miércoles, 24 de noviembre de 2010

Karl Marx


Karl Heinrich Marx, conocido también en castellano como Carlos Marx (Tréveris, Alemania, 5 de mayo de 1818 – Londres, Reino Unido, 14 de marzo de 1883), fue un intelectual y militante comunista alemán de origen judío. En su vasta e influyente obra, incursionó en los campos de la filosofía, la historia, la sociología y la economía. Junto a Friedrich Engels, es el padre del socialismo científico. Sus escritos más conocidos son el Manifiesto del Partido Comunista (en coautoría con Engels) y el libro El Capital. Fue miembro fundador de la Liga de los Comunistas (1847-1850) y de la Primera Internacional (1864-1872).

Karl Marx fue el tercero de siete hijos de una familia judía de clase media. Su padre, Herschel Mordechai (luego Heinrich) Marx, quien era descendiente de una larga línea de rabinos, ejercía la abogacía en Tréveris, su ciudad natal. Era además consejero de justicia, sin embargo recibió fuertes presiones políticas, por parte de las autoridades prusianas que le prohibieron continuar con sus prácticas legales de acuerdo a su religión y le obligaron a abrazar el protestantismo para poder mantener el cargo en la administración de Renania. Su madre fue Henrietta Pressburg, nacida en los Países Bajos, y sus hermanos fueron Sophie, Hermann, Henriette, Louise, Emilie y Caroline.

Realizó sus estudios de Derecho en la Universidad de Bonn pero los dejó para estudiar Filosofía en Berlín. Se doctoró en 1841 en Jena con una tesis titulada Diferencia entre la filosofía de la naturaleza de Demócrito y la de Epicuro. Pronto se implicó en la elaboración de trabajos en torno a la realidad social, colaborando en 1842 junto con Bruno Bauer en la edición de la Gaceta Renana (Rheinische Zeitung), publicación de la que pronto llegó a ser redactor jefe. Durante este período también frecuentó la tertulia filosófica de Los Libres (Die Freien). La publicación finalmente sería intervenida por la censura, y posteriormente, Marx tuvo que marchar al exilio.

PENSAMIENTO

Testigo y víctima de la primera gran crisis del capitalismo (década de 1830) y de las revoluciones de 1848, Marx se propuso desarrollar una teoría económica capaz de aportar explicaciones a la crisis, pero a la vez de interpelar al proletariado a participar en ella activamente para producir un cambio revolucionario.

La obra de Marx ha sido leída de distintas formas. En ella se incluyen obras de teoría y crítica económica, polémicas filosóficas, manifiestos de organizaciones políticas, cuadernos de trabajo y artículos periodísticos sobre la actualidad del siglo XIX. Muchas de sus obras las escribió junto con Engels. Los principales temas sobre los que trabajó Marx fueron la crítica filosófica, la crítica política y la crítica de la economía política.

Algunos autores pretendieron integrar la obra de Marx y Engels en un sistema filosófico, el marxismo, articulado en torno a un método filosófico llamado materialismo dialéctico. Los principios del análisis marxista de la realidad también han sido sistematizados en el llamado materialismo histórico y la economía marxista. Del materialismo histórico, que sitúa la lucha de clases en el centro del análisis, se han servido numerosos científicos sociales del siglo XX: historiadores, sociólogos, antropólogos, teóricos del arte, etc. También ha sido muy influyente su teoría de la alienación.

Otros autores, entre los que destaca Louis Althusser, argumentan que los escritos de Marx no forman un todo coherente, sino que el propio autor, al desarrollar sus reflexiones críticas sobre la economía política durante la década de 1850, se desembarazó de su propia conciencia filosófica anterior y comenzó a trabajar científicamente. Desde esta perspectiva no existiría una ciencia marxista, sino un científico, Karl Marx, que fue un pionero en la comprensión de los mecanismos fundamentales que rigen el funcionamiento de la sociedad moderna, en especial con su reelaboración de la teoría del valor, y cuya obra cumbre fue El Capital.

Las obras de Marx han inspirado a numerosas organizaciones políticas comprometidas en superar el capitalismo. Por una parte, habría que señalar la interpretación que han realizado los leninistas, partidarios de que una vanguardia del proletariado, organizada en un partido revolucionario, preparado, si es necesario, para trabajar en la clandestinidad, empuje a la clase obrera a hacerse con el poder mediante la fuerza insurreccional de masas, para así derrocar a sus antiguas clases opresoras y dominantes, la burguesía y la aristocracia, expropiándolas de su control sobre el aparato de Estado y los medios de producción, y procediendo a la construcción de un Estado obrero que, además de instituir a aquélla como clase dominante, le permita avanzar hacia el socialismo —sociedad altamente igualitaria y solidaria, sobre la base de la democracia obrera y la propiedad social sobre los medios de producción, y un fuerte desarrollo productivo y cultural, con una economía planificada capaz de suplir holgadamente las principales necesidades mayoritarias— y la desaparición de la división de la sociedad en clases, hasta llegar al comunismo —sociedad sin clases sociales y sin Estado, basada en un altísimo nivel de civilización—.

Por otra, la que realiza la socialdemocracia, en sus orígenes contraria a la táctica revolucionaria y partidaria de avanzar hacia el socialismo a través de progresivas reformas parlamentarias (hay que decir que la mayoría de partidos socialdemócratas han ido poco a poco reformando sus planteamientos, hasta aceptar la economía de mercado). Otros teóricos, como los del comunismo consejista son partidarios de la toma del poder por parte de la clase obrera autoorganizada y no por parte de un partido.

Asignatura: CRF

Friedrich Engels


Filósofo marxista alemán, nacido en Barmen[1], (Wuppertal, cerca de Düsseldorf). Hijo de un empresario industrial y educado en una familia rígidamente pietista (Calvinista), que tenía una fábrica en Renania. Friedrich Engels siendo joven, había demostrado incomprensibles aficiones a la poesía, y entonces su padre le hizo la maleta y lo despachó a Bremen, para que aprendiese el negocio de la exportación y viviese en casa de un clérigo. Por lo visto, el padre, Gaspar Engels, opinaba que la religión y el ganar dinero eran un buen tratamiento curativo para el alma romántica. Engels obedeció y se consagró a los negocios, pero lo veía todo através de su propia personalidad rebelde…

Friedrich Engels abandona sus ideas religiosas tras la lectura, a sus 19 años, de Vida de Jesús (1835), de Strauss. Durante su servicio militar en Berlin, entra en contacto con la izquierda hegeliana; La esencia del cristianismo (1841), de Feuerbach, lo orienta hacia el materialismo, y a través de Moses Hess abraza el comunismo[2]. En 1844 inicia en París su amistad con Marx, a quien había conocido anteriormente en Colonia, y esta amistad supondrá un período de cuarenta años de íntima colaboración, que abarca tanto aspectos intelectuales y políticos como de ayuda económica [3].

Tras una estancia de tres o cuatro años en Manchester, donde su padre poseía fábricas textiles [4], Friedrich Engeles publica en Leipzig “La situación de la clase trabajadora en Inglaterra (1845)”, considerada la primera obra de socialismo científico, y en ella describe con detalle el resultado de la revolución industrial inglesa y las razones prácticas por las que considera inevitable la llegada del socialismo. En colaboración con Marx [5] escribe La Sagrada Familia o Crítica de la Crítica Crítica: contra Bruno Bauer y compañía (1845), contra los jóvenes hegelianos, La ideología alemana (escrita hacia 1846, pero que no se publica íntegramente hasta 1932), contra la antropología de Feuerbach y la idea de individuo de Max Stirner, y el Manifiesto del partido comunista (1848). Tras el fracaso de la revolución de 1849 en Alemania, vuelve a Manchester para hacerse cargo, a partir de 1850, de la industria familiar y ayudar económicamente a Marx, dedicado entonces por completo, en Londres, a la redacción de El Capital. Abandonando la actividad industrial en 1869, se retira a Londres para entregarse por completo a la vida política, a la escritura y a la dirección de la Segunda Internacional (1889). Al morir Marx en 1883, prepara la edición de los volúmenes II (1885) y III (1894) de El Capital, a partir de los manuscritos de Marx, y se dedica intensamente a la edición de escritos suyos y a mantener relación epistolar con muchos intelectuales europeos.

Aunque es difícil separar en las obras escritas conjuntamente con Marx cuáles son las teorías de uno y de otro, a Engels se le atribuye propiamente la paternidad del materialismo dialéctico, esto es, la afirmación de que la materia, que es la única realidad, se desarrolla según las leyes dialécticas, inevitables y necesarias, de unión y lucha de contrarios, de la conversión de la cantidad en cualidad y de la negación de la negación. Engels ve en estas teorías una manera de exponer que el marxismo es la concepción científica del mundo, y así las desarrolla en las obras de su último período: El origen de la familia y de la propiedad privada (1884), obra en que aprovecha las teorías etnológicas y evolucionistas del americano L.H. Morgan para presentar una confirmación del materialismo histórico, Anti-Dühring La revolución de la ciencia según el señor Eugen Dühring (1878), Fuerbach y el final de la filosofía clásica (1888), y sobre todo Dialéctica de la naturaleza (obra escrita ya en 1873, pero que no se publica hasta 1925). En sus últimas obras muestra interés por la ideología para contrarrestar una versión excesivamente economicista de la relación entre infraestructura y superestructura.

Renania alemana.
Aunque no tuviera muy claro en esa entonces del mismo, salvo que rechazaba toda propiedad privada como medio de organizar el esfuerzo económico de la sociedad.

Siendo Engels el compañero intelectual por antonomasia de Marx, generalmente se tiende a considerarlo un pensador inferior a su compañero de fórmula; no obstante, fue él, Federico Engels, quien desarrolló los aspectos filosóficos del Marxismo. Gracias a su empuje hubo marxismo ortodoxo, basado en el materialismo histórico y en la dialéctica. Allí también vió Engels ango más que la fachada; atrevióse a mirar la población atrofiada que vivía entre la suciedad y la desesperación, la misma que se refugiaba en la gienbra y el evangelismo, y se drogaba con láudano para escapar, ellos y sus hijos, de una vida desesperanzada y brutal.

Resulta curioso el contraste entre Marx y Engels, puesto que el segundo podía pasar por un miembo de aquella misma burguesía que despreciaba: era rubio, alto y bastante elegante, y producía la impresión de un caballero aficionado a la esgrima y a la caza con jaurías; se dice de Engels, que encierta ocasión cruzó a nado, cautro veces consecutivas, el río Weser.

Además, Engels era alegre y obsrvador, y poseía una inteligencia rápida y fácil; decíase de él, que era capaz de tartamudear en veinte idiomas. Era aficionado a los placeres burgueses de la vida, siendo incluso un buen catador de vinos, y constituye una nota divertida el que, si bien buscaba sus amores entre proletarias, pasó gran parte de su vida tratando de demostrar románticamente –aunque sin éxito- que su amante Mary Burns (y, a la muerte de esta, su hermana Lizzie), eran descendientes del poeta escocés de ese apellido.

Engels era capaz de escribir en un santiamén una obra científica…Con lo único que no pudo Engels fue con el idioma árabe y sus cuatro míl raíces verbales.

Asignatura: CRF

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach

La filosofía de Feuerbach es el puente que comunica al idealismo absoluto de Hegel con el materialismo histórico de Marx. Feuerbach nació en Baviera en 1804. Luego de estudiar durante un año (1823) la teología luterana en Heidelberg, se trasladó a Berlínpara estudiar Teología con Schleiermacher y Filosofía con Hegel. Un año más tarde optó por la Filosofía, disciplina en la que se doctoró en 1828 en la Universidad de Erlangen.

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach

Ya había comenzado a trabajar como docente en Erlangen cuando el escándalo generado por una obra anónima suya (Pensamientos sobre la muerte y la inmortalidad) dio por tierra con su intención de lograr un nombramiento firme. Esta situación lo llevó a inclinarse por la escritura.

Entre sus obras se destacan: En torno a la crítica de la filosofía hegeliana (1839), La esencia del cristianismo (1841) y Principios fundamentales de la filosofía del futuro (1843).
Cerca de su muerte, se afilió al Partido Socialdemócrata alemán (1870). Esto favoreció que a su muerte, acaecida dos años después, la despedida de sus restos contara con una cantidad de asistentes ciertamente inusual.

Feuerbach pretendía corregir a Hegel transformando su idealismo en materialismo. No es el pensamiento el que genera el ser sino el ser el que genera el pensamiento. El espíritu, que con sus decisiones determina al cuerpo, es previamente determinado por éste.

La filosofía de Hegel es fundamentalmente teológica. Cuando afirma que la realidad proviene de la idea no hace sino decir con otras palabras que el mundo ha sido creado por Dios. Y justamente Feuerbach entiende que Dios no es sino una proyección que el hombre hace de sí mismo. De ahí que su materialismo se complete con su ateísmo.

Es el hombre quien, proyectando fuera de sí, en Dios, sus atributos más valiosos, ha generado a este ser que nos reduce a nuestra condición más miserable. La necesidad y el deseo de lo que no somos pero podemos ser nos ha llevado a generar esta idea. Comparados con ella sólo somos miseria y degradación. Pero si tomáramos conciencia de que no es el hombre el que ha sido hecho por Dios a su imagen, sino que es Dios quien ha sido hecho por el hombre a su imagen y semejanza, podríamos recuperar la conciencia de nuestra dignidad y de nuestras posibilidades.

Feuerbach consideraba que, cuando el hombre tomara conciencia de que aquello a lo que adoraba bajo el nombre de Dios no era sino su esencia, lo propio de la humanidad, podría construir una nueva religión, la Religión de la Humanidad. Esta religión se identificaría con la política: su providencia sería la previsión del hombre que se organiza para asistir a los hombres en dificultades; su culto, el ejercicio del amor al hombre por el hombre ("filantropía"): homo homini Deus.

Asignatura: CRF

Bruno Bauer


(1809-1882), philosopher, historian, and theologian. His career falls into two main phases, divided by the revolutions of 1848. In the 1840's, the period known as the Vormärz or the prelude to the German revolutionary events of March 1848, Bauer was a leader of the Left-Hegelian movement, developing a republican interpretation of Hegel, which combined ethical and aesthetic motifs. His theory of infinite self-consciousness, derived from Hegel's account of subjective spirit, stressed rational autonomy and historical progress. Investigating the textual sources of Christianity, Bauer described religion as a form of alienation, which, because of the deficiencies of earthly life, projected irrational, transcendent powers over the self, while sanctioning particularistic sectarian and material interests. He criticized the Restoration state, its social and juridical base, and its orthodox religious ideology. Analyzing the emergence of modern mass society, he rejected liberalism for its inconsequent opposition to the existing order, and for its equation of freedom with property, but he accused socialism of an inadequate appreciation of individual autonomy. After the defeats of 1848, Bauer repudiated Hegel. He predicted a general crisis of European civilization, caused by the exhaustion of philosophy and the failure of liberal and revolutionary politics. New prospects of liberation would, he believed, issue from the crisis. His late writings examined the emergence of Russia as a world power, opening an era of global imperialism and war. These writings influenced Nietzsche's thinking on cultural renewal. Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky claimed Bauer's religious criticism for the socialist movement, while the anti-traditionalist conservatism and anti-Semitism of his late work link him to the revolutionary right in the twentieth century.
1. Career

In 1815, Bauer's family moved to Berlin from south-eastern Germany (present-day Thuringia). At the University of Berlin (1828 -1834), he studied under Hegel, Schleiermacher, and the Hegelians Hotho and Marheineke. His 1829 essay on Kant's aesthetics won the Prussian royal prize in philosophy, on Hegel's recommendation. From 1834 to 1839, he lectured on theology and biblical texts in Berlin. He was transferred to the theology faculty at Bonn after publishing an attack on his colleague and former teacher Hengstenberg. He taught in Bonn from 1839 till spring 1842, when he was dismissed for the unorthodoxy of his writings on the New Testament. The dismissal followed a consultation by the ministry of education with the theology faculties of the six Prussian universities, but no consensus emerged from the academic inquest. The order for Bauer's dismissal came directly from the king of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who had decreed the suspension from state employment of participants in a banquet to honour the South German liberal Karl Welcker, held in Berlin in 1841. On that occasion, Bauer had proposed a toast to Hegel's conception of the state.

From 1842 to 1849, Bauer was active in political journalism and historical research on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. He argued against the emancipation of Prussian Jews in 1842-43, seeing this proposal as a political legitimation of particular religious interests. He was the object of polemical attacks by Marx and Engels in The Holy Family (1844) and The German Ideology (written in 1845-46). With his brother Edgar, Bauer founded the Charlottenburg Democratic Society in 1848, and stood unsuccessfully for election to the Prussian National Assembly on a platform of popular sovereignty.

Remaining in Prussia after the defeats of 1848-49, Bauer continued to produce work of biblical criticism and political analysis. He wrote in the mid 1850's for Die Zeit, a government-sponsored newspaper, in which his anti-liberalism took a conservative turn. He contributed articles on European affairs to other newspapers, such as Die Post, the Kleines Journal, and the New York Daily Tribune. From 1859-66 he collaborated with F.W.H. Wagener on his conservativeStaats- und Gesellschafts-Lexikon, editing almost all 23 volumes, and writing numerous articles, several with anti-Semitic themes. In 1865 he acquired a small farm in Rixdorf, on the outskirts of Berlin. He died there in April 1882.

2. Bauer's Writings, 1829-50

Bauer was a prolific writer, publishing a dozen substantial books and over 60 articles between 1838 and 1848 alone, but no critical edition of these works exists. They included analyses of Hegel, the Bible, modern theologies, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution and its aftermath. The interpretation of Bauer's work is problematic for several reasons. Because of anonymous, pseudonymous, and collaborative publication, some attributions are disputed; and divergences exist between Bauer's published texts and private correspondence. In the anonymous Trumpet of the Last Judgement(1841) and Hegel's Doctrine of Religion and Art (1842), Bauer spoke not in his own voice, but in the ironic guise of a conservative critic of Hegel, attributing to Hegel his own revolutionary views.

Three lines of interpretation of Bauer can be distinguished. These focus on his early work; his later writings have attracted little critical attention. The first sees Bauer as a radical subjectivist, whose social and religious criticism was closer to Enlightenment rationalism than to Hegel (Sass, 1978; Brudney, 1998). The second, largely influenced by Marx, insists on Bauer's abandonment of the Hegelian left after 1843 (Rossi, 1974; Pepperle, 1978). The third emphasizes the continuity throughout the Vormärz of Bauer's thought and of his republicanism, based on the Hegelian idea of the unity of thought and being (Moggach, 2003, 2006).

Bauer's prize manuscript of 1829, De pulchri principiis, presented the unity of concept and objectivity as the central idea of Hegel's idealism. It examined this unity as expressed in art, comparing Hegel's aesthetic theory to Kant's Third Critique. The manuscript supplemented the criticisms of Kant from Hegel's Berlin Aesthetics lectures with the logical analysis of categories provided by the 1827 Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Bauer argued that while the Critique of Judgement attempted to bridge thought and being, and thus opened the way to Hegel, it reproduced the antinomies characteristic of the first two critiques. Kant's synthesis failed, since he continued to define the concept as merely subjective, and the object as the unknowable thing-in-itself, transcending the cognitive power. Self-consciousness, or the subject of the transcendental unity of apperception, was likewise impervious to cognition from the Kantian standpoint. In Hegel's syllogisms of the idea, objectivity attained rational form, while the concept acquired an explicit, material existence. Beauty, life, and idea were moments in the process which constituted the actuality of reason. As the immediate unity of thought and objectivity, art illustrated the inexhaustible fecundity of the philosophical Idea. The manuscript underlined the opposition of faith and reason in its critique of the religious conceptions of the unity of thought and being. Faith was taken to be inimical to free inquiry, which is the element of reason.

Throughout the 1830's, however, Bauer sought to reconcile thought and being through the idea of rational faith. InZeitschrift für spekulative Theologie, which he edited between 1836 and 1838, and in Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, he offered a speculative account of Christian doctrines as exemplifications of logical categories. In the 1838 Religion of the Old Testament, Bauer depicted religious experience as a product of self-consciousness. He proposed both a transcendental account, stressing the conditions of possibility of religious experiences, and a phenomenological sequence of their forms: a legalistic subordination to an authoritarian deity in the early books of the Old Testament expressed a merely external relation between God and man, while the messianic consciousness of later books heralded a higher form, the immanence of the universal in the community; but this consciousness could only point up the inadequacy of the law, not yet propose the effective overcoming of estrangement. The texts of the 1830's located the logical structure which, for Bauer, defined the religious consciousness: the immediate identity between particularity, whether of a subject or a community, and the abstract universal, a unity achieved without self-transformation. By 1839, Bauer deduced the political implications of this view: the religious consciousness asserted this immediate identity as a monopolistic, sectarian claim, excluding other particulars from equivalent status. The essence of religion for Bauer was now a hubristic particularism, which also conferred a transcendent status on the universal, as a realm divorced from concrete social relationships. This position received its fullest exposition in Bauer's Christianity Revealed (1843). He already sketched this argument in Herr Dr. Hengstenberg, of 1839, publicly breaking with orthodox and conservative versions of Christianity, and stressing the discontinuity between Christianity and Judaism. By 1840-41, Bauer would present the emancipated philosophical self-consciousness as opposed to all forms of religious representation. His political radicalism and republicanism were cemented by his recognition of the structural identity between the private interests fostered by the Restoration order, and the monopolistic religious consciousness.

Bauer's political and theoretical radicalization is evidenced in his biblical studies. The series is comprised of Critique of the Gospel of John (1840), and the three-volume Critique of the Synoptic Gospels (1840- 42). Together with his 1838 study of the Old Testament, these volumes criticized the stages of revealed religion, and forms of self-alienated spirit in history. Bauer's critique of John's gospel demonstrated the opposition between the free self-consciousness and the religious spirit. His stated purpose was to restore the Christian principle to its source in creative self-consciousness; he did not yet openly oppose the principle itself, but sought to differentiate it, as a rational idea, from ecclesiastical dogmatism. The positivity of Christianity derived from the abstract understanding, rather than from speculative reason, which led religious experience back to its subjective roots. The rational core of Christianity was the identity of God and man, but theology had built an untenable doctrinal system on this foundation. Speculation now undermined dogma; it was not confirmed by it, as Bauer's mid-1830's articles had maintained. In his correspondence, though not in this text itself, Bauer indicated that this restoration of the Christian principle was also its overthrow, as the unity of universal and particular could now be grasped in more tangible and earthly forms. Christianity was a necessary but now transcended stage in the development of the human spirit, to be supplanted by new expressions of autonomous self-consciousness.

In his critique of the Synoptics, Bauer's object was more openly to negate dogmatic Christianity, mobilized in defence of the absolutist order. The incidents described in the gospels were products of the religious consciousness, rather than factual reports. Bauer's critique of John convinced him that the gospel narrative was a purely literary product, and he now argued that the Synoptics too contained no historically authentic material. Bauer attempted to establish the historical priority of Mark, and the specific elaborations undertaken sequentially by Luke and Matthew. He depicted miracles as fallaciously displaying the immediate causality of the universal in nature, and criticized the naturalistic explanations favoured by theological rationalism. The third volume of the series denied the historicity of Christ. The Christian idea that God and mankind share the same essence appeared as the religious representation of a single empirical individual who assumed the universal power of spirit. Like his contemporaries D.F. Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, Bauer understood this synthesis instead as a project immanent in human history. As Bauer's political writings from this period show, he proposed that the assumption of universality, and the transcendence of particular interest, were historical tasks, undertaken by the state and the republican citizenry. In the Synoptics texts, Bauer equated Christianity and feudalism, and defended the freedom and equality of self-consciousness. Religion and the absolutist state were mutually sustaining, sharing the essential features of alienation and repression. Christianity represented the completion of the religious consciousness in pure abstraction, and the dissolution of all ethical bonds. Bauer contended that Judaism presupposed the subordination of nature to religious interests, but still maintained the natural links of kinship and ethnicity. Christianity eliminated this limited Sittlichkeit in favour of the purely abstract self, thus perfecting alienation and requiring its definitive resolution.

The political application of self-consciousness can be traced through two texts on the state, also dating from 1840-41. InThe Evangelical State Church of Prussia and Science, Bauer described the essence of the state as free development. The state was the dialectical agency of historical progress and of the universality of the will, manifesting the capacity to abstract from any given content and express itself in ever new forms. While signalling empirical tendencies which might limit the state's progressive function (the prominence of religious interests, and hesitancy before the social question), Bauer contended that the genuine state, as the expression of freedom, was in constant transformation. His surface claim was that the Prussian state is such an institution, though his contemporary correspondence belied this view. He defended the 1817 union of the Lutheran and Reformed churches in Prussia as the political overcoming of religious oppositions, whose basis had been eroded by the Enlightenment. Through its (still abstract) grasp of the universal concept of man, against religious particularity, the Enlightenment had transformed religious consciousness into self-consciousness. (This process formed one of the major themes of Bauer's Christianity Revealed, along with a critique of French materialism for its inadequate grasp of freedom). The churches were now impotent to perpetuate their own existence without the support of the state. Countering conservative historians like F.J. Stahl, who championed the independence of the churches, Bauer's "The Christian State and Our Times," of 1841, again identified the state as the focus of ethical life. Stahl's position implied a derogation of the spirituality of the state, presenting it an agency of external constraint, to uphold the orthodox ecclesiastical and political order against the flow of history, and to defend a social order governed by irrational privileges and immunities. Bauer denounced not only the Christian state of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, but also the formal Rechtsstaat, or liberal constitutionalism. For Bauer, both these positions defined freedom as private interest, religious or economic; but as particularity, these attitudes had to be purged away in the name of a new political order. Bauer maintained that Hegel's view of freedom as universality was far in advance of liberal views, even if the Philosophy of Right was inconsistent or incomplete. This was Bauer's provocative claim at the Welcker banquet of 1841. The elimination of egoistic atomism by moral self-consciousness was the pre-requisite for the republic, or the free state.

The anonymous Trumpet of the Last Judgement, or Posaune (November, 1841), and its sequel, Hegel's Doctrine of Religion and Art (1842), interpreted Hegel as sounding a call for revolution, to bring this state into being. Bauer claimed that the consequences of Hegel's system were the overthrow of church and state; and that Hegel's conservative critics were right to see him as the most dangerous adversary of the Restoration. Written ironically as pietistic denunciations, Bauer's two texts attributed to Hegel a theory of infinite self-consciousness, in which the concept of substance and a transcendent absolute were necessary but self-annulling illusions. Recapitulating the issue in his own voice in 1845, Bauer identified a tension in Hegel's thought between Spinoza and Fichte, between inert, undifferentiated substance and creative form. ThePosaune, however, argued that the Spinozist moment, though necessary to Hegel's dialectic, was fully assimilated to infinite self-consciousness. In absolute spirit, properly understood, all religious pretensions dissipated, while the absolute itself dissolved into the critical activities of conscious individual subjects. Nothing transcendent remained. Yet, the Posaunerecognized, Hegel also stressed the concept of substance. Its role had to be accounted for. In its apparent transcendence, substance disciplined the immediate, particular self. This was necessary because, as Hegel argued, particularity cannot be the criterion of theoretical or practical reason; rather, individuals must first internalize substance as a stage in reaching infinite self-consciousness. The undifferentiated, pure universal of substance subsumed all particularity, including the self. This initial, Spinozist moment created an appearance of pantheism in Hegel, which misled interpreters like D. F. Strauss. In Bauer's depiction, however, Hegel proceeded to dissolve substantiality as a power independent of consciousness. This dialectical resolution was not equivalent to renouncing objectivity, but meant that substance, once it had demonstrated to the particular consciousness the need to transcend itself, might not claim an immediate validity either. Forgoing immediacy to substantiality, individuals could then become the organs through which the universal attained conscious form. By overcoming the dialectical illusion of substance, the unity of concept and objectivity could first be glimpsed. The subject must appear as potentially universal, and the objective must show itself as a purposive order, responding to the subject's striving for rational freedom. This development entailed transforming substance into the record of the acts of conscious spirit, an inner relation of self-consciousness to itself. Subjectivity thus assimilated the principle of universality, which it now contained as its own character, not as something alien to it. But this relation was not confined to an inward experience, since reason must realize itself in the world. The externalization of reason produced a historical sequence, including the forms of alienated life. The stages in this sequence could be grasped as moments in the unfolding unity of thought and being. Bauer described self-consciousness, conceived as an immanent and subjective universality, as the motive force of history, generating historical content by taking up and transforming the given. As Bauer's 1829 manuscript had declared, at stake was not only the subjective realisation of the concept, but the fate of the idea, the unity of thought and being; and this required that the objectivity of the historical process be equally emphasized. This historical and critical idealism, which the Posaune attributes to Hegel, was politically revolutionary: it affirmed the rights of free self-consciousness against any positive institution which could not justify its existence before rational thinking, against state, religion, and social hierarchy.

Bauer used his central concept of infinite self-consciousness, a term taken from Hegel's theory of subjective spirit, to reconfigure the Hegelian absolute, bringing art and philosophy into close proximity, and excluding religion as a form of alienated reason, while recognising its past historical necessity. Bauer insisted on the immanence of the universal in history, as the record of struggles for liberation, and of alienation, which was necessary to discover the meaning of rational autonomy. Bauer's ethical idealism resembles what Kant calls perfectionism, or Vollkommenheit, a form of rational heteronomy, one of whose meanings is that action is validated by its contribution to historical progress. Bauer equated perfectionism and autonomy, as an uncompromising commitment to remodel political and social relations and institutions. Subjects acquired autonomy by freeing themselves from particular interests, and by repudiating transcendent universals, religious and political institutions which claimed to be underivable from self-consciousness, and exempt from history. Bauer denounced the ancien régime and its Restoration surrogates as a feudal system of tutelage and irrational privileges. Arrogating universality to itself, the authoritarian state which arose over these exclusive particulars thwarted the self-activity of its people, and concealed the source of its authority behind a veil of religious sanctification. Bauer maintained that the state, and not religion, was the principal adversary. Against this order of alienated spirit, he insisted that the decisive political question was the source of the state's authority, whether in tradition and religious sanction, or in the popular will. This question was to be resolved without compromise. Bauer asserted that his objective was not merely political, but social emancipation. The social question, the polarizations and crises of civil society to which Hegel had been alert, could be resolved not by direct appeals to the particular interests of one class, but by a common republican struggle against multiform privilege. The result of this combat would be the attainment of justice in all spheres of social life.

Two texts, dating from late 1842 and early 1843, The Jewish Question, and “The Capacity of Present-Day Jews and Christians to Become Free,” elaborate Bauer's critique of the religious consciousness and of political reformism. The consequence of their publication, however, was that Bauer forfeited his leading position in the opposition movement, as he challenged one of its central demands. The question was whether the explicitly Christian state of Prussia could eliminate restrictions on Jewish participation in civil institutions. While liberals and republicans advocated emancipation, conservative opponents defended the state's exclusive confessional allegiance. Bauer's interventions attacked the state for defending privilege, and claimed that it used religion as a mask for its interests in maintaining relations of subordination; but he also criticized Jews and their supporters for claiming freedom on the basis of a particular identity. Political and social freedom required the renunciation of all particularistic ties with the past; thus, as a precondition of juridical equality, Jews must renounce their religious allegiance, as must Christians. Christianity demonstrated a historically higher degree of consciousness, since it cancelled the externality of the deity. But this was not a unilateral progress upon Judaism, because Christianity, and especially Protestantism, universalized alienation to encompass all aspects of life. The superiority of Christianity consisted in its radical negativity, making requisite a transition to a new and higher form of ethical life. By exacerbating the contradiction between self-determination and self-abasement, the way was cleared for an epochal resolution. These interventions were censured by Marx, and by leading liberal spokesmen. Bauer remained adamant that his position was the correct progressive stance.

In his studies of the French Revolution and its impact on Germany, Bauer traced the emergence of mass society, based on conformity and inchoate particularism. The dissolution of the feudal estates by the Revolution produced a purely atomistic society, characterized by the assertion of individual property right. The attachment to private economic interest made impossible a concerted opposition to privilege and to the existing order, and had caused the ultimate defeat of the revolutions that had spawned it. Jacobinism, which Bauer in many ways endorsed, had been directed against this attitude, but had failed to overcome it; and it now threatened the republican movement of the Vormärz. The masses, encompassing both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, represented inertia and stagnation, and formed the bulwark of the existing order. Their opposition to it was merely apparent. Liberalism unconsciously expressed this development of mass society, defining freedom as acquisition. Bauer criticized liberal constitutionalism as a vacillating, compromising attitude toward the feudal regime. Even in its most advanced form, that endorsed by Hegel, constitutionalism juxtaposed two diametrically opposed principles of sovereignty, popular and princely, and was unable to resolve the contention between them. Incipient socialism shared the same terrain as liberalism, the defence of private interest, but proposed inconsequent and unacceptable solutions to the conditions which liberalism simply affirmed. For Bauer, socialism was irredeemably heteronomous. The socialist movement, he claimed, sought to organize the workers in their immediate, particular existence, and not to transform them. He saw in the proletariat pure particularity, and, unlike Marx, denied that this particularity could transform itself into a genuine universal unless it first renounced its own sectional interests. Bauer also anticipated the negative effects of a socialist organization of labour. While criticizing capitalism for its irrational competitive forms, he defended the principle of competition itself as a necessary condition for progress, the independence of persons, and the possibility of conscious, free self-determination. Bauer's pre-1848 work revived the classical republican themes of the opposition of commerce and virtue, but gave them a new shape, consistent with his Hegelianism. In 1842-43, Bauer confidently predicted the triumph of republican principles and institutions, though this confidence waned as the political crisis deepened. In his two electoral addresses of 1848-49, he defended popular sovereignty and the right of revolution, demanding that the new constitution be promulgated as an act of revolutionary will, and not received as a concession from the king.

3. Bauer's Late Work, 1850-1882

While he continued to proclaim the continuity of his thought, Bauer's late work was characterized by the definitive abandonment of his Vormärz republicanism. The failure of 1848, he argued, demonstrated the bankruptcy of the European philosophical tradition. Instead of the triumph of republics, Bauer now foresaw an age of global imperialism. The decisive political question after 1848 was the rise of Russia. Bauer predicted that Russian pressure would promote a pan-European union, as a stage in a movement toward a global absolutism. The revolutionaries of 1848 still presupposed, uncritically, that states were independent units. The next historical period would initiate a genuine continental crisis. Anticipating Nietzsche, Bauer contended that the impending collapse of European civilisation would make possible a new beginning, a liberation from traditional forms and values, together with their metaphysical and religious sanctions. Bauer's abiding opposition to liberalism now induced him to collaborate in conservative causes; but his conservatism was unconventional. Like Nietzsche, he continued to repudiate tradition and religion. Because of his anti-Semitism, Bauer was claimed as a precursor by some National-Socialist authors, though Ernst Barnikol, for example, disputes a direct connection (Barnikol 1972, pp. 350-53).

For Bauer, the revolutions of 1848 were so closely connected with the Enlightenment, Kantian, and Hegelian projects that their failure sounded the death-knell of philosophy and its claims to rational individual autonomy. Bauer's late critique assimilated Hegel with Spinoza and the metaphysics of substance, understood as the negation of form and subjectivity. Unlike his Vormärz position, he asserted in texts of 1852 and 1853 that Hegel had yielded to the influence of Spinoza, effacing individuality, and submerging concrete particulars under illusory, abstract logical categories. Bauer now described the Hegelian idea as a transcendent illusion. Its inability to admit concrete particulars derived from the substantiality of the system itself. The result was that Hegel had discounted individuality in favour of conformity. While prior to 1848 Bauer proclaimed that Hegel had taught "the republic and the revolution," he now decried the absolutist tendencies of the Hegelian system, whose oppressive unity paralleled the historical trend toward an all-encompassing political despotism. Bauer accused philosophy of contributing to an inexorable process of levelling and uniformity in the post-revolutionary state (Bauer, Russland und das Germanenthum, I, pp. 40-54). These criticisms anticipated Rudolph Haym's polemic in Hegel und seine Zeit (1857).

In common with many post-1848 intellectuals, Bauer's abandonment of metaphysics led him to a new conception of critique as a positive science or empirical investigation. Bauer no longer contended that history represents an unfolding dialectic of self-consciousness. Critique was to permit the observer to examine historical phenomena without distortion or partiality, and without an a priori systemic concern. Bauer maintained that scientific research must remain independent of ecclesiastical and political tutelage. Its objective was to determine the relation of nature to rights and freedom of the will (concepts which the late Bauer retained, while rejecting their metaphysical foundations); but critique did not enjoin practical intervention in political affairs. The correct stance was now disinterested contemplation of the inevitable processes of cultural decay and regeneration.

The conclusion of this new critique was that the future belonged not to the republican people, or to separate peoples, but to a transnational imperialism, involving the confrontation of two absolutist programmes. In one of these, the Western European, political absolutism arose over modern mass society as its necessary complement. Bauer had earlier criticized this configuration as an outmoded form of state, to be supplanted by the republic; it now described the result of an incomplete political development, which would issue in a contention for world domination. Within the Western European form, Bauer distinguished two variants: Bismarck's state socialism, imitating eighteenth-century Prussian militarism, attempted to subject economic production to political control, suppressing innovation and personal independence; Disraeli's romantic imperialism sought to level and subordinate English society before a paternalistic monarchy. In opposition to the west, the second major absolutist form was that of Russia, a substantial power with limited internal distinctions. Its cohesiveness derived from the fusion of political and ecclesiastical power, and the absence of the modern idea of subjectivity. Bauer noted that Hegel had mistakenly discounted this zone from world history. Like the anarchist Michael Bakunin, Bauer claimed that Russia owed its original state formation to Germany; but Russia had otherwise been impervious to western philosophical influence, adopting only what served its immediate, concrete ends. Animated by hatred and shame of its past insignificance, Russia too was ambivalent. It did not directly provide the solution to the contemporary political crisis, but elicited the decisive struggle with the west. The vigour of an alien adversary would force Europe to transform itself. This process involved the extension of imperialism across the continent and the globe, and the clash of rivals for dominance within the new empire. World war was inevitable.

Bauer's prognosis anticipated aspects of Karl Kautsky's 1915 theory of ultraimperialism, though without the latter's optimism that this trend heralded a reduction in conflicts among contenders for hegemony. Imperialism, moreover, did not stimulate, but hampered economic growth, since insecurity and permanent military mobilization undermined productive activity. The historic function of the globalizing process was to eliminate national identities, laying the basis for an eventual cosmopolitan rebirth. Bauer saw nationalism as a dissipated force. The emerging world order was framed not by the defence of national interests, but by a struggle for transnational supremacy among elites with no local loyalties. The growing centralization of political power was abetted by the levelling forces of the socialist movement, with its own internationalist pretensions. This trend also underlay what Bauer called political pauperism, a generalised disqualification of individuals from participation in political activity. The conclusion of this process would be to perfect mass society, which Bauer had analyzed since the 1840's. The principle of substance, non-differentiation, and conformity would reach its ultimate extension, and could then be overthrown. World imperialism would issue in an all-embracing catastrophe, the apocalyptic end of the old, Christian-Germanic order. Only then would new cultural possibilities emerge. Though these could not be predicted in detail, they would involve the emergence of an unprecedented creative individuality, freed from religious and metaphysical illusions.

Bauer likened the present crisis to the end of the classical world in Roman imperialism. His studies in the 1850's located the origins of Christianity in the second century A.D., concluding that the first gospel was written under Hadrian (117-138 AD), though slightly predated by some of the Pauline epistles. Bauer traced the evolution of Christian ideas from Hellenism and Stoicism, deriving the logos doctrine of John's gospel from Philo and neo-Platonic sources. As in Herr Dr. Hengstenberg, he denied that Christianity had emerged directly from Judaism. More than in his early work, though, he now stressed the revolutionary power of the early Christian religion, as a source of liberation for the excluded and impoverished elements of the Roman Empire. His final book described Christianity as the socialist culmination of Greek and Roman history. Responding to this argument in his very positive obituary of Bauer, Friedrich Engels acknowledged the importance of Bauer's late work for the socialist critique of religion (Sozialdemokrat, 1882). In 1908, Karl Kautsky's book, The Origins of Christianity, applied Bauer's thesis.

Bauer's late writings identified sentiment and pietistic feeling-certainty, rather than autonomous reason, as the principal force in shaping modern subjectivity. His studies of the Quakers and of pietism described passive inwardness and feeling as the dominant characteristics of the German Enlightenment. The practical reason of Kant and Fichte merely translated the inner voice of pietist conscience into a rationalist idiom. Bauer also described pietism as the end of Christianity, since it destroyed dogma in favour of inner illumination and personal moral rectitude. Consistent with his Christianity Revealed, Bauer continued to define positive or statutory religions by their exclusive dogmas and symbols; and he still saw the general course of history as dissipating these dogmas as mere illusions. He discounted the mobilizing potential of religion in the modern imperial order. In the Posaune, he had denounced Schleiermacher's efforts to restore dogmatic Christianity through an appeal to feelings of dependency. Now he claimed that the force of sentiment, contrary to Schleiermacher's supposition, was to dissolve dogmatic religion into personal conviction. The new world empire would end with the inner erosion of religious belief. Not rational speculation, but sentiment, would effect this transformation.

A stringent anti-nationalism and a marked anti-Semitism characterized Bauer's later thought. He defended German culture against its political appropriation by the Prussian and Austrian regimes, but criticized its insufficiencies, in Goethe, for example, who remained enthralled to the metaphysical tradition. Bauer stressed that Germany was not a racial unit, but a historical and cultural artefact, reinforced by racial mixing, and not by racial purity (Barnikol 1972, p. 393). It is clear, however, that some elements were excluded from the mix: unlike his earlier treatment of the Jewish question as historical, cultural, and religious, he now asserted that a natural distinction of race created an impassable divide between Jews and Europeans (Bauer, “Present Position of the Jews,” 1852). His claim that the political significance of the Jews throughout the political spectrum was a testimony to the debility of European culture and to the approaching crisis was greeted by National-Socialist authors.

Bauer's late work contains prescient observations on globalization and world war, and has affinities with a variety of twentieth-century ideological forms, from socialism to imperialism and anti-Semitism. In contrast, his early work bespeaks an original, Hegelian republicanism, and offers cogent analyses of Restoration political thought and the rise of mass society. His intellectual legacy is complex and contentious.

Asignatura: CRF

Jóvenes Hegelianos


Los jóvenes hegelianos, más tarde conocidos como izquierda hegeliana, eran un grupo de estudiantes y jóvenes profesores de laUniversidad Humboldt de Berlín seguidores del trabajo de Georg Hegel.

Derecha e Izquierda Hegeliana
Los jóvenes hegelianos se oponían a otra corriente hegemónica llamada derecha hegeliana que dominaban los estamentos universitarios y gubernamentales. Esta derecha hegeliana opinaba que la serie de eventos históricos de la dialéctica hegeliana se habían completado en su sociedad, y que el estado y la sociedad prusianos tal como existían eran la culminación de todos los cambios dialécticos (mencionaban el alto grado desarrollo del Estado, la presencia de universidades importantes, desarrollo económico y altas tasas de empleo). A diferencia de esta visión positiva y nacionalista del estado prusiano, los jóvenes hegelianos opinaban que muchos otros cambios dialécticos habrían de suceder, y que la sociedad prusiana del momento estaba lejos de la perfección puesto que contenía bolsas depobreza, censura gubernamental, y discriminación religiosa de los no luteranos.

Los jóvenes hegelianos no eran reconocidos por las universidades debido a sus visiones radicales de la religión y la sociedad. A varios de profesores se les obligó a dimitir, a algunos estudiantes como el jovenMarx se rechazaron trabajos en la Universidad de Berlín.

Opiniones sobre a religion
Los jóvenes hegelianos interpretaban que todo el aparato estatal prusiano reposaba en una legitimidad basada en la religión, específicamente en el luteranismo de la Prusia del momento. Sin embargo, generalizaron su crítica para hacerla ampliamente aplicables a otros estados y religiones. De acuerdo con los jóvenes hegelianos, todas las leyes se asentaban en último término en dogmas religiosos.

Por eso, su plan para erosionar el sistema estatal que ellos consideraban corrupto y despótico se esforzaron por atacar la base de la religión, mediante argumentos filosóficos. En ese proceso de crítica, los jóvenes hegelianos fueron los primeros eruditos no religiosos en la Biblia desde Spinoza y su Tratado teológico-político.

Miembros del Movimiento
David Strauss escribió Das Leben der Jesus (La vida de Jesús), donde argumentó que las enseñanzas originales de Jesús habían sido pervertidas con el tiempo con propósitos políticos. Strauss argumentó que el mensaje original de Jesús se dirigía a los pobres y marginados de la sociedad, no a las clases dominantes. Así las enseñanzas de Jesús habrían sido usurpadas por las clases dominantes con el fin de manipular y oprimir a los pueblos del mundo prometiéndoles una recompensa después de la muerte si no se rebelaban contra el orden establecido por los ricos.

Bruno Bauer fue más lejos y proclamó que la historia de Jesús era sólo un mito. Bauer no encontró ninguna referencia histórica a nadie llamado "Yeshua ha-Nazareth" entre los textos sobrevivientes de la antigüedad romana.

Ludwig Feuerbach terminó abandonando el sistema idealista hegeliano y la filosofía especulativa proponiendo un retorno de las ideas al mundo sensible. Su crítica de la filosofía de Hegel consistía en que representaba la realidad de manera invertida. En La esencia del cristianismo descubre que el Dios cristiano no es más que la esencia del hombre enajenada y proyectada hacia el infinito.

Karl Marx y Friedrich Engels fueron otros de los jóvenes hegelianos, inicialmente simpatizaron con la estrategia de atacar al cristianismo para erosionar el sistema prusiano y fueron partidarios de Feuerbach, pero más tarde desarrollaron ideas divergentes y rompieron con los jóvenes hegelianos, atacando sus ideas en La ideología alemana y en La sagrada familia.

Max Stirner ocasionalmente departió con jóvenes hegelianos, aunque sostenía ideas contrarias a esta corriente de pensamiento. Finalmente satirizó a los jóvenes hegelianos en su obra maestra Der Einzige und Sein Eigentum (El Único y su Propiedad).

Asignatura: CRF

German Idealism

The nineteenth century movement called German Idealism grew from the highly independent character of the Enlightenment in Germany. The main features of the movement were the mind-dependence of reality, the dominance of thought over sensation, universalized ethics, and natural teleology.

Leibniz was an important early influence on the movement through his dedication to ethics and religion and through his doctrine of natural teleology. However, Kant provided the first conceptual framework for German Idealism by securing the priority of mind over nature without endangering the validity of scientific principles.

Kant’s idea of inner freedom became the inspiration for creative genius; the resulting aesthetic-ethical idealism manifested in the work of Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller and many others. However, the absolute reality of nature was equally important to these poets; thus, an absolute consciousness from which the individual consciousness could be deduced was posited to eliminate the unknowable real world of the Kantian system.
Inspired by this turn, German Idealism became Absolute Idealism through the philosophies ofFichte and Schelling. In their systems, the human mind is directly in touch with reality as an individual manifestation of the absolute mind. Absolute Idealism reached its peak with the philosophy of Hegel. Hegel makes the impulse of the absolute mind a gradual and self-determined process, by which the Absolute lifts itself from mere possibility and actuality to conscious, free, and necessary possession. For Hegel, the whole process is timeless, and only to a finite mind does it appear as an endless procession in time and space. Schelling, who coined the term “the Absolute,” disagreed with Hegel’s idea that the Absolute was spirit, preferring to say the Absolute is the identity of subject and object. In the late nineteenth century, German Idealism as Absolute Idealism became influential in British philosophy through the works of Bernard Bosanquet and F. H. Bradley, and in the United States through the works of Josiah Royce.

Schopenhauer’s variant of German Idealism returned to the Kantian separation of the phenomenal world and the world-in-itself. He identified the phenomenal world as pure idea and the world-in-itself as a blind, illogical, aimless impulse with no ethical direction.

German Idealism has affected many fields other than philosophy including the positive sciences, poetry, art, and theology.

1. The Movement Characterized

The term “German Idealism” refers to a phase of intellectual life that had its origin in the Enlightenment as modified by German conditions. English and French representatives of the Enlightenment, giving precedence to sensation, had become empiricists and skeptics. They viewed the world as a great machine, adopted hedonism as their ethics, and interpreted history from a subjective-critical point of view. The situation in Germany was just the reverse. There thought was given precedence over sensation, and, instead of empiricism, idealism was dominant. Ethics was based on norms of universal validity, instead of on individual whim. History was interpreted genetically as a rational process; and in place of the mechanical conception of the world, an organic or dynamic view was substituted. Nature was seen to be spiritual, as well as spatial, and was interpreted teleologically. In the hands of Jacobi and Kant, Hume’s skepticism became the weapon that destroyed the influence of empiricism and thus paved the way for idealism. For the Germans, at least, Rousseau’s radicalism brought into question the value of the culture-ideals of the Enlightenment, and impelled them to seek the basis of culture in the creative power of the mind. For the philosopher German idealism usually means the philosophy of Kant and his immediate followers, while for the historian of literature it may seem little more than the personality of Goethe; and it is not usual to characterize the literary aspect of the movement as neo-humanism. However, there is a unity in the movement that cannot be ignored. All its varied manifestations, whether in science, philosophy, literature, art, or social life, are properly treated under the title German Idealism

2. Leibniz and the Pietists

Several factors contributed to the peculiarly independent character of the Enlightenment in Germany. Most notable was the influence of Liebniz and that of the Pietists. Leibniz was an essentially religious personality, and in transplanting the spirit of the Enlightenment into Germany he gave it that distinctively ethical and religious flavor which became characteristic of German Idealism. It was he who was chiefly instrumental in substituting the mechanical view of nature with a teleological one. He transformed the atoms of the materialists into monads, or psychical entities, and substituted for natural law his theory of preestablished harmony. He asserted the absolute worth of the individual against the destructive monistic pantheism of Spinoza, and saw in the progress of history a movement of the monads towards some divine end. On the one hand, he made the development of materialism and skepticism impossible in Germany, and, on the other hand, he brought about the teleological explanation of the history of the universe as a whole. The teleological and idealistic tendencies of Leibniz were strengthened through Pietism; Klopstock, Herder, Jacobi, Goethe, and Jean Paul, all betray in their works the Pietistic influence.

3. Kant’s Transcedentalism

The conceptual framework of German Idealism was provided by Immanuel Kant who was the first to reconcile the conflicting empirical and rationalistic elements of the prevailing dogmatic philosophy. With one stroke he secured for mind priority over nature, and yet without endangering the validity of the principles of scientific investigation. By giving the primacy to practical reason, he placed religion and ethics on a sure footing and broke the ban of rationalism. In the first instance Kant’s work was purely epistemological. He made it particularly his problem to rescue natural science from the (epistemological) skepticism of Hume, and then to rescue religion from nationalism. Kant demolished the rationalistic arguments of Anselm, Descartes, and others, for the existence of God. Science is valid, but it has to do only with phenomena. This phenomenal world, however, is produced a priori by the activity of consciousness, reacting on that external reality whose eternal nature cannot be known. The constancy of experience is accounted for by the very fact that the world as we know it is only the sum total of phenomena. This becomes the basis of the universal validity of certain principles of explanation. Space and time, and the categories of the understanding are subjective and thus ideal. Taken together they form a mold in which we shape the impressions coming from the unknowable, transcendent reality. Thus, the principles of science and the laws of nature are universally valid because they are in the subject, not in the object. Knowledge of ultimate reality comes through the practical reason, particularly through the a priori moral law in us. Kant’s idea of inner freedom became the inspiration of the creative genius. The phase of German Idealism manifested in the art and poetry of the period has been called aesthetic-ethical idealism. The leaders of this artistic movement, who really popularized idealism and made it a part of the life of the time, were not intent on solving the old philosophical problems. For conceptual thought they substituted the creative imagination.

4. Lessing, Herder, and Others

Klopstock and Wieland mark the turning-point toward idealsm. However, their contemporary, Lessing, was the first representative of the movement to liberate himself completely from conventional theology and all that was arbitrary and external in German culture and find in the inner aesthetic and ethical development of the mind the ideal to be followed. Idealism in the sense in which the word is here used became even more effective in the work of Herder. His break with the Enlightenment was complete. In his large application of the idealistic method to the interpretation of science, art, and history, he practically reformed all the intellectual sciences. He, too, proceeded from an analysis of the poetic and artistic impulse, and in the creative activity of the mind he found the key to ethics, aesthetics, and religion. From this subjective, or idealistic, view-point he saw the panorama of history as a spiritualistic development. If Lessing’s great work was to introduce idealism into aesthetics, particularly the aesthetics of dramatic poetry, Herder’s greatest service to the idealistic cause was his application of idealism, as a method, to the interpretation of history. What Wieland, Lessing, and others had done for poetic art, this Winckelmann did for plastic art. He too found in the conception of the free creative mind the basis of ethics, aesthetics, and religion.

5. Goethe, Schiller, and Others

The great representatives of the idealistic type mind in German poetry were Goethe, and Schiller. Against the exclusive claims of the aesthetic view of nature, and a morality essentially classical, Goethe emphasizes the moral and religious worth of the individual, thus approaching the ethical teachings of Kant. Schiller combined the epistemology of Kant with the pantheism of Goethe. With him aesthetic values were the chief types of intellectual norms. Thus, his ethics and religion might be regarded as a phase of aesthetics. However, the aesthetic harmony that he found in the universe had an impact on his ethical and religious nature; despite his aesthetic view-point, he must be classed with Kant and Fichte as one of the great moral teachers of Germany. Schiller’s only consistent follower was Willhelm von Humboldt, who was instrumental in bringing about the Neo-Humanistic reform, on the basis of the new aesthetic-ethical culture. Jean Paul was a representative of the anti-classical type of idealism.

6. Early Views of Fichte and Schelling

The basis of the aesthetic-ethical movement was Kant transcendental idealism. But while Kant made the idealistic position secure, he had not accounted for the reality of the world of nature, with all that it means to the poet as the expression of some divine purpose. To get at the bottom of the matter, it was felt that human consciousness as a starting-point would have to be abandoned and an absolute consciousness posited. From this reality of absolute consciousness, then, individual consciousness could be deduced in a manner, analogous to that employed by Kant. The first to attempt such a comprehensive solution of the problem was Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Starting from Kant’s idealistic position he tried to overcome the dualism involved in Kant’s doctrine of a (thing in itself) by bringing this mysterious reality into consciousness. To do this he dropped the Kantian distinction between practical and theoretical reason, and conceived of the absolute mind, or ego, as moral reason. In his view all existence is psychical, and the human mind is only a manifestation of the absolute ego. Thus, the last trace of an unknowable transcendent reality is obliterated. The absolute ego has divided itself into a large number of relative egos, and through these it is moving progressively toward its own destiny. The core of reality lies in human personality, in the finite mind, but this is caught up in an endless process of development; Hence, to transcend his own consciousness and explain the progress of history, with reference to the past and future, the philosopher must look at existence from the point of view of the absolute ego. In this way Fichte developed his subjective realism, bringing this scheme of idealistic evolution every phase of human experience. Under his treatment, ethics, sociology, aesthetics, and religion become a part of the history of the Absolute. He overcame the dualism between individual mind and nature by dissolving both individual nature and mind. Schelling, starting from the Kant-Fichte point of view, extended the conception of the Absolute to objective nature. His system may be characterized as a sort of spiritualized pantheism. The world is a continuous process from inorganic unconscious nature to organic conscious nature, and then from organic nature back to inorganic nature. While in humans the Absolute reaches consciousness, nature remains essentially objective, but not in a materialistic sense. Nature, for Schelling, is a system of spiritual forces similar to the monads of Leibniz. Schelling worked out his so – called Identitatsphilosophie by extending to absolute consciousness the view that in consciousness subject and object are identical. The sum total of existence then becomes the Absolute as perceived by itself. Naturally, all distinctions and qualities, which are created by a finite relational consciousness, disappear in a self-contemplation of the Absolute by itself, and existence becomes neutral. If Fichte had interpreted existence ethically, Schelling interprets it aesthetically. While with Fichte the Absolute distributes itself in finite minds in order to work out its own moral development, with Schelling the Absolute comes to consciousness in humans in order that we may enjoy the aesthetic contemplation of the unity of mind and nature, the identity of mind with its sensuous content.

7. Romanticism

The immediate result of the metaphysical systems of Fichte and Schelling was a revival of poetic production and criticism known as Romanticism, which sprang from the school of Goethe and Schiller. The union of poetry with the metaphysical or religious view of life became a recognized principle of art; and it was this combination that secured for idealism the final triumph over the narrow naturalism and rationalism of the Enlightenment. Romanticism brought to light the connection of poetry with Christianity. Just as Schiller had taken Kant’s epistemology as a basis for the explanation of the relation of aesthetics to ethics, so now the Kantian position was used to explain the relation of religion to aesthetics. Thus, from Kant’s idealism came a new analysis of religion, illuminating with a new light the problems of culture. Romanticism gave depth to the historical view and dissolved into thin air those time-worn conceptions of a “law of nature,” “common sense,” and innate norms of the reason; this was just as the Enlightenment had formerly disposed of the idea of a supernatural, ecclesiastical norm, which rested on these conceptions. The leading spirits in the romantic movement were the two Schlegels, though Fichte, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Schelling, Novalis, and many others took a part in it. Out of Romanticism sprang a new impulse for systematic thinking; and through the political catastrophes of the time and the moral earnestness of the intellectual leaders, idealistic speculation was forced to apply its norms to practical social problems.

8. Later Views of Fichte and Schelling

The first to feel the pressure of the realistic-historical problems were the founders of metaphysical idealism, Fichte and Schelling. Both betray the influence of Schleiermacher. Realizing the inadequacy of their philosophy to meet practical needs, they now sought an ethical and religious ideal which should unify the concrete content of spiritual life and at the same time be a necessary deduction from the metaphysical background of existence. Fichte retained his idea of the moral state as the consummation of the historical process. However, he no longer considered this state merely as a postulate of progressive freedom, but as a concrete civilized state, in which all members of society share in the blessings of religion, morality, and art. In this remodeled view of Fichte, religion is dominant; for he finds that only religious faith makes possible the realization of the moral idea, and thus the reality of the external world. The world is ethical. It is religious faith that gives an ultimate aim to ethical conduct, that makes possible a union of the empirical ego with its metaphysical basis, that is, God. His ethics is thus deprived of its formal character as an endless progress and given a definite aim. This ethical and religious view necessitates a modification of his metaphysics. The background of empirical consciousness is no longer an endless progression of the Absolute, but a fixed and unchanging divine being. In this being the empirical ego has its origin, and through ethical conduct it returns to its source. Similarly, in view of moral and aesthetic needs, Schelling was forced to change his views. In applying the principle of identity, he destroyed the variety of existence, and thus its reality. In describing the universe as a quality-less neutrum he had only caricatured the Absolute. His philosophy disagreed with every phase of experience. Just as Fichte, so Schelling sought in religion the key to the origin and destiny of humans. The phenomenal world takes its rise in the absolute, self-determined will of God. Because of its origin, the phenomenal world necessarily works its way back up to God again. This movement back to God is a religious process, through mythology, or natural religion, up to Christianity, at which stage the union of man with God takes place. Thus, Christianity, whose dogmas are interpreted evolutionistically by Schelling, becomes the end and purpose of history; and it is upon Christianity that ethics, politics, and aesthetics are to be based.

9. Hegel’s System

If Fichte and Schelling tried to find the purpose of existence in some concrete content (such as the moral state or the Christian religion, deducing this concept from the conception of God), Hegel solved the problem by a systematic exploitation of the conception of evolution, which with him was both a constituent and a teleological principle. The conception had been variously and obscurely employed by Leibniz, Lessing, Kant, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, and F. Schlegel. Then, on the basis of Kant’s transcendental deduction, Fichte and Schelling interpreted the process of development in a purely idealistic manner as the unconscious opposition of the Absolute to itself; this further entailed the conscious and gradual removal of this opposition by self-absorption, the double process following necessarily from the very nature of mind. Hegel makes the impulse of the absolute mind a gradual and self-determined process, by which the Absolute lifts itself from mere possibility and actuality to conscious, free, and necessary possession. Viewed sub specie aeternitatis the whole process is timeless, and only to a finite mind does it appear as an endless procession in time and space. However, it is just in this finite view that the ethical, aesthetic and religious character of Hegel’s philosophy manifests itself. In the finite consciousness there is a separation of the natural, the actual, and the empirical from the spiritual, the free, and the necessary. In the unity reached by overcoming this divorce of the finite from the infinite lies religious blessedness, perfect beauty, and moral freedom. Every phase and stage of this inner teleological development is necessary to the life of the Absolute, and all variety in finite experience is preserved in the higher unity. Nothing is lost. Instead of being an undifferentiated substance, or a qualityless neutrum, the Absolute is the living, vital reality that manifests itself in human experience. This reality is spiritual , and the guiding principle of its upward movement is the fulfillment of its own divine purpose, which is religious, ethical, aesthetic. Religion and ethics are thus a necessary product of the self-explication of the Absolute, or God.

10. Schleiermacher

The religious turn that idealistic metaphysics had taken was due to the influence of Schleiermacher, the most specifically religious of all the great philosophers. In his own system he made use of the religious consciousness in an original and striking manner to solve the practical and theoretical problems growing out of Kant’s critical philosophy. In the field of ethics he was the most conspicuous exponent of German idealism. What Hegel had deduced from the Absolute by his application of the conception of development, Schleiermacher, following the critical method of Kant, sought to attain by an analysis of empirical consciousness. In its theoretical attitude toward being, consciousness is receptive and seeks to combine the data of sense into the highest possible conceptual unity; in its practical attitude consciousness is active and transfers the aim of reason from the world of sense to the world of conscious freedom. However, in both cases thought and being always remain separate for the finite understanding. On the other hand, that essential unity of reality which makes possible any relation of thought to being, such as volition to being, is present in religious feeling. While Hegel had employed a deductive, dialectical method to show that all being is in God, Schleiermacher reached this unity by an inductive process, which was guided by feeling, instead of by pure reason. Instead of starting with a timeless and spaceless Absolute, he started with the phenomenal world. His task was to analyze the reason that dominates the actual world of history, to bring to light its various purposes, combine them into a totality representing the absolute divine purpose of the universe, thesummum bonum, and to show that the power to realize this ideal lies in religious consciousness. Schleiermacher’s practical religious interests now took him into the field of theology.

11. Herbart

Herbart stuck even more closely to the Kantian view-point, but, like other followers of Kant, he sought to eliminate the conception of an unknowable reality, and press forward to the ultimate nature of things. He adopted Kant’s analysis of consciousness, but in a psychological sense, and found that the transcendental reality consists of a plurality of simple substances. These he called “reals.” They are psychical in nature and analogous to the monads of Leibniz. Through their relations to one another and to human consciousness the phenomenal world is brought into existence; and from their teleological cooperation Herbart deduces a divine, creative intelligence, analogous to the monad-monadum of Leibniz, thus opposing sharply current poetic naturalism and Spinozism. Herbart’s practical and social philosophy, which is based on the judgments of the soul as to the relations of the “reals” to each other, particularly on judgments expressing like or dislike, also tends toward rationalism. On account of the method employed here, Herbart calls the result aesthetics, to which he subordinates ethics. In his view the ideal society would be one based on the insight and activity of the educated, and on the rational education of youth, and realizing in its organization the natural and fundamental ethical ideas. Herbart thus became not only a reformer of psychology, but of pedagogy as well.

12. Schopenhauer

The last great representative of German Idealism in systematic philosophy was Schopenhauer. While with him the phenomenal world is idea (that is, existing only as a subject idea) its objective basis is not a “thing in itself” as Kant taught, but a universal will. This Schopenhauer interprets as a blind, illogical, aimless impulse, without any original ethical tendency whatsoever. Through the blind impulse of this world-will arises human intelligence and the phenomenal world. History loses all teleological significance and becomes an irrational and endless progression. Ethics, therefore, as the philosophy of the ultimate purpose of the world can only proclaim the aimlessness of the cosmic process and seek to put an end to it by stilling the will. This quietizing of the will is effected by recognizing the aimlessness of the process and resigning oneself to it completely. For these teachings, Schopenhauer found a support in Buddhism, which was then just becoming known in the West. He was bitter in his hatred of the theism of Judaism, which for him exhibited selfishness and sensuality, and was the root of all deceptive theism. The pure Christianity of Christ he regarded as a sort of mystical quietism. Though his metaphysical work,De Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, appeared as early as 1819, his teachings found no popular reception till after the wane of Hegel’s influence in Germany.

13. Idealism in the Positive Sciences

The effects of this idealistic development are apparent in the positive sciences no less than in metaphysics. In accord with the idea of the oneness of the world, the natural sciences have been given a subordinate position, or else reduced to natural philosophy. The new spirit is manifested even more clearly in the historical sciences, where the genetic method is everywhere employed and individual facts are treated in relation to the whole development. For instance, the historian of literature or art now seeks to bring the facts with which he is dealing into relation with other phases of life and thus grasp the life and ideals of a nation as a whole. Similarly, the philologist is no longer satisfied with the study of one language, but seeks to correlate it with kindred tongues and reconstruct the inner life of the people. Even in the field of jurisprudence the genetic method has been adopted and particular stress laid on the development of common law. The effect of this idealistic movement may also be observed in theology. Here deistic efforts to base Christianity on a general theory of religion have been replaced by a more penetrating psychological analysis, together with a genetic view of religious history. It should be added, though, that repeated and earnest attempts have been made to rescue the core of Christianity from the general flux of history and give to it a fixed character. Since it is in the universities, chiefly, that the sciences are cultivated, naturally the universities were reorganized in conformity to the changed ideals. It was in the University of Jena that German Idealism got its first foothold. From here the new educational ideal went to the newly established universities of Berlin, Heidelberg, Bonn, Breslau, and Munich, and into the secondary schools.

Asignatura: CRF