From Kant to Nietzsche

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

The class is intended to be a graduate introduction to the history of the development of German Idealism from Kant to Hegel and then the far reaching critiques of that development by Marx and Nietzsche. For the last two hundred years, the development of “German Idealism” has been one of the most controversial developments in the history of philosophy. Hegel (and later Marx) saw the movement as issuing forth from and responding to problems internal to the Kantian system itself, with Hegel’s own philosophy as the capstone of the project. Later neo-Kantians thought that the entire idealist movement rested on either fatal misunderstandings of Kant or failed to see that there were other (and more legitimate) alternatives that responded to the difficulties in Kant’s positions. Likewise, proponents of the figures “on the way” to Kant and Hegel (most importantly, Fichte and Schelling) have argued that it was Hegel’s misunderstanding of “their” figure that led him to his conclusions. There are important movements in European and what has broadly come to be called “analytic” philosophy that by and large accepted that there was a unity to the development of idealism from Kant to Hegel, and that this was reason enough to start somewhere else or to return to it from a chastened analytic perspective. The course will thus look at the general positions represented by some of the protagonists in the story (Kant, Fichte, Hölderlin, Schelling, Hegel) from a philosophical point of view, which includes asking questions about how the history of philosophy is to be done from a philosophical perspective itself. In this light, we will be reading in tandem the most recent book that attempts to characterize part of this movement as a whole, Eckart Förster’s The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy (which only covers the period between Kant and Hegel). A list of key topics to be considered would include but not be exhausted by terms such as “spontaneity,” “autonomy,” “recognition,” “alienation,” “modernity,” and “subjectivity.” The focus all along will be on themes having to do with theories of knowledge, philosophy of mind, and the connection between ethics and political thought in all these thinkers. Aesthetics will also figure prominently. Among the philosophers to be considered will be: Kant, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. We will also look very briefly at the poets Novalis and Hölderlin.