Elisabeth continued on the path of
conflict and reconciliation, but they would meet again only after his collapse. He continued to have
frequent and painful attacks of illness, which made prolonged work impossible. In 1887 Nietzsche wrote
the polemic On the Genealogy of Morals.
During the same year Nietzsche encountered the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky, with whom he felt an
immediate kinship.[28] He also exchanged letters with Hippolyte Taine, and then also with Georg
Brandes. Brandes, who had started to teach the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard in the 1870s, wrote to
Nietzsche asking him to read Kierkegaard, to which Nietzsche replied that he would come to
Copenhagen and read Kierkegaard with him. However, before fulfilling this undertaking, he slipped too
far into sickness. In the beginning of 1888, in Copenhagen, Brandes delivered one of the first lectures on
Nietzsche's philosophy.

Although Nietzsche had in 1886 announced (at the end of On The Genealogy of Morality) a new work
with the title The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values, he eventually seems to have
abandoned this particular approach and instead used some of the draft passages to compose Twilight of
the Idols and The Antichrist (both written in 1888).[29]

His health seemed to improve, and he spent the summer in high spirits. In the fall of 1888 his writings
and letters began to reveal a higher estimation of his own status and "fate." He overestimated the
increasing response to his writings, especially to the recent polemic, The Case of Wagner. On his 44th
birthday, after completing Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, he decided to write the autobiography
Ecce Homo. In the preface to this work—which suggests Nietzsche was well aware of the interpretive
difficulties his work would generate—he declares, "Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all,
do not mistake me for someone else."[30] In December, Nietzsche began a correspondence with August
Strindberg, and thought that, short of an international breakthrough, he would attempt to buy back his
older writings from the publisher and have them translated into other European languages. Moreover,
he planned the publication of the compilation Nietzsche Contra Wagner and of the poems that
composed his collection Dionysian-Dithyrambs.

Mental breakdown and death (1889–1900)

The house Nietzsche stayed in while in Turin (background, right), as seen from across Piazza Carlo
Alberto, where he is said to have had his breakdown. To the left is the rear façade of the Palazzo
Carignano

On January 3, 1889, Nietzsche suffered a mental collapse. Two policemen approached him after he
caused a public disturbance in the streets of Turin. What happened remains unknown, but an often-
repeated tale states that Nietzsche witnessed the whipping of a horse at the other end of the Piazza
Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his arms up around its neck to protect the horse, and then
collapsed to the ground.[31]

In the following few days, Nietzsche sent short writings—known as the Wahnbriefe ("Madness
Letters")—to a number of friends (including Cosima Wagner and Jacob Burckhardt). To his former
colleague Burckhardt, Nietzsche wrote: "I have had Caiaphas put in fetters. Also, last year I was crucified
by the German doctors in a very drawn-out manner. Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all anti-Semites
abolished."[32] Additionally, he commanded the German emperor to go to Rome to be shot, and
summoned the European powers to take military action against Germany.[33]

On January 6, 1889, Burckhardt showed the letter he had received from Nietzsche to Overbeck. The
following day Overbeck received a similarly revealing letter, and decided that Nietzsche's friends had to
bring him back to Basel. Overbeck traveled to Turin and brought Nietzsche to a psychiatric clinic in Basel.
By that time Nietzsche appeared fully in the grip of a serious mental illness, and his mother Franziska
decided to transfer him to a clinic in Jena under the direction of Otto Binswanger. From November 1889
to February 1890 the art historian Julius Langbehn attempted to cure Nietzsche, claiming that the
methods of the medical doctors were ineffective in treating Nietzsche's condition. Langbehn assumed
progressively greater control of Nietzsche until his secretiveness discredited him. In March 1890
Franziska removed Nietzsche from the clinic, and in May 1890 brought him to her home in Naumburg.
During this process Overbeck and Gast contemplated what to do with Nietzsche's unpublished works. In
January 1889 they proceeded with the planned release of Twilight of the Idols, by that time already
printed and bound. In February they ordered a fifty copy private edition of Nietzsche contra Wagner, but
the publisher C. G. Naumann secretly printed one hundred. Overbeck and Gast decided to withhold
publishing The Antichrist and Ecce Homo because of their more radical content. Nietzsche's reception
and recognition enjoyed their first surge.

In 1893 Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth returned from Nueva Germania (in Paraguay) following the suicide of
her husband. She read and studied Nietzsche's works, and piece by piece took control of them and of
their publication. Overbeck eventually suffered dismissal, and Gast finally cooperated. After the death of
Franziska in 1897 Nietzsche lived in Weimar, where Elisabeth cared for him and allowed people,
including Rudolf Steiner (who in 1895 had written one of the first books praising Nietzsche)[34] to visit
her uncommunicative brother. Elisabeth at one point went so far as to employ Steiner–at a time when
he was still an ardent fighter against any mysticism–as a tutor to help her to understand her brother's
philosophy. Steiner abandoned the attempt after only a few months, declaring that it was impossible to
teach her anything about philosophy.[35]

Peter Gast would "correct" Nietzsche's writings even after the philosopher's breakdown and did so
without his approval—an action severely criticized by contemporary Nietzsche scholars.

Nietzsche's mental illness was originally diagnosed as tertiary syphilis, in accordance with a prevailing
medical paradigm of the time. Although most commentators regard his breakdown as unrelated to his
philosophy Georges Bataille drops dark hints ("'man incarnate' must also go mad")[36] and René Girard's
postmortem psychoanalysis posits a worshipful rivalry with Richard Wagner.[37] The diagnosis of syphilis
was challenged, and manic-depressive illness with periodic psychosis, followed by vascular dementia was
put forward by Cybulska[38] prior Schain's;[39] and Sax's studies;.[40] Orth and Trimble postulate
frontotemporal dementia,[41] while other researchers[42] propose a syndrome called CADASIL.

In 1898 and 1899 Nietzsche suffered at least two strokes, which partially paralysed him and left him
unable to speak or walk. After contracting pneumonia in mid-August 1900 he had another stroke during
the night of August 24 / August 25, and died about noon on August 25.[43] Elisabeth had him buried
beside his father at the church in Röcken bei Lützen. His friend, Gast, gave his funeral oration,
proclaiming: "Holy be your name to all future generations!"[44] Nietzsche had written in Ecce Homo (at
the time of the funeral still unpublished) of his fear that one day his name would be regarded as "holy".

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche compiled The Will to Power from Nietzsche's unpublished notebooks, and
published it posthumously. Because his sister arranged the book based on her own conflation of several
of Nietzsche's early outlines, and took great liberties with the material, the consensus holds that it does
not reflect Nietzsche's intent. Indeed, Mazzino Montinari, the editor of Nietzsche's Nachlass, called it a
forgery in The 'Will to Power' Does Not Exist. For example, Elisabeth removed aphorism 35 of The
Antichrist, where Nietzsche rewrote a passage of the Bible (see The Will to Power and Nietzsche's
criticisms of anti-Semitism and nationalism).

Citizenship, nationality, ethnicity

Nietzsche is commonly classified as a German philosopher.[45] The modern unified nation-state called
Germany did not yet exist at the time of his birth, but the German Confederation of states did, and
Nietzsche was a citizen of one of these, Prussia—for a time. When he accepted his post at Basel,
Nietzsche applied for the annulment of his Prussian citizenship.[46] The official response confirming the
revocation of his citizenship came in a document dated April 17, 1869,[47] and for the rest of his life he
remained officially stateless.

According to a common myth, Nietzsche's ancestors were Polish. Nietzsche himself subscribed to this
story toward the end of his life. He wrote in 1888, "My ancestors were Polish noblemen (Nietzky); the
type seems to have been well preserved despite three generations of German mothers."[48] At one
point Nietzsche becomes even more adamant about his Polish Identity. "I am a pure-blooded Polish
nobleman, without a single drop of bad blood, certainly not German blood."[49] On yet another occasion
Nietzsche stated "Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their
veins [...] I am proud of my Polish descent."[50] Nietzsche believed his name might have been
Germanized, in one letter claiming, "I was taught to ascribe the origin of my blood and name to Polish
noblemen who were called Niëtzky and left their home and nobleness about a hundred years ago, finally
yielding to unbearable suppression: they were Protestants."[51]

Most scholars dispute Nietzsche's account of his family's origins. Hans von Müller debunked the
genealogy put forward by Nietzsche's sister in favor of a Polish noble heritage.[52] Max Oehler, the
curator of Nietzsche Archive at Weimar, argued that all of Nietzsche's ancestors bore German names,
even the wives' families.[48] Oehler claims that Nietzsche came from a long line of German Lutheran
clergymen on both sides of his family, and modern scholars regard the claim of Nietzsche's Polish
ancestry as "pure invention."[53] Colli and Montinari, the editors of Nietzsche's assembled letters, gloss
Nietzsche's claims as a "mistaken belief" and "without foundation."[54] The name Nietzsche itself is not
a Polish name, but an exceptionally common one throughout central Germany, in this and cognate forms
(such as Nitsche and Nitzke). The name derives from the forename Nikolaus, abbreviated to Nick;
assimilated with the Slavic Nitz, it first became Nitsche and then Nietzsche.[48]
It is not known why Nietzsche wanted to be thought of as Polish nobility. According to biographer R. J.
Hollingdale, Nietzsche's propagation of the Polish ancestry myth may have been part of the latter's
"campaign against Germany".[48]

Philosophy

Nietzsche's works remain controversial, and there is widespread disagreement about their interpretation
and significance. Part of the difficulty in interpreting Nietzsche arises from the uniquely provocative style
of his philosophical writing. Nietzsche frequently delivered trenchant critiques of Christianity in the most
offensive and blasphemous terms possible given the context of 19th century Europe.[original research?]
These aspects of Nietzsche's style run counter to traditional values in philosophical writing, and they
alienated him from the academic establishment both in his time and, to a lesser extent, today.

A few of the themes that Nietzsche scholars have devoted the most attention to include Nietzsche's
views on morality, his view that "God is dead" (and along with it any sort of God's-eye view on the world
thus leading to perspectivism), his notions of the will to power and Übermensch, and his suggestion of
eternal return.

Morality

In Daybreak Nietzsche begins his "Campaign against Morality".[55] He calls himself an "immoralist" and
harshly criticizes the prominent moral schemes of his day: Christianity, Kantianism, and utilitarianism. In
Ecce Homo Nietzsche called the establishment of moral systems based on a dichotomy of good and evil a
"calamitous error",[56] and wished to initiate a re-evaluation of the values of the Judeo-Christian
world.[57] He indicates his desire to bring about a new, more naturalistic source of value in the vital
impulses of life itself.

In Beyond Good And Evil and On The Genealogy Of Morality, Nietzsche's genealogical account of the
development of master-slave morality occupies a central place. Nietzsche presents master-morality as
the original system of morality—perhaps best associated with Homeric Greece. Here, value arises as a
contrast between good and bad, or between 'life-affirming' and 'life-denying': wealth, strength, health,
and power, the sort of traits found in a Homeric hero, count as good; while bad is associated with the
poor, weak, sick, and pathetic, the sort of traits conventionally associated with slaves in ancient times.

Slave-morality, in contrast, comes about as a reaction to master-morality. Nietzsche associates slave-

morality with the Jewish and Christian traditions. Here, value emerges from the contrast between good
and evil: good being associated with other-worldliness, charity, piety, restraint, meekness, and
submission; evil seen as worldly, cruel, selfish, wealthy, and aggressive. Nietzsche sees slave-morality
born out of the ressentiment of slaves. It works to overcome the slave's own sense of inferiority before
the (better-off) masters. It does so by making out slave weakness to be a matter of choice, by, e.g.,
relabeling it as "meekness."
Nietzsche sees the slave-morality as a source of the nihilism that has overtaken Europe. In Nietzsche's
eyes, modern Europe, and its Christianity, exists in a hypocritical state due to a tension between master
and slave morality, both values contradictorily determining, to varying degrees, the values of most
Europeans (who are "motley"). Nietzsche calls for exceptional people to no longer be ashamed of their
uniqueness in the face of a supposed morality-for-all, which Nietzsche deems to be harmful to the
flourishing of exceptional people. However, Nietzsche cautions that morality, per se, is not bad; it is good
for the masses, and should be left to them. Exceptional people, on the other hand, should follow their
own "inner law." A favorite motto of Nietzsche, taken from Pindar, reads: "Become what you are."

Death of God, nihilism, perspectivism

The statement "God is dead", occurring in several of Nietzsche's works (notably in The Gay Science), has
become one of his best-known remarks. On the basis of it, most commentators[58] regard Nietzsche as
an atheist; others (such as Kaufmann) suggest that this statement reflects a more subtle understanding
of divinity. In Nietzsche's view, recent developments in modern science and the increasing secularization
of European society had effectively 'killed' the Abrahamic God, who had served as the basis for meaning
and value in the West for more than a thousand years.

Nietzsche claimed the death of God would eventually lead to the loss of any universal perspective on
things, and along with it any coherent sense of objective truth.[59] Instead we would retain only our own
multiple, diverse, and fluid perspectives. This view has acquired the name "perspectivism".

Alternatively, the death of God may lead beyond bare perspectivism to outright nihilism, the belief that
nothing has any inherent importance and that life lacks purpose. As Heidegger put the problem, "If God
as the suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the suprasensory world of the Ideas has
suffered the loss of its obligatory and above it its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing more
remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself."[60] Developing this idea, Nietzsche
wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, therein introducing the concept of a value-creating Übermensch.
According to Lampert, "the death of God must be followed by a long twilight of piety and nihilism (II. 19;
III. 8). […] Zarathustra's gift of the superman is given to a mankind not aware of the problem to which the
superman is the solution."[61]

Will to power

A basic element in Nietzsche's philosophical outlook is the "will to power" (der Wille zur Macht), which
provides a basis for understanding human behavior. In a wide sense of a term, the will to power is a
more important element than pressure for adaptation or survival.[62] According to Nietzsche, only in
limited situations is the drive for conservation precedent over the will to power. The natural condition of
life, according to him, is one of profusion.[63] In its later forms Nietzsche's concept of the will to power
applies to all living things, suggesting that adaptation and the struggle to survive is a secondary drive in
the evolution of animals, less important than the desire to expand one's power. Nietzsche eventually
took this concept further still, and speculated that it may apply to inorganic nature as well. He
transformed the idea of matter as centers of force into matter as centers of will to power. Nietzsche
wanted to dispense with the atomistic theory of matter, a theory which he viewed as a relic of the
metaphysics of substance.[64] One study of Nietzsche defines his fully developed concept of the will to
power as "the element from which derive both the quantitative difference of related forces and the
quality that devolves into each force in this relation" revealing the will to power as "the principle of the
synthesis of forces."[65]

Nietzsche's notion of the will to power can also be viewed as a response to Schopenhauer's "will to live."
Writing a generation before Nietzsche, Schopenhauer had regarded the entire universe and everything in
it as driven by a primordial will to live, thus resulting in all creatures' desire to avoid death and to
procreate. Nietzsche, however, challenges Schopenhauer's account and suggests that people and
animals really want power; living in itself appears only as a subsidiary aim—something necessary to
promote one's power. Defending his view, Nietzsche describes instances where people and animals
willingly risk their lives to gain power—most notably in instances like competitive fighting and warfare.
Once again, Nietzsche seems to take part of his inspiration from the ancient Homeric Greek texts he
knew well: Greek heroes and aristocrats or "masters" did not desire mere living (they often died quite
young and risked their lives in battle) but wanted power, glory, and greatness. In this regard he often
mentions the common Greek theme of agon or contest.

In addition to Schopenhauer's psychological views, Nietzsche contrasts his notion of the will to power
with many of the other most popular psychological views of his day, such as that of utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism—a philosophy mainly promoted, in Nietzsche's days and before, by British thinkers such as
Jeremy Bentham and James Mill—claims that all people fundamentally want to be happy. But this
conception of happiness found in utilitarianism Nietzsche rejected as something limited to, and
characteristic of, English society only.[66] Also Platonism and Christian neo-Platonism–which claim that
people ultimately want to achieve unity with The Good or with God–are philosophies he criticizes. In
each case, Nietzsche argues that the "will to power" provides a more useful and general explanation of
human behavior.

Übermensch

Another concept important to an understanding of Nietzsche's thought is the Übermensch. While

interpretations of Nietzsche's overman vary wildly, here is one of his quotations from Thus Spoke
Zarathustra (Prologue, §§3–4):

"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome
him? … All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of
this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A
laughing stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughingstock or painful
embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you
were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.... The overman is the meaning of the
earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth.... Man is a rope, tied between
beast and overman—a rope over an abyss … what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end."

Eternal return

The idea of eternal return occurs in a parable in Section 341 of The Gay Science, and also in the chapter
"Of the Vision and the Riddle" in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, among other places.[67] Nietzsche
contemplates the idea as potentially "horrifying and paralyzing", and says that its burden is the "heaviest
weight" imaginable ("das schwerste Gewicht").[68] The wish for the eternal return of all events would
mark the ultimate affirmation of life, a reaction to Schopenhauer's praise of denying the will–to–live. To
comprehend eternal recurrence in his thought, and to not merely come to peace with it but to embrace
it, requires amor fati, "love of fate":[69]

Reading and influence

As a philologist, Nietzsche had a thorough knowledge of Greek philosophy. He read Immanuel Kant, John
Stuart Mill, Arthur Schopenhauer and African Spir,[70] who became his main opponents in his
philosophy, and later Spinoza, whom he saw as his "precursor" in some respects[71] but as a
personification of the "ascetic ideal" in others. However, Nietzsche referred to Kant as a "moral fanatic",
Mill as a "blockhead", and of Spinoza he said: "How much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this
masquerade of a sickly recluse betray?"[72]

Nietzsche's philosophy, while highly innovative and revolutionary, was indebted to many predecessors.
While at Basel, Nietzsche offered lecture courses on the "Pre-Platonic Philosophers" for several years,
and the text of this lecture series has been characterized as a "lost link" in the development of his
thought. "In it concepts such as the will to power, the eternal return of the same, the overman, gay
science, self-overcoming and so on receive rough, unnamed formulations and are linked to specific pre-
Platonics, especially Heraclitus, who emerges as a pre-Platonic Nietzsche."[73] The pre-Socratic Greek
thinker Heraclitus was known for the rejection of the concept of being as a constant and eternal principle
of universe, and his embrace of "flux" and incessant change. His symbolism of the world as "child play"
marked by amoral spontaneity and lack of definite rules was appreciated by Nietzsche.[74] From his
Heraclitean sympathy Nietzsche was also a vociferous detractor of Parmenides, who opposed Heraclitus
and believed all world is a single Being with no change at all.[75]

In his Egotism in German Philosophy, Santayana claimed that Nietzsche's whole philosophy was a
reaction to Schopenhauer. Santayana wrote that Nietzsche's work was "an emendation of that of
Schopenhauer. The will to live would become the will to dominate; pessimism founded on reflection
would become optimism founded on courage; the suspense of the will in contemplation would yield to a
more biological account of intelligence and taste; finally in the place of pity and asceticism
(Schopenhauer's two principles of morals) Nietzsche would set up the duty of asserting the will at all
costs and being cruelly but beautifully strong. These points of difference from Schopenhauer cover the
whole philosophy of Nietzsche."[76]

Nietzsche expressed admiration for 17th century French moralists such as La Rochefoucauld, Jean de La
Bruyère and Vauvenargues,[77] as well as for Stendhal.[78] The organicism of Paul Bourget influenced
Nietzsche,[79] as did that of Rudolf Virchow and Alfred Espinas.[80] Nietzsche early learned of
Darwinism through Friedrich Albert Lange.[81] Notably, he also read some of the posthumous works of
Charles Baudelaire,[82] Tolstoy's My Religion, Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The
Possessed.[82][83] Nietzsche called Dostoevsky "the only psychologist from whom I have anything to
learn."[84] Harold Bloom has often claimed, particularly in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, that the
essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson had a profound and favourable influence on Nietzsche. While Nietzsche
never mentions Max Stirner, the similarities in their ideas have prompted a minority of interpreters to
suggest a relationship between the two.[85] In 1861 Nietzsche wrote an enthusiastic essay on his
"favorite poet", Friedrich Hölderlin, mostly forgotten at that time.[86] He also expressed deep
appreciation for Adalbert Stifter's Indian Summer.[87]

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Gottlieb_Fichte

Era 18th-century philosophy

Region Western Philosophy

School German Idealism, German Romanticism, Neo-Kantianism, Post-Kantianism

Main interests Self-consciousness and Self-awareness, Moral Philosophy, Political Philosophy

Notable ideas Absolute consciousness, thesis-antithesis-synthesis, the not-I, striving, mutual

recognition

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (May 19, 1762 – January 27, 1814; German pronunciation: [ˈjoːhan ˈɡɔtliːp ˈfɪçtə])
was a German philosopher. He was one of the founding figures of the philosophical movement known as
German idealism, a movement that developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel
Kant. Fichte is often perceived as a figure whose philosophy forms a bridge between the ideas of Kant
and the German Idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Recently, philosophers and scholars have begun
to appreciate Fichte as an important philosopher in his own right due to his original insights into the
nature of self-consciousness or self-awareness. Like Descartes and Kant before him, he was motivated by
the problem of subjectivity and consciousness. Fichte also wrote political philosophy and is considered
one of the fathers of German nationalism.
Biography

Origins

Fichte was born in Rammenau, Upper Lusatia. The son of a ribbon weaver,[1] he came of peasant stock
which had lived in the region for many generations. The family was noted in the neighborhood for its
probity and piety. Christian Fichte, Johann Gottlieb's father, married somewhat above his station. It has
been suggested that a certain impatience which Fichte himself displayed throughout his life was an
inheritance from his mother.[2]

Young Fichte received the rudiments of his education from his father. He early showed remarkable
ability, and it was owing to his reputation among the villagers that he gained the opportunity for a better
education than he otherwise would have received. The story runs that the Freiherr von Militz, a country
landowner, arrived too late to hear the local pastor preach. He was, however, informed that a lad in the
neighborhood would be able to repeat the sermon practically verbatim. As a result the baron took the
lad into his protection, which meant that he paid his tuition.[2]

Early schooling

Fichte was placed in the family of Pastor Krebel at Niederau near Meissen and there received thorough
grounding in the classics. From this time onward, Fichte saw little of his parents. In October 1774, he was
attending the celebrated foundation-school at Pforta near Naumburg. This school is associated with the
names of Novalis, August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel, Fichte and Nietzsche. The spirit of the
institution was semi-monastic and, while the education given was excellent in its way, it is doubtful
whether there was enough social life and contact with the world for a pupil of Fichte's temperament and
antecedents. Perhaps his education strengthened a tendency toward introspection and independence,
characteristics which appear strongly in his doctrines and writings.[2]

Theological studies

In 1780, he began study at the Jena theology seminary. Fichte seems to have supported himself at this
period of bitter poverty and hard struggle.[2] Freiherr von Militz continued to support him, but when he
died in 1784, Fichte had to end his studies prematurely, so without completing his degree. During the
years 1784 to 1788, he supported himself in a precarious way as tutor in various Saxon families.[1] Fichte
then worked as a private tutor in Zürich for two years, which were a time of great contentment. Here he
met Johanna Rahn,[2] and became acquainted with Pestalozzi.[1] In 1790, he became engaged to
Johanna Rahn, who happened to be the niece of the famous poet F. G. Klopstock. In 1790, Fichte began
to study the works of Kant, initially since one of his students wanted to know about them. They were to
have a lasting effect on the trajectory of his life and thought. While he was assimilating the Kantian
philosophy and preparing to develop it, fate dealt him a blow: the Rahn family had suffered financial
reverses, and the impending marriage had to be postponed.[2]
Kant

From Zurich, Fichte returned to Leipzig, and in 1791 obtained a tutorship at Warsaw, in the house of a
Polish nobleman. The situation, however, proved disagreeable.[1] He was soon released. He then got a
chance to see Kant at Königsberg. After a disappointing interview, he shut himself in his lodgings and
threw all his energies into the composition of an essay which would compel Kant's attention and
interest. This essay, completed in five weeks, was the Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (Attempt at
a Critique of All Revelation, 1792).[2] This book that investigates the connections between divine
revelation and Kant's critical philosophy. The first edition of the book was published, without Kant or
Fichte's knowledge, without Fichte's name and signed preface; it was thus mistakenly thought to be a
new work by Kant himself.[3] Everyone, including the first reviews of the book, assumed Kant was the
author; when Kant cleared the confusion and openly praised the work and author, Fichte's reputation
skyrocketed, as many intellectuals of the day were of the opinion that it was "...the most shocking and
astonishing news... [since] nobody but Kant could have written this book. This amazing news of a third
sun in the philosophical heavens has set me into such confusion..."[4]

Jena

In October 1793, he was married at Zürich, where he remained the rest of the year. Stirred by the events
and principles of the French Revolution, he wrote and published anonymously two pamphlets which
mark him as a devoted defender of liberty of thought and action and an advocate of political changes. In
December of the same year, he received an invitation to fill the position of extraordinary professor of
philosophy at the University of Jena. He accepted and began his lectures in May of the next year. With
extraordinary zeal, he expounded his system of “transcendental idealism.” His success was immediate.
He seems to have excelled as a lecturer because of the earnestness and force of his personality. These
lectures were later published under the title The Vocation of the Scholar. He gave himself up to intense
production, and a succession of works soon appeared.[1][2]

Atheism Dispute

After weathering a couple of academic storms, he was finally dismissed from Jena in 1799 as a result of a
charge of atheism. He was accused of atheism in 1798 after publishing his essay “Ueber den Grund
unsers Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung” (On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World-
Governance), which he had written in response to Friedrich Karl Forberg's essay “Development of the
Concept of Religion,” in his Philosophical Journal. For Fichte, God should be conceived primarily in moral
terms. To many, such a conception would to rob Him of personality, and in vain did Fichte deny the
atheistic nature of his doctrine.[1][2]
Berlin

Since all the German states except Prussia had joined in the cry against him, he was forced to go to
Berlin. Here he associated himself with the Schlegels, Schleiermacher, Schelling and Tieck.[2] In April
1800, through the introduction of Hungarian writer Ignaz Aurelius Fessler, he was initiated into
Freemasonry in the Lodge Pythagoras of the Blazing Star where he was elected minor warden. At first
Fichte was the warm admirer of Fessler, and was disposed to aid him in his proposed Masonic reform.
But later he became Fessler's bitter opponent. Their controversy attracted much attention among
Freemasons.[5] In 1805, Fichte was appointed to a professorship in Erlangen. The disaster at Jena in
1806, in which Napoleon completely crushed the Prussian army, drove him to Königsberg for a time, but
he returned to Berlin in 1807 and continued his literary activity.[1][2]

The deplorable situation of Germany stirred him to the depths and led him to deliver the famous
Addresses to the German Nation (1808) which guided the uprising against Napoleon. He became a
professor of the new university at Berlin founded in 1809. By the votes of his colleagues Fichte was
unanimously elected its rector in the succeeding year. But, once more, his impetuosity and reforming
zeal led to friction, and he resigned in 1812. The campaign against Napoleon began, and the hospitals at
Berlin were soon full of patients. Fichte's wife devoted herself to nursing and caught a virulent fever. Just
as she was recovering, he himself was stricken down. He died of typhus at the age of 52.[1][2]

His son, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, also made contributions to philosophy.

Fichte's philosophy

In mimicking Kant's difficult style, Fichte produced works that were barely intelligible. "He made no
hesitation in pluming himself on his great skill in the shadowy and obscure, by often remarking to his
pupils, that 'there was only one man in the world who could fully understand his writings; and even he
was often at a loss to seize upon his real meaning.' "[6] This remark was often mistakenly attributed to
Hegel.

Fichte did not endorse Kant's argument for the existence of noumena, of "things in themselves", the
supra-sensible reality beyond the categories of human reason. Fichte saw the rigorous and systematic
separation of "things in themselves" (noumena) and things "as they appear to us" (phenomena) as an
invitation to skepticism. Rather than invite such skepticism, Fichte made the radical suggestion that we
should throw out the notion of a noumenal world and instead accept the fact that consciousness does
not have a grounding in a so-called "real world". In fact, Fichte achieved fame for originating the
argument that consciousness is not grounded in anything outside of itself. The phenomenal world as
such, arises from self-consciousness; the activity of the ego; and moral awareness. His student (and
critic), Schopenhauer, wrote:

...Fichte who, because the thing-in-itself had just been discredited, at once prepared a system without
any thing-in-itself. Consequently, he rejected the assumption of anything that was not through and
through merely our representation, and therefore let the knowing subject be all in all or at any rate
produce everything from its own resources. For this purpose, he at once did away with the essential and
most meritorious part of the Kantian doctrine, the distinction between a priori and a posteriori and thus
that between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself. For he declared everything to be a priori, naturally
without any evidence for such a monstrous assertion; instead of these, he gave sophisms and even crazy
sham demonstrations whose absurdity was concealed under the mask of profundity and of the
incomprehensibility ostensibly arising therefrom. Moreover, he appealed boldly and openly to
intellectual intuition, that is, really to inspiration.

— Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. I, §13

Central theory

In his work Foundations of Natural Right (1796), Fichte argued that self-consciousness was a social
phenomenon — an important step and perhaps the first clear step taken in this direction by modern
philosophy. A necessary condition of every subject's self-awareness, for Fichte, is the existence of other
rational subjects. These others call or summon (fordern auf) the subject or self out of its
unconsciousness and into an awareness of itself as a free individual.

Fichte's account proceeds from the general principle that the I must set itself up as an individual in order
to set itself up at all, and that in order to set itself up as an individual it must recognize itself as it were to
a calling or summons (Aufforderung) by other free individual(s) — called, moreover, to limit its own
freedom out of respect for the freedom of the other. The same condition applied and applies, of course,
to the other(s) in its development. Hence, mutual recognition of rational individuals turns out to be a
condition necessary for the individual 'I' in general. This argument for intersubjectivity is central to the
conception of selfhood developed in the Doctrine of Science (aka 'Wissenschaftslehre'). In Fichte's view
consciousness of the self depends upon resistance or a check by something that is understood as not
part of the self yet is not immediately ascribable to a particular sensory perception. In his later lectures
(his Nova Methodo), Fichte incorporated it into his revised presentation of the very foundations of his
system, where the summons takes its place alongside original feeling, which takes the place of the earlier
Anstoss (see below) as both a limit upon the absolute freedom of the I and a condition for the positing of
the same.

The I ('Das Ich') itself sets this situation up for itself (it posits itself). To 'set' (setzen) does not mean to
'create' the objects of consciousness. The principle in question simply states that the essence of an I lies
in the assertion of ones own self-identity, i.e., that consciousness presupposes self-consciousness. Such
immediate self-identity, however, cannot be understood as a psychological fact, nor as an act or accident
of some previously existing substance or being. It is an action of the I, but one that is identical with the
very existence of this same I. In Fichte's technical terminology, the original unity of self-consciousness is
to be understood as both an action and as the product of the same I, as a fact and/or act (Tathandlung),
a unity that is presupposed by and contained within every fact and every act of empirical consciousness,
though it never appears as such therein.

The 'I' must set (setzen) itself in order to be an 'I' at all; but it can set itself only insofar as it sets itself up
as limited. Moreover, it cannot even set for itself its own limitations, in the sense of producing or
creating these limits. The finite I cannot be the ground of its own passivity. Instead, for Fichte, if the 'I' is
to set itself off at all, it must simply discover itself to be limited, a discovery that Fichte characterizes as a
repulse or resistance (Anstoss) to the free practical activity of the I. Such an original limitation of the I is,
however, a limit for the I only insofar as the I sets it out as a limit. The I does this, according to Fichte's
analysis, by setting its own limitation, first, as only a feeling, then as a sensation, then as an intuition of a
thing, and finally as a summons of another person. The Anstoss thus provides the essential impetus that
first sets in motion the entire complex train of activities that finally result in our conscious experience
both of ourselves and others as empirical individuals and of the world around us.

Though Anstoss plays a similar role as the thing in itself does in Kantian philosophy, unlike Kant, Fichte's
Anstoss is not something foreign to the I. Instead, it denotes the I's original encounter with its own
finitude. Rather than claim that the Not-I is the cause or ground of the Anstoss, Fichte argues that non-I
is set up by the I precisely in order to explain to itself the anstoss, that is, in order to become conscious
of anstoss.

Though the Wissenschaftslehre demonstrates that such an Anstoss must occur if self-consciousness is to
come about, it is quite unable to deduce or to explain the actual occurrence of such an Anstoss — except
as a condition for the possibility of consciousness. Accordingly, there are strict limits to what can be
expected from any a priori deduction of experience, and this limitation, for Fichte, equally applies to
Kant's transcendental philosophy.

According to Fichte, transcendental philosophy can explain that the world must have space, time, and
causality, but it can never explain why objects have the particular sensible properties they happen to
have or why I am this determinate individual rather than another. This is something that the I simply has
to discover at the same time that it discovers its own freedom, and indeed, as a condition for the latter.

Other works

Fichte also developed a theory of the state based on the idea of self-sufficiency. In his mind, the state
should control international relations, the value of money, and remain an autarky. Because of this
necessity to have relations with other rational beings in order to achieve consciousness, Fichte writes
that there must be a 'relation of right,' in which there is a mutual recognition of rationality by both
parties.

Nationalism
Fichte made important contributions to political nationalism in Germany. In his Addresses to the German
Nation (1808), a series of speeches delivered in Berlin under French occupation, he urged the German
peoples to "have character and be German"--entailed in his idea of Germanness was antisemitism, since
he argued that "making Jews free German citizens would hurt the German nation."[7] Fichte answered
the call of Freiherr vom Stein, who attempted to develop the patriotism necessary to resist the French
specifically among the "educated and cultural elites of the kingdom." Fichte located Germanness in the
supposed continuity of the German language, and based it on Tacitus, who had hailed German virtues in
Germania and celebrated the heroism of Arminius in his Annales.[8]

In an earlier work from 1793 dealing with the ideals and politics of the French Revolution, Beiträge zur
Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die Französische Revolution (Contributions to the Correction
of the Public's Judgment concerning the French Revolution), he called Jews a "state within a state" that
could "undermine" the German nation.[9] In regard to Jews getting "civil rights," he wrote that this
would only be possible if one managed "to cut off all their heads in one night, and to set new ones on
their shoulders, which should contain not a single Jewish idea."[9]

Historian Robert Nisbet thought him to be "the true author of National Socialism".[10]

Final period in Berlin

Some of Fichte's best-known works are from the last decade of his life, where he gave lecture courses in
Berlin to the public at large on a wide variety of topics.

These include two works from 1806: The Characteristics of the Present Age, where Fichte outlines his
theory of different historical and cultural epochs, and a semi-mystical work: The Way Towards the
Blessed Life; or, the Doctrine of Religion, which contains his most extensive thoughts on religion. In 1808
he gave a series of speeches in French-occupied Berlin, Addresses to the German Nation.

In 1810, in part because educational themes in Addresses..., although the University itself was designed
along lines put forward by Wilhelm von Humboldt and in part because of his earlier work at Jena
University, Fichte was made the first Chair of Philosophy at the new Berlin University, where he was also
made rector.

Fichte also continued to give private and university lectures on further versions of his
Wissenschaftslehre. However, apart from a brief work of barely 15 pages from 1810: The Science of
Knowledge in its General Outline, Fichte did not publish any of these lecture courses. A small selection
was published thirty years after Fichte's death by his son, but the vast majority has only recently been
made available in the last decades of the twentieth century, in the Gesamtausgabe. These writings
include substantially reworked versions of the Wissenschaftslehre from the years 1810, 1811 and 1813,
as well as a Doctrine of Right (1812), a Doctrine of Ethics (1812).
HISTORY OF 19TH CENTURY EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY

http://www.csudh.edu/phenom_studies/europ19/lect_1.html

INTRODUCTION

Why do we bother to pursue knowledge or the questioning search? More specifically, in particular when
such knowledge has no practical or useful relevance to our practical pragmatic everydayness? From the
point of view of everydayness and dealing with our mundane concern with everyday practical needs, it
seems more likely that instead of pursuing knowledge as such truth itselfwe would be better off and
more successful in our practical lives if the knowledge was instrumentalnamely useful and effective for
problem-solvingto make our lives better. (We dare not here ask the question, what is the nature of the
better life or the good life.)

Nevertheless, Aristotle said that by nature the human-being pursues knowledge and truth. What did he
mean "by nature?" He perhaps means that what makes the human-being human is that predisposition to
pursue knowledge also for its own sake. This reduces the level of the question to that of our natural
constitution. In this sense, Aristotle's viewpoint is often characterized as naturalistic. However, this at
least helps us to avoid falling into a certain kind of reductionism, in which an explanation is attempted to
explicate the pursuit of knowledge by means of something else than knowledge for its own sake, i. e., by
means of the elements of practical human existence such as "pleasure," "happiness," "desire," "practical
use," "the well-being of society," "power or the ability to dominate others," "control over nature," and
"progress for its matter," etc.

However, we should not and could not leave the question of the pursuit of knowledge in this manner.
Aristotle was not completely satisfied with it at that. Aristotle further elaborates, although he was
necessarily naturalistic, that, in our pursuit of knowledge and possessing knowledge itself, we experience
pure, intrinsic joy. This joy is to be distinguished from mere sensuous pleasure, though according to
Aristotle, sensuous pleasure is one of the joys and perhaps 'joy" immediate, the easiest, the lowest one.
However, that joy or pleasure which "accompanies" the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is not the
aim and goal of our pursuit of knowledge, but is a "side effects," if you will, on our body and sometimes
on consciousness; it cannot be the reverse (here we deviate from Aristotle's position, which holds that
the human-being by nature desires happiness (pleasure). Of course, here we are not asking for the cause
or the ground for the pursuit of knowledge.

We simply ask ourself how (phenomenologically in particular) the pursuit of knowledge begins, how is it
given to us as a concrete phenomenon and what difference the pursuit of knowledge brings about in us
in the process.

Let us start describing a most concrete, particular situation of the human-being where one does not
pursue knowledge and is quite content with such situation (with a kind of self-conceit in already
possessing knowledge) and compare this with the human situation in which we feel the urge to desire,
pursue and discover, and possibly even acquire knowledge. As Plato beautifully described this situation
in his Symposium, Socrates in the dialogue calls this urge to search for knowledge the "love of wisdom."
On the one hand, this urge in us is driven by the clear awareness that indeed we possess no knowledge.
On the other hand, we are led to the search for knowledge that the explicit consciousness of the absence
of knowledge directs us to. Intrinsic joy is found in our own pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, in
itself as its "value."

Due to the overwhelming control of natural sciences and knowledge of them, we are very accustomed
to the instrumental value of knowledge, which we find useful. However, it is indispensable to note that
even in the natural sciences, the search for and discovery of knowledge for its own sake (and not
motivated by any particular purpose) is always accompanied by pure joy as an intrinsic value. In this
sense, therefore, h fisosophia (philosophy-=love of wisdom and its pursuit) is not for something else, but
is pursued for its own sake. Thus, knowledge is to be pursued primarily for its own sake and not for
something else (denial of the instrumental nature of philosophical pursuit).

Our next question is then: Why do we study philosophy in a historical perspective? We may perhaps
read well the works of Hegel or Schelling or Nietzsche. That is not sufficient to understand the historical
development of philosophical inquiry in 19th century philosophy in Europe. This is why we study the
history of philosophy. Otherwise, we could leisurely read, say, Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind in
isolation for a couple of semesters.

Then what is history? Until the 19th century, intellectuals, scholars and philosophers were not
interested in history as the domain of investigation, nor did they recognize history as the legitimate
domain of reality. Why? For one reason, it is because our intellectual curiosity is directed to nature and
its understanding (since the Renaissance in particular) and not to the human-being and its domain of
activities (there are always exceptions such as Machiavelli, Pascal, Locke, Hegel and others in
philosophy).The other reason is because two mutually inconsistent concepts of time were taken for
granted. Thus, the domain of reality called "history" was totally covered up by the self-evidentness
(being-taken-for-grantedness) in our understanding. Time is understood in Western "religious culture"
(except the Indian and Asian cultures--Zorasterism included--- where time was viewed not as linear, but
circular) as a linear, uninterrupted development which is supposedly begins with God and Genesis and
ends with the Final Judgment. This is called the eschatological concept of time. In this concept of time
nothing repeats. The other concept of time taken for granted in the pursuit of natural science when
mathematics were applied to the understanding of nature, and pure linear mechanical efficient causality
became to be considered the sole principle of reality (=the universe or nature), it is assumed that in time,
everything in principle repeats and is repeatable. Nothing new happens, but rather a certain regularity
rules among phenomena of nature, thus we are able to discover a law of nature which can and does
apply to many phenomena, which are considered essentially the same. (Needless to say, this contention
is not consistent with the incompleteness and predictability of scientific law, which also in principle
allows change as progress of knowledge.) The celestial bodies repeatedly circle themselves in their own
orbits. Four seasons take place one after another. Plant and animal life repeats itself. Only this aspect of
Aristotle's observation of nature was revived (the aspects of value in his conception of nature were
ignored). An experiment is possible only under the assumption of this repeated time or repeatable time.
 Since the Renaissance, when linear, mechanical causality was accepted as the self-evident principle of
reality, this notion of repeatable time (together with linear, mechanical causality) has become
overwhelmingly accepted "as self-evident" among the intellectual pursuits in the West. Thus, the
eschatological concept of time is pushed aside and perhaps an effort was made to even overlook and
forget this eschatological time in the understanding of the universe. When time is understood to be
repeatable, there is no way for us to conceive of the portion of reality which flowed in the past as
history. History in its principle is supposed to consist in the uniqueness of an event and the
nonrepeatability of time, as Neo-Kantians such as Heinrich Rickert made clear. Such understanding came
not only from the Judeo-Christian tradition as mentioned above and generally assumed, but also,we
must emphasize it has been up to now long ignored that understanding the nonrepeatability and
linearity of time is unmistakably rooted in and derived from the "teleological causal" understanding of
reality.

History in the primary sense is the history of human activities and incidents resulted from such human
activities. Of course, one may say "the history of nature" or "the history of the galaxies." In this case the
concept of history is used in the derivative sense. Therefore, we do not worry about such use.

In the sense of "Geschichte" (history in the sense of what has happened in the past), events which can
be called "historical" must involve human actions and activities, whereby the meaning and the purpose
or intention of such human actions are crucial to describing the historical "events." Without taking into
consideration these elements of meaning and purpose or intention, any so called "historical events" are
in toto indistinguishable from events which merely happen (as natural phenomena). For example, the
French revolution occurred in 1789. As a mere event, a mob stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789. Here
we do not know the following: Why they went, their intention, how they got together, or the meaning
this event had in the flow of history of French politics and civilization. Amazingly, upon closer
examination, the event was described merely as somewhat "violent" movements of people in Paris from
the city to Bastille alone and nothing else.

In order to understand the meaning and value of this event we must presuppose in order to describe
and narrate it as a historical phenomenon. We neither "create" nor "construct" for our convenience such
meaning and value for the purpose of historical narration (history in the sense of "Historie" in German).
On the contrary, the historical event, as long as it is historical, hides its meaning and its value behind the
superficial phenomenon of a certain event. The genuine task of the true historian is to interpret, take the
meaning and value of such an event from the darkness into the light by putting it into the context of
historical development. This work of the historian signifies literally what the German word "auslegen"
(bring out) primarily denotes.

To "interpret" (auslegen) a phenomenon as historical in this way is to see a certain phenomenon in the
relational context of the final causality or the teleological causality.

In the history of Western philosophy, it was Hegel that drew our attention to unrepeatable time and
history itself.
 What did Hegel attempt to accomplish? Instead of linear, mechanical, efficient causality (causa
efficiens), Hegel saw the meaning, the purposefulness and the telos in the understanding of reality. In
other words, in reality Hegel rediscovered teleological causality (causa finalis or value) as the principle of
reality.

Any entity, any being which exists or existed in reality, according to Hegel, does not happen to be merely
by chance. In this case, chance is to be understood not against linear, mechanical causality (which is the
basis for mechanical causal determinism), but as chance which is only understood from the meaning and
purpose, and signifies ungovernable, ungoverned, unintelligible not by linear, mechanical causality, but
by teleological causality. Namely such chance is specifically against the meaning and purpose of reality,
teleological causality. On the contrary, any entity, any event which existed, exists or will exist must have
some meaning or purpose for it to be. Now the cause is not efficient and mechanical, but teleological
cause for an entity to be. Hegel has been misunderstood for too long. From this point of view, too,
Hegel's philosophy must be reinterpreted. Only rediscovering the teleological causality in reality, Hegel
was able to deal with history as a portion of reality.

According to Hegel, history is indeed the most important portion of reality which determines whatever
happens in the present and possibly in the future (this "determination" should not be understood as by
mechanical causality--as Marx understood--, but rather with the emphasis on teleological causality). The
concepts of potency and actuality by Aristotle are no longer applied to the repeatable cycle of a
biological organism, but now they obtain a totally new significance and role in understanding an
unrepeatable and unrepeated portion of reality. Hegel understood that there must be something like the
essence or nature of humankind or humanity.

It belongs to the nature of history that history is not synonymous with the experience of past, nor
something which has simply passed into the past. In one sense, history can not subsist as a part of reality
unless we the moral human beings, understand those events which happened in the past.

It is wrong to assume that history is exhausted by such "Erzдhlungen" (story-telling) of what happened
in the past. In this respect, the so-called postmodern contention of history which intends to reduce all
historical phenomena to story-telling shall be found in error. This question must be dealt with in another
context (see Phenomenology of the Other and its Priority). Brief as it may be, let us point out that Hegel
was absolutely right in shedding light on the historical fact that our understanding of history is not
comprehensive and always brings something other with itself. This other cannot be reduced to oneself.

Thus, in the other sense, history is indeed something independent of our story-telling and something
which is to be investigated and by means of which we are able to newly discover and understand what
really happened historically. History, therefore, can and must be investigated. Therefore, often discovery
is made in history. Take for example, for a long time, I was brain washed by the traditional interpretation
of Hegel and overlooked this genuine, authentic motivation of Hegel's attempt. Quite recently, I am
more convinced that linear, mechanical causality (causa efficiens), if it should be a principle of reality,
must be very limited. Besides causa efficiens, there must be causa finalis, mutual determination,
intentionality and even synchronicity in reality. I am more and more convinced with the Humean
interpretation of causation and have quite recently come to the conclusion that Hegel tried to discover
and understand reality in terms of causa finalis instead of causa efficiens. This would have been totally
impossible when history is nothing but a possible totality of story-telling.

In the position in which history may be reducible to story-telling of history, it is implicitly assumed, after
the Leibnizian model, that a historical event is not a fact which indeed happened in the past, but is only
known to us as a phenomenon dependent on the perspective in which the history is viewed. This is a
strange combination of Leibniz's notion of all possible worlds and the sophists' relativism. This position
also reminds us of Hume's point of view, in which a universal such as a substance is useless, because we
can understand phenomena without assuming any such a thing as substance. According to Hume, it
makes perfect sense and is quite sufficient to understand a bundle of impressions or ideas for a
substance.

On the basis of the above described, now we may be able to discern what actually was historical and
what is told as a story of what historically occurred.

Relationships among so-called historical events have been also misconceived for a long time. In order to
discern what belongs to history and what does not, we talk about the significance or importance. And
yet, this cause finalis of such a historical event in itself has been completely overlooked in our historical
understanding. Instead, we have exerted ourselves in applying causa efficiens to the understanding and
explanation of a historical phenomenon. Of course, I do not deny some usefulness of causa efficiens, but
this alone will never be able to help us understand what history is all about.

In this context, we must praise Hegel and his insight into this causa finalis (the final or teleological
causality) as the principle of historical reality. In short, it may be said that it is Hegel who discovered the
genuine principle of reality, that is, of what history is.

Hegel has been criticized in that he tried to see the History of Humankind as a whole. He was also
criticized on his view that such a possibility only consists in the influence of Judeo Christian eschatology.

Considering the perspective in which Hegel saw history, we are easily led to the same conclusion as
Hegel, that reality must be integrated and unified rather than separate and unconnected. The meaning
or purpose always presupposes the whole and its relation to its parts, just as linear, mechanical causality
presupposes the relation between cause and effect. Causality (or causation when applied as the logical
inference) is a relationship, as Kant correctly considered. In order to establish a certain relationship, it is
necessary to have a certain unity. In this sense, Hegel, instead of viewing reality as meaningless,
unrelated sequences of bunches of bundles of ideas (like Hume's view), saw a process of self-
actualization of the absolute Spirit which has its own purpose, its goal and its meaning.

Thus, history ,when viewed by one or a group of people as the part of reality which is past, must not be
a bunch of insignificant, scattered and unrelated bundles of ideas. On the contrary, there is a unity, there
are relationships among them, there is hierarchy of significance and the process of a series of event to
tell. ўIstorein (to tell a story) was indeed the center of history.
History of philosophy, therefore, is the story of the sequence of philosophers who actually accepted the
question of the teacher and either elaborated on it, or rejected it or advanced it further. The history of
Western philosophy in the 19th century must be understood as an organic whole.

It is not easy for us to comprehend and evaluate the significance of 19th century European philosophy in
its proper perspective because we are temporally so little distant from the 19th century. Nevertheless,
we may safely say in general that 19th century European philosophy constitutes the peak in the historical
development of Western philosophy since the Ancient Greek philosophy. For on the one hand, German
Idealism, Hegel's philosophy in particular, is the ultimate culmination and unification of European
Reason.

It is a philosophical culmination of the ultimate principle such that European Reason is so

comprehensible and accommodating the principles including that of nonreason that Reason appears no
longer merely the principle of two valued logic.

By making the principle of contradiction as the principle of reality, Hegel came so close to the point
where European Reason reflects upon itself such that it makes a breakthrough in its own limitation and
results in grasping reality in its totality through its historical development. I would like to even contend
that Hegel's philosophy went far beyond the limits of European Reason and discovered a possible
direction to what I call the Philosophy of the Other and its Priority.

In this sense, Hegel accomplished not only the total inventory and completion of Western philosophical
thoughts, but also opened up a new road to the possibility of choosing and employing principles other
than reason more extensively in post-postmodern philosophy. It is Fichte who had already discovered
completely anew not reason in the sense of cognitive principle of philosophy, but will and the principle
of his philosophical pursuit, although it is also called reason. In Schelling, however, reason was
abandoned and replaced by such principles of philosophy as intuition, creative imagination and aesthetic
feeling. Schopenhauer thought very highly of Kant's philosophy and yet he chose the non-rational, to be
more precise, the anti rational, "blind" "will" (= World Will which totally alienates itself from cognition of
a thing) as the principle of reality and that of its philosophical comprehension rather than reason. Thus,
as already evident in the case of Herder, Schleiermacher earlier, in development of the German idealism
of Fichte, Schilling and Hegel as well as Schopenhauer who was in opposition to Hegel and his
philosophy, several trials in search of a principle other than reason are already evidenced.

Then we must ask ourselves: What is the essential character of 19th century Western philosophy? In
order to understand this question, it is necessary to ask the following questions: What happened
culturally in Western Europe in the 19th century? Was ist die geistige Situation der Zeit (der
Neunzehnten Jahrhundert , to borrow Karl Jaspers' formulation? How was it related to the preceding
century of the Enlightenment movement and what kind of influences did it exercise on the 20th century
Western world? What were other domains of cultural phenomena in relation to philosophical ones,
which are our main concern.

Let us look at the end of the 18th century in Europe and see what kind of cultural events were taking
place first: In philosophy, one year after his death (1779), Hume's Dialogues of Natural Religion
appeared. Immanuel Kant was still active (Critique of Pure Reason in 1781,Critique of Practical Reason-
1788 and Critique of Judgment-1790) and Fichte's anonymously published An Attempt of Critique on all
Revelations in 1792 which was first taken as being written by Kant and made Fichte instantaneously
famous. Jeremy Bentham published in 1789 Introduction to the Principles for Morals and Legislation.
This was the same year in which the French Revolution took place. In 1791, Herder published The Ideas
for Philosophy of the History of Humanity and Thomas Paine published his magna opera, The Rights of
Man. and The Age of Reason (1794). Not only Herder (by seeing the unity of nature and history with
causa finalis), but also Schleiermacher (with his religious philosophy) made a great impression on the
contemporary intellectuals.

Politically speaking, Europe was under Napoleon Bonaparte's reign, in the U.S. Texas and other states
joined the Union and in 1781, The first ten Amendments to the Constitution (The Bill of Rights) were
ratified. At the end of the 18th century, India and the Far East were threatened by Europeans with
colonization for their opium.

In the domain of music, Haydn (his later chamber music and 12 London symphonies as well as his
oratorio "Creation") and Mozart (the last three Symphonies and Six Haydn String Quartets (1785) The
Marriage of Figarro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787) and Cosi Fan Tutte (1790)The Magic Flute ) were still
active. Against this, Beethoven started studying under Haydn in 1792 and completed his opus 1 Piano
Trio in 1795 and Symphony No. 1 in 1799. The great Romantic composer Franz Schubert was born in
1797.

In the field of literature, the period of Skeptical Enlightenment (Voltaire Irene in 1778, Lessing Nethan
The Wise) quickly ended, and first the so-called "Strum und Drang," then Romanticism and Neo-
Classicism arose and overwhelmed European literature. In 1761, Rousseau published Julie, our Nouvelle
Eloise, while in 1762 Dedrot wrote Le Nouveau de Rameau and Rousseau wrote "Du Contrat Social." The
next year Voltaire wrote Treatise on Tolerance. and Philosophical Dictionary in 1764. In 1765, M. J.
Sedaine wrote the play, "Philosophe sans le savoir." In 1767 Lessing wrote Minna von Barnheim. and yet
already Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg had formulated the movement "Strum und Drang" for the
first time in 1766. In 1770 Friedrich Hцlderlin, the great classic poet, was born in Germany. So too
William Wordsworth in the same year in England. Indeed Goethe was contemporary to Kant and was
requested by one of his friends to read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, so Goethe (Stella-1776, Italian
Journeys-1786, Iphigenie auf Tauris-1787, Don Carlos-1787, Egmond-1788) was active with Schiller (The
Thieves-1782, Fiesco-1783, Kabale and Love-1784). Beaumarchais' The Marriage of Figarro appeared in
1784 (Mozart's opera based on it premiered in 1796). In 1789, William Blake's Songs of Innocence
appeared. In the same year, Goethe's Torquarto and Tasso also performed. It is also interesting to note
that in 1793, Marquis de Sade published his La philosophie dans le boudoir. In 1794, Blake published
Songs of Experience. In 1796, Wordsworth's The Borderers appeared. Goethe wrote his poem, "Hermann
and Dorothea" in 1797, Heinrich Heine was born, and Hцlderlin's "Hyperion" appeared. August Wilhelm
von Schlegel started his translation of Shakespeare in the same year. In 1799, Balzac was born, Novalis'
Heinrich von Otterdingen appeared, Schiller' trilogy, Waldstein and Schegel's Lucinde also published.
 In the field of fine arts, Gйrard, David, and Ingresthe most representative classic painters were active,
while in the UK Gainsbourgh, Reynolds and other portrait painters painted their works. In Venice, the so-
called post-card painters, Cannaletto and Guardi were active. In the U.S., major government buildings
including the White House began to be built. At the end of the 18th century, Goya was painting his
masterpieces in Spain.

In the field of sciences and technologies, an enormous number of discoveries and inventions took place
from 1780-1800. First of all, we must point out James Watt's invention of the double-acting rotary steam
engine in 1782. Together with Matthew Boulton, Watt installed the steam engine in the cotton mill, at
Pappelewick, Nottinghamshire. In 1785. Two years later, John Fitch, an American inventor, launched a
steamboat! It was the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Louis Daguerre pioneered photography in 1789.
Lavoisier, who was executed in 1794, discovered the Table of 31 Chemical Elements in 1790. In America,
Ei Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793 and mass produced the Musket rifle in 1800. In 1797, J. L.
Lagrange published Thйorie des fonctions analytiques.

Thus viewed, it becomes obvious that 18th century Western civilization is the period of transition, that
of change, that of reform, perhaps the first revolt against the overwhelming rationalism since the
Renaissance. It was not reform in the sense that the structure of government or the economic system or
the corporate structure was transformed. On the contrary, the principle of reality was radically
transformed. A new view of reality (particularly in our society) was opened by removing and bracketting
the narrow way of comprehending reality in terms of reason and mechanical causality. Through such a
liberation of the narrow interest of human search for knowledge, suddenly the emphasis of philosophical
and literary interests shifted from nature to the human-being and society. The metamorphosis from the
18th to the 19th century in Western culture is, limited though it may be, a liberalization of culture from
the aristocratic limited few to the more people and expansion of civil society to the bourgeoisie, which
the French Revolution ideologically symbolized.

It may be of some interest to point out that the so-called le fin de ciecle (the end of the century)
movement at the end of the 19th century. It was the feeling of the end of the real Christian era and even
such people as Hegel and Goethe felt that they could not understand what was going to happen in the
immediate future, although they felt that something different was coming (cf.my article, "The Crisis of
Philosophy and the Philosophy of Crisis").

Because of the impact of ideology on 20th century politics, Marx and his philosophy seemed to have
been overestimated in our era. Considering the nature of his philosophy and paradigm, he is strictly
speaking no more than a left Hegelian, although his concept of self alienation of the human-being from
oneself which came from Feuerbach's radical approach to Christianity had a great impact in the further
development of the so-called existential philosophy in 20th century European philosophy. Kierkegaard is
another philosopher, a right Hegelian, who was able to reach the depth of human existence to
essentially actualize the new meaning of Christianity. To Kierkegaard, not reason, but faith in an entirely
different and new sense, was to be the principle of philosophy and of our existence.

On the other hand, our awareness of history and historicity made it possible to reflect upon what we
have had as tradition in 19th century philosophy. Of course, prior to this period, that is the period of the
Enlightenment, the intellectuals defied tradition and tried to see a new way by means of the so-called
narrow sense of Reason. This may be considered as the earlier, quite unsuccessful attempt to critically
evaluate our understanding of reality. However, we had to wait the arrival of Friedrich Nietzsche for the
comprehensive appraisal of European history and its culture. The explicit self-appraisal of European
philosophy and culture in history was attempted for the first time in the history of Western philosophy in
Friedreich Nietzsche's thoughts. Nothing cannot be taken for granted, but philosophy makes everything
including any presupposition a theme of philosophical inquiry. Asserting the creative power of life,
Nietzsche demanded that such concepts as Christian morality and traditional European rational
philosophy be exposed to the clear light of truth and reinterpreted as totally meaningless and useless in
light of the creative future of humankind.

It is therefore our hope that by this inquiry, we shall learn what was experienced at the end of the 19th
century and how such thoughts impact the trends and directions of 20th century philosophical inquiry.

Before, we start investigating Fichte's philosophy of reflection, however, perhaps it is necessary for us to
understand how the philosophical questions were conceived and dealt with from philosophers of the
Renaissance to Fichte's immediate predecessor in German Idealism, Immanuel Kant.

THE BACKGROUND: Historical Development of Western Philosophy from the Renaissance to Kant

It is generally agreed that Western civilization started anew during the Renaissance. Instead of making
an exception (at this time, it is not necessary to do so), we, too, start the Contemporary History of
Western philosophy with the Renaissance. Why?

Almost all contemporary histories of Western philosophy begin with Descartes, though the reasons are
not sufficient to do so. In fact, should we define the contemporary history of Western philosophy as the
philosophy of self and self-consciousness, then at least we must say that it begins with Descartes and will
end with Kant.

However, we would like to begin with some of the Renaissance philosophers such as Copernicus,
Galileo, Kepler, Paraclesus, Nicolo Machiavelli, Nicholas Cusanus as well as Ficino and some Aristotelians
in Padva. In fact, in the Renaissance, the change in the way we view the universe, from the geocentric to
the heliocentric, was an enormous event in the history of the human spirit. However, the change in the
pursuit of knowledge from theo-centric to geo-centric and the homocentric approach was more
earthshaking.

As we all know, the Renaissance started with the desire and intention of our intellectual life's change as
to its object from God and the church to the secular world of the Ancient cultures and that of their
repatriation. In certain areas of our intellectual activities, we had already discovered the Ancient cultures
much earlier than the Renaissance. For example, the legal system of Rome was discovered in the 14th
century, while mathematics, which was mediated and further developed by the medieval Arabic world,
was discovered and introduced via Toledo (Spain) in the 14th century with the help of Jewish
intellectuals who spoke both Arabic and Spanish and assisted as translators of these languages.
 Massive shifts of interest, discoveries and changes took place in the visual arts, theatre, music, dance,
literature, mythology and philosophy of the Ancient worlds. (The pursuit of knowledge may be the best
translation of the philosophy until the post-renaissance period‹in the Medieval universities in the
Western world, undergraduate studies were divided into moral philosophy‹ethics, economics and social
sciences‹ and natural philosophy‹natural sciences‹. At the graduate level, where one could earn a
Doctorate degree, there were theology, jurisprudence, and medicine, the former being the theoretical
pursuit of knowledge, while the latter two, practical pursuit of knowledge. This distinction may still be
found, for example, at Oxford and Cambridge Universities even today.) Not only the clergy, but also
many people outside the church were now taught to read and write classic Latin (no longer Church
Latin). The ideal of education (paideia) changed in terms of its object (from potential clergies to general,
wealthy intellectuals), in terms of its content (from theology and its understanding to that of the well
rounded human-being as human (humanitas is the Latin translation of the Greek paideia, which originally
signified the Greek and then the Roman who were educated by the culture of that time) and in terms of
the means (ancient Greek and Roman culture). In the Ancient Greek and Roman civilization, the object of
inquiry was the universe, nature and the human-being, although Aristotle and Neo-Platonists (e.g.
Plotinus) considered The Divinity as the center of their ontological investigation. Prior to and during the
Renaissance, the interest of the artists were, for example, more directed to human nature (even though
they painted or sculpted the Virgin Mother and Jesus as a Child and saints and angels). The landscape
and details of the room, human figures and expressions were the foci of the artists. Besides sacred
music, much secular music was composed and performed, translated theatre was performed, secular
architecture was built.

What then was the primary and uniquely the object of the pursuit of knowledge (=philosophy) in the
Renaissance and thereafter?

It was the universe, it was nature and it was the human-being itself. Suddenly, God was no longer the
object of our intellectual pursuit of knowledge, although the interest and influence of the church still
persisted, He was no longer the dominant object of intellectual pursuit. The most dominant object of our
intellectual curiosity and knowledge was and has been indeed nature even to this day. This nature was
conceived as the nature, the principles of which are written in mathematical language and only humans
who have the ration and rational understanding can decipher the mystery of nature (Galileo). From
philosophy (pursuit of knowledge), many so-called natural sciences were born to investigate and pursue
knowledge of nature in specific aspects of nature. Yet in philosophical circles in Europe, Scholastic
philosophy had still dominant influence. This philosophy was of course theo-centric and was intended to
support our understanding of reality other than God.

Against this, many philosophers of the time felt a strong need to articulate true knowledge from false
information transmitted from the past. The natural sciences established themselves firmly on the
experience of nature and our mathematical, rational ability to ascertain the laws of nature. Some
philosophers (Bacon for example) failed to recognize the significance of mathematics in comprehension
of nature. Thus, it was of cardinal importance to critically evaluate everything that was considered true,
and clearly and distinctly articulate truth from falsehood.
 Renй Descartes appeared at the right time and in the right place. He was well trained in Scholastic
philosophy and in mathematics (the founder of analytic geometry) and was intellectually quite
sympathetic to both Galileo and Kepler in understanding of the universe. Descartes was caught by a
strong impulse to discern the true from the false and ultimately discover the absolute basis for any
intellectual pursuit of knowledge. His device of universal doubt, however, led him to the evident
knowledge of self and its consciousness. When he was convinced with the dictum that cogito, ergo sum,
Descartes made an inexcusable error in believing that, since the immediate givenness of consciousness
to itself is indubitable, it is equally self-evident that the existence of such a self is also self-evident,
apodeictic truth. By so doing, Descartes was caught deep in the domain of philosophy of self and its
consciousness, which resulted in developing Western philosophy only within this philosophy of self and
consciousness. Indeed, his intention was to comprehend nature, too, and he even succeeded in
providing the basis for the understanding of nature by means of rational knowledge (extension =
mathematical, quantifiable mass), but the actual consequence of his philosophy was to trap all
philosophical enterprises coming after him within the scope of this dead end street of the self and self-
consciousness, at least until Immanuel Kant.

What do I mean by the philosophy of self and consciousness? It is philosophical inquiry to start with the
blind, unquestioned assumption of the evidentness of knowledge of self and consciousness of itself, and
it is based on the unexamined assumption that all philosophical inquiry is thus based on inner knowledge
of self and self consciousness. Hegel was absolutely right when he said that so long as philosophy after
Descartes made its cogito (Denken) the principle of philosophy, Descartes was the father of
contemporary philosophy. The main reason Descartes and his followers (Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibniz,
Locke, Berkeley, Hume) were trapped in this inescapable hole of self and self-knowledge of
consciousness is because in their approach, Descartes and his followers chose to attack, and solve the
ontological questions by way of their investigations on the epistemological domain.

While the rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz) convinced themselves that nature can and must
be known to us by reason alone (mathematically and by means of quantifiable masses), the empiricists
(Locke, Berkeley and Hume) insisted that the origin of our knowledge of nature must be from our
experience, and not reason. Nevertheless, the empiricists, once they defined knowledge, following
Descartes, as the relations of ideas, were to investigate the nature of knowledge once again via "ideas"
within the domain of our consciousness. It is obvious that Hume ended up with his skepticism that we
could neither say yes, nor no about nature itself, for we only know and can explain all knowledge by
means of ideas and their relations within consciousness.

It was indeed Leibniz' "monad" which has no window. Namely, we are able to investigate and know
everything with such evidence inside of one's own consciousness, but we are not able to go beyond the
border of self consciousness and communicate with others. Nor is it possible that such consciousness be
influenced from the outside world. All the philosophers, whether rationalist or empiricist, who came
after Descartes were methodologically imprisoned in self and consciousness. From this perspective, we
will be able to understand why these British Empiricists, who intended to secure our knowledge of
nature, could not get out from the realm of self and self consciousness (impressions and ideas) and
ended up with Humean skepticism. Aiming, too, at knowledge of nature, philosophical enterprise from
Descartes through Kant endeavored to provide philosophy with the absolute, indubitable foundation of
our knowledge as its method prescribed to investigate only the realm within self and self consciousness,
and knowledge of reality as such (=to know nature itself in this case) was forced to abandon the ultimate
goal of knowledge itself, while they attempted to find the absolutely knowable self and self
consciousness. Kant was no exception, as long as he maintained that what we know is the phenomenal
world and the thing in itself is never known to our human intellect. Indeed, the phenomenal world is in a
sense no longer within the self, but is projected as on a movie screen, which is far from nature itself, and
allows us to not immediately, but only vicariously know nature. In other words, there was no means
given to our way of knowing to compare, say, my "idea" of the moon with the moon itself. As the natural
sciences did not bother with such a question of the foundation of their knowledge, they immediately
were involved in inquiries into a variety of aspects of nature itself rather than their validity. Thus, the
fate of making philosophy a scientific inquiry into the foundation of the sciences was already determined
by Descartes and we did not have to wait for the Neo-Kantian contention about the nature of
philosophical inquiry. However, before we start talking about the Neo-Kantian movements, we must first
of all properly understand how Fichte grasped Kant's philosophy and its problems.

IMMANUEL KANT AND THE END OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT PHILOSOPHY

Let us briefly discuss the philosophy of Kant, which provided Fichte with his starting point. Kant situated
himself in confrontation with British Empiricism and Continental Rationalism. In his pre-critical period,
Kant was under the influence of Christian Wolff's popularized version of Leibniz' philosophy (without
monad) and his standpoint was Speculative Rationalism. In other words, Kant held that genuine
knowledge must be rooted in human reason, and experience does not give any appropriate knowledge
of nature. Kant firmly believed that knowledgeanything which deserved the name of knowledgemust
possess objectivity, i.e., be universally and necessarily valid. Analytic a priori knowledge, whose criterion
of truth is contradiction, certainly fulfills this criterion for truth without any qualification. Therefore, he
had no problem as long as he lived in the tradition of Continental Rationalism.

However, Kant became well aware of Hume's philosophy and his understanding of reality which was
rooted in two elements: the one was the tradition of British Empiricism, that our knowledge must be also
knowledge about nature and this must come from experience alone, i.e., knowledge of the
universephysics, Newtonian mechanics in particular. The other was the radicalization of philosophical
approach, that was the philosophy of self in which the starting point and principle were sought in the
evident self reflection on one's own self as the indubitable basis. Hume's method of inquiry was the
extreme radicalization of this philosophy of self, which no longer knows what reality (nature) really is,
that Hume ended with skepticism. According to Hume, since our philosophical eyethe eye of self-
reflection (introspection) as the method of inquirywill never be able to provide so much as Locke
believed and was never able to get out of consciousness itself, we cannot say (and do not know as its
consequence) whether or not our knowledge of nature (the external world from the viewpoint of
consciousness) is indeed reality. In fact, sometimes Hume gives the impression that, although what we
can know is limited and far less than previously considered, we do not have to have universals,
substance, or mechanical causality in reality, but can make our experience of them quite intelligible and
explainable. Instead of affirming or denying the knowledge of the universe (as nature) itself, Hume
attempted a psychological explanation of our knowledge of the external world, i.e, the universe, thus
including such principles as the law of gravitation and mechanical causality. This makes our knowledge of
nature merely highly probable, thus knowledge of the universe can no longer be said to be "objective" in
the strict sense of necessity and universal validity. Now the center of philosophical inquiry was shifted
from substance and causality in reality to the understanding of them purely in consciousness. Although
Hume never seriously (=practically) doubted our knowledge of the universe as true (however limited
sense it might be), he attempted to "explain" psychologically everything including mechanical causality
and the laws of nature. This consequence of Hume's radicalization of the philosophy of self and
Enlightenment philosophy, ending up with universal skepticism was unacceptable to Kant, who was still
in the spirit of the Enlightenment and with the faith of reason as the absolute principle of reality. Kant's
grandiose, systematic approach called transcendental philosophy was indeed the last attempt of
Enlightenment philosophy to re-establish objectitivity, i.e., the universal and necessary validity of the
laws of nature as well as mechanical causality as the principles of the universe as such.

Although Kant humbly and seriously accepted Hume's challenge itself in his endeavor to argue that such
principles as mechanical causality and the laws of nature are merely explainable as psychologically
"subjective," this consequence, of course, Kant could not accept. As mentioned above, Kant must accept
the thesis of British Empiricism that knowledge is the knowledge of the universe and he firmly believed
that the natural sciences, Newtonian mechanics in particular, are knowledge of nature and possess
"objective" validity. Namely, Kant never doubted that such laws of nature must be "objective." They are,
according to Kant's conviction, not "subjective" in the sense of "personal and relative," but they must be
objective, i.e., they are also universally and necessarily valid.

In other words, for his solution to Hume's challenge Kant indeed sought that our knowledge in the not
trivial, but the most profound sense, must consist of two mutually irreducible elements, that is, the
"formal "elements which are to provide the objectivity (=necessity and universal validity) of knowledge
and the "material" elements which relate our knowledge to the universe. "Knowledge without form is
meaningless, while knowledge without matter is empty." These material elements must somehow come
from and relate to our senses, while the formal elements come from the rational structure of our mind
which by definition guarantees the university and necessity in validity. Instead of asking whether or not
such objective knowledge of the universe is possible, Kant tried to elucidate rather how and under what
conditions such knowledge is possible at all, assuming as a fact that objective knowledge of nature is
indeed possible. This philosophical approach is called "critical," since unlike British Empiricism, Kant did
not try to explain the nature of knowledge by means of its origin (tabula rasa and senses), and because
unlike Continental Rationalism, he did not attempt to call analytic knowledge the only knowledge with
"objectivity" and speculatively develop a philosophical system consisting of this knowledge. On the
contrary, Kant was supposed to open the third way independent of British Empiricism and Continental
Rationalism and endeavored to elucidate, although his method was logical inference (from the fact that
there is objective knowledge of the universe), the conditions of the possibility of objective knowledge of
the universe, as long as they are a priori.
 Kant's position was defensible and meaningful as long as his metaphysics is kept in dualism both
epistemology and metaphysics, namely 1) knowledge is a composite of the rational form and the
material elements given in the sensibility. This is epistemological dualism. Furthermore, 2) his position
must be metaphysically dualistic in that it was Kant who tried to see the possibility of reality both
(mechanically) causally determined (in the world of phenomenon) and ethically and teleologically
"determined" (in the world of noumenon), thanks to human freedom. In Kant's philosophy, although a
solution to Hume's challenge was found, the so-called dichotomy over (mechanical) causal determinism
versus freedom of will became very sharpened. Once again, here too, Kant "distributed" (mechanical)
causality to the world of phenomenon (the epistemological world of sciences) and freedom to the world
of noumenon teleologically "oriented" or the thing itself which is supposed to be behind the
phenomenal world. Thus, Kant also took two mutually inconsistent principles (being and ought) as the
basis for this solution of the philosophical a priori. The phenomenon (scientific and cognitive world of
nature) and the noumenon (non cognitive, moral reality of the thing in itself) are two realities, which ,
although they are related, are of two different beings. In this sense, he also may be called dualistic here.
Thus, his epistemology is the doctrine of cognitive being (ontologia generalis=metaphysics of nature) and
his ethics is dealt with by the doctrine of speculative being--Freedom, Immortality and God-- (ontologia
speculativa) are unified in not way, but they were rather sharply articulated and distributed to two
totally mutually exclusive domains of reality.

In Kant's philosophy, Fichte saw as irreconcilable those dichotomies between the formal and the
material elements of knowledge, between freedom (=teleological causal determination) and mechanical
causal determination, and between ethics and epistemology.

Fichte considered these mutually exclusive dichotomies as "faults" of a system of philosophy rather than
the strengths of Kant's philosophy. (In fact Kant himself thought that dualism in his philosophy was an
excellent means to overcome both the dogmatic consequences of Continental Rationalism and the
skeptic results of British Empiricism.) To Fichte, philosophy as a system of knowledge of the absolute
must be consistent and in absolute unity, from which everything else must be deduced by the act of the
"I."

Thus, it is obvious that Fichte saw the incompleteness and inconsistencies of Kant's system from his own
perspective of philosophical problems and attempted to correct those faults in Kant's philosophical
system.

Then, how could and did Fichte attempt to overcome those faults of Kant's philosophy? First of all, while
Kant's philosophy was more centered around the epistemological questions than the ontological
viewpoint, Fichte aimed to reorganize and unify the philosophical system more from the ethical point of
view (and yet by "intuition"). That is, Fichte pursued the solving of the problem of accomplishing unity
and integrity of the philosophical system by means of the pure, self-reflective, intuitive activities of the I,
which obviously may be evidenced first of all in the moral sphere of philosophy.
 In other words, in Kant's philosophy, while reason as the cognitive faculty is dominant in his
investigation, Fichte focuses his attention to "will" to answer his philosophical questions, although both
Kant and Fichte called cognitive faculty and volition "reason."

This is the overture of the new direction of Western philosophy in which the cognitive reason as the
principle of philosophy was gradually taken over by something else such as "will" (Fichte and
Schopenhauer, although they conceived will in two totally different ways), "creative imagination"
(Schelling), "intuition" (Schelling), "faith" (Kierkegaard) and "Life" and "Power" (Nietzsche). This shift of
the emphasis from the rational faculty and cognition to the non-rational faculty of will or intuition in the
principle in 19th century European philosophy must be elaborated upon later in other contexts as it
would result in considerable interesting changes in the development of Western philosophy.

For Fichte, Kant already accomplished the task of establishing the transcendental basis of knowledge,
although he failed to unify his system. Thus, Fichte conceived his task to correct this fault of Kant's
philosophy.

The birth of German Idealism was motivated to establish the absolute basis of systematical knowledge
of philosophy. The boudary of "philosophy of self and consciousness" could not be overstepped, but
rather we may say that Fichte attempted to return to the core of such philosophy of self and
consciousness not as the source of the epistemological, absolute certainty, but as the source of unity and
activity of will. This subtle difference has long been overlooked.