The Past and Current Reputation of German Philosophy

When Rosenkranz completed his biography of Hegel in 1844, he wrote the meaningful words in the preface: "Does it not seem as if we are today only the gravediggers and monument-setters for the philosophers whom the second half of the last century gave birth to in order to die in the first half of the present century? Kant began this death of German philosophers in 1804. Do we see an offspring for this harvest of death? Are we capable of sending a holy crowd of thinkers into the second half of our century?" Four decades have now passed since the intellectual and jovial Hegelian posed this question. Let us look around us! What answer does our time give us? Now they must have become the men of whom Rosenkranz asked: "Are there any of our young people alive to whom Platonic enthusiasm and Aristotelian industriousness inspire the mind to immortal effort for speculation?" A fairly superficial knowledge of the intellectual life of our time is sufficient to realize that the answer to the above question will not be a very pleasant one. The group of philosophers who are enthusiastic about speculation today is small, very small, but the group of those who shrug their shoulders and look down on the entire philosophical age of the German people is large. It almost seems as if we have buried German philosophy with the German philosophers.

What did philosophy mean to the Germans at the beginning of our century, what does it mean today? At that time it was the watchword of the day; the philosopher could count on the participation of every educated German, his words were not only listened to by an enthusiastic audience in the lecture halls, they penetrated everywhere where there was any intellectual interest at all. Today, philosophy professors read - in front of empty benches. For a time, philosophical questions were the issues of the day; they were treated in the same way as political, national or economic issues are treated today. Having a world view seemed to be a necessity for every thinking person. Philosophy seemed destined to carry the torch ahead of all other sciences, to determine their direction and goal. The full energy of human thought awoke, and with this energy came the fullest confidence in human reason. The deepest need to penetrate into the secrets of the mystery of the world awoke in the heart, and at the same time the spirit considered itself capable, supported by its own power - without revelation, without experience - of doing justice to this endeavor. How different things are today! We have completely lost confidence in our thinking. We regard it solely as a tool of observation, of experience, just as we once regarded it only as a tool for interpreting the dogmas established by the Church. We do not even try to solve the great riddles that nature and life pose to us. We have Aristotelian industriousness, but we lack Platonic enthusiasm. We waste endless effort on detailed research, which is of no value without great guiding principles. The only thing we forget is that we are on the best way to a point of view that we consider to have long been overcome: on the way to blind dogmatic faith.

The rejection of sovereign thinking, combined with the insistence on the sayings of experience, is quite the same for a deeper understanding as the blind faith in revelation of a dismissed theology. Theology is handed down truths that it must accept without being allowed to ask why, without being able to use its own thinking to work out why what it believes to be true is true. It hears the message and must believe it. Thinking has nothing to do but to bring the finished truth into a form suitable for man. It is no different with mere empirical science. In its view, nothing is true except what the facts proclaim. We should observe, organize, collect, but refrain from all reflection on the inner driving forces of the events we encounter. The truths of experience are also transmitted to us from the outside. The Church demanded that thought submit to revelation; empirical science demands submission to the random statements of the factual world.

And in the field of practical philosophy, where have we got to? The common thread that runs through the thinking of all minds of the classical period is the recognition of man's free will as the supreme power of his mind. This recognition is sometimes taken very lightly. Few realize that, grasped in its full depth, it forms the seeds of a religious view of the future. Whoever recognizes man's free will in the highest sense of the word must deny any inner or outer worldly influence on the actions of his spirit. He must refer him entirely to himself, to his own personality. No "divine commandments", no "thou shalt", as the religions have it, can he allow to apply to the moral life of man. Man must draw the goal and purpose of his existence from himself.

His destiny is not that which an "eternal counsel" of God assigns to him, but that which he gives to himself. He recognizes no master over himself. This view increases the awareness of human dignity infinitely. In order to cherish it, however, we need that trust in our own reason which we no longer have, or at least not to the same extent as in the classical epoch of our philosophy. This view must give up finding consolation in religion or in the consciousness of being a child of God in general; it must seek consolation in man's own breast. It must give up leading a life pleasing to God and recognize only its own reason as its guide. Only with this view does man feel completely free. It was a tremendous step forward in the education of the human race when the German philosophers proclaimed this truth in all its forms. Who recognizes it as such today? We no longer believe that we are capable of setting ourselves the goal and purpose of our lives. We believe ourselves to be under the sway of an iron necessity of nature, just as an outdated humanity believed itself to be under the sway of divine wisdom. Anyone who also has a sense of the miserable situation we would be in if this view were true becomes a pessimist. And so today, pessimism is considered the attitude of noble spirits. Our ancestors, who were strong in faith, were not pessimists only because they believed that the Creator was all-good and all-wise and that everything would ultimately work out for the best. Of course, such an assumption cannot apply to the blind necessity of nature.

Only free philosophical thinking, which is capable of the highest development, can rise above this view. And such was the thinking of our classical epoch.

Our German philosophy is not the deed of an individual, it is the deed of the German people. The German people brought their best, their lifeblood to the surface, and that is what we call German philosophy. The men who appeared at the turn of the century and in the first decades of ours proclaimed a message that arose from deep within the soul of the people. And not only the philosophers, but also the poets proclaimed the same message. For the epoch of our classical literature does not signify a one-sided upswing in poetry, but a deepening of the entire German essence. The basic character of all the creations of our greatest age is a philosophical one. Our greatest poets had to come to terms with the philosophical views of the time. Schiller considered himself fortunate to live at the time when Kant was bringing the greatest world problems into flow, and there are philosophical truths that no one has grasped more deeply than Schiller to this day.

If we ask for the reason for this phenomenon, we must look for it in the depth and peculiarity of the German essence. This essence is best grasped when it is linked to ancient Greekness. The cultural historian of the future will certainly attribute to the German spirit the same significance for the formation of modern times as today's historian does to the Greek spirit with regard to the formation of antiquity. The Greek spirit was directed outwards, it urged the shaping of the world of the senses in order to reproduce a small world in individual works of art. The Greek artist sought to imprint on his creation that which in nature is distributed among a multiplicity of beings, so that one might say that the Greek sought to unite all the laws of nature in a single work of art. When Goethe recognized this basic character of Greek masterpieces in Italy, he said that the Greeks followed the same laws in their work that nature follows and that he was on the trail of. This immediately expresses the contrast and similarity between the German and Greek spirit. The Greek seeks to imprint the idea of creation on matter, the German seeks to grasp it by thinking and to shape it as a world of ideas, to which he withdraws. Plastic sense is at home with the Greeks, plastic spirit with the Germans. It has been repeatedly stated what the Germans want with their philosophy. He wants to recreate in his mind the order according to which the world around us is assembled.

Only the German has grasped philosophy in this bold sense. All other worldly wisdom is merely a premonition, a foreshadowing of what became a world-historical phenomenon in the German spirit. Philosophy in the German people was transformed from a scholarly matter into a matter of humanity. It was with this awareness that Hegel was able to say, when he delivered his inaugural address on October 22, 1818: "This science has taken refuge with the Germans and lives on in them alone. We have been entrusted with the preservation of this sacred light, and it is our duty to nurture and nourish it and to ensure that the highest thing that man can possess, the self-consciousness of his being, does not go out and perish." This also explains why it had to be a philosopher who best showed the Germans their own nature in the mirror of the idea. The basic trait of German nature is precisely a philosophical one and can therefore be grasped most deeply by philosophical reflection. The "Speeches to the German Nation", which Fichte delivered in Berlin, surrounded by the armies of the enemy, are a treasure of the German people.

If the philosophical current is currently being pushed back in our nation, we must not be unfair. Today, we are too absorbed by political, economic and national interests. But the spirit of German philosophy continues to have an unconscious effect on the social reforms in the empire. We need only recall the idea of the "closed commercial state" advocated by Fichte. We surrender to the belief that in the not too distant future our people will completely reconnect their present with their past. It must, because it denied itself when it denied its philosophers. Our western neighbors have mocked us for our idealism. We were able to bear the mockery, because idealism can only be appreciated by those who have it. Things are different today anyway. While French chauvinism preferred to turn its weapons against our people, today French scholarship is immersed in German thought, and the English are competing with the French. Tying the present to the past: in this sign we shall triumph, and our best victories will be those of the spirit.