German Classical Philosophy

German classical philosophy became one of the peaks of world philosophy.

It reflected the contradictions of Germany as the backward (отсталый) state in socio-economic sense, divided into more than 300 small principalities (княжества), as well as into the Catholic and Protestant churches.

However, the Germans started to develop dialectic, which had almost been forgotten since the Greeks. This feature of German classical philosophy became a reflection of deep thinking of the German society’s future.

It was related to the Enlightenment and the French revolution. German idealists believed that nothing exists without the mind.

German classical philosophy consists of five thinkers:
Immanuel Kant
Johann Fichte
Friedrich Schelling
George Hegel
Ludwig Feuerbach

The ancestor of German classical philosophy is Immanuel KANT (1724-1804). He was born in Konigsberg, Prussia, and also died there.

In his entire life Kant never travelled more than seventy miles from the city of Königsberg.

Kant created a new perspective in philosophy that had widespread influences on philosophy continuing till 21st century.

In Kant’s philosophy there are two stages:
before critical
critical

At the first stage, Kant is a materialist.
At the second stage, he moves to the position of theoretical agnosticism, and in many respects, idealism.

In before critical period Kant’s philosophy was a combination of natural-scientific materialism and the philosophy of Leibniz.
In 1755 Kant wrote a work “General Natural History and Theory of the Celestial Bodies”

Along with Pierre-Simon de Laplace, Kant proposed a theory of the Solar system appearance from gas-dust cloud around the Sun.

Critical period of Kant’s philosophy is marked by publication of three Critiques...
“Critique of Pure Reason” (1781)
“Critique of Practical Reason” (1788)
“Critique of [Ability of] Judgment” (1790)

In one of his friends (K.Schteudlin), Kant declared main aim of his scientific plan, that is to answer the questions:
What can I know? (metaphysics)
What must I do? (ethics)
What can I trust in? (religion)

In 1781/87, Kant published “Critique of Pure Reason”, in which he explored the possibilities of human mind during cognition.

Kant raises the questions on certain knowledge which has necessary and universal essence.
How can pure mathematics be?
How can pure science be?
How can metaphysics be as a science?
And he answers: reliable (достоверное) knowledge is possible in mathematics and natural sciences.

According to Kant, scientific knowledge is based on two sources:
A POSTERIORI (from experience), that is, empirical data through feelings.
A PRIORI (beyond experience), that is forms of sensibility and reason.

A posteriori forms come to human mind due to the ability to feel the outside reality. It is result of outer surrounding.
A priori forms of sensibility are space and time. Both they exist within us as conditions of experience before any kind of experience.
Relationships among things, causality (причинность) and regularity (закономерность ) as qualities are understood beyond feelings.

Considering human cognition as complicated process, Kant reveals (обнаруживает) four contradictions, which he calls antinomies. Antinomy is a dual judgment containing two opposite sides, each of which can be proved.

They are:
1. The world is limited in space and time
The world is infinite in space and time.
2) The world consists of simple particles of matter
The world contains complex particles of matter.

They are:
3) There is freedom in the world
There is no freedom.
4) There is necessary essence of the world (God)
There is no original cause.

Due to the fact that these antinomies can be proved by logical means, Kant shows that human mind has come into conflict with itself. Here, there are limits of human reason to cognize the ideas.

An idea of soul and an idea of God can not be obtained (получить) owing to experimental verification. Kant wrote that he limited the sphere of reason, to make place for faith.
Kant calls transcendental knowledge everything that goes beyond the limits of mind and cognition.

That is why Kant doesn’t believe in power of logical thinking making “Copernican turn”. It is when the nature should be corresponded to human cognition while before they proclaimed human perception had to be appropriated to the nature.
In his opinion, the world influences on human mind, as well as human comprehends the world.

Kant considered external world and its forms as divided into:
“thing in itself” (noumenon-essense)
“thing for us” (phenomenon-accidence).

In his second writing “Critique of Practical Reason”, Kant considered mind as a true source of morality.
Morality is derived (выводится) from the concept of DUTY.

Categorical imperative:
“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law”.

A categorical imperative is an unconditional obligation; that is, it has the force of an obligation regardless of our will or desires.

“Critique of the Power of Judgment”, is the third work of Kant. It is a project of foundations for aesthetics as sensibility. In this book, Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is the “free play” of the imagination. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide what is beautiful, the judgment of beauty is not a cognitive judgment.

Johann Gottlieb FICHTE
(1762-1814)

Inspired by his reading of Kant, Johann Fichte developed systematic version of transcendental idealism, which he called Wissenschaftslehre of “Doctrine of Scientific Knowledge.”

Main source of human’s existence is his fundamental freedom. Freedom is based on self-awareness.
Self-awareness is the awareness (осознание) that human exists as an individual being.

Subject (I) is the only one who is real and absolute. All other world including the nature world, is a product of activity of “Me”
Me = Me
Me = not Me
Me = synthesis of Me and not Me (self-identity)

Fichte stands on the position of subjective idealism. Fichte rejects “thing in itself”, replacing it with “not-Me” (nature) that exists within “I”. Nature is a sensuous nature of man.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von SCHELLING (1775-1854)

There are four periods of his philosophy:
Gnoseological,
Naturphilosophical
3. Transcendental,
4. Philosophy of revelation (откровение).

Gnoseological period is to understand the abilities of human cognition. An object is not main element in cognition, as well as a subject doesn’t esteem the cognition. The point is to combine both object and subject, where cognitive process depends on concrete situation and individual features of human.

Naturphilosophical period is consideration reality as separated self-advanced spiritual nature. In nature, there are many processes, which purely connected. Thus, man have to find general principle for structural organization of his knowledge about nature.
Main principle is unity of nature, which has many branches of its development.

Transcendental period is to define identical parallels between man and nature in cognition. We can do this through intellectual intuition. It helps us to go up till free action of understanding of nature. Intellectual intuition become the object of scientific research.

Philosophy of revelation is the period, when Schelling considered religion as the highest form of human attitude to nature. Religion appears because of depth of the essence of nature and limits of human cognition.

The essence of God is in his self-expression. Man must develop himself to discover and understand God’s self-expression for the aim to get real freedom. That’s why in the fourth period, Schelling moves to the position of Theosophy, combining philosophy, mythology and religion.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HEGEL
(1770-1831)

Hegel has compiled (обобщил) many rational ideas of classical German philosophy in the field of dialectic. He criticized the subjective idealism of Fichte and Kant’s agnosticism, saying that the world is knowable and there is no unknowable “things in itself”.

Hegel begins from intelligence (рассудок), which allows us to differ moments of world as fundamental motion, as well as the elements of nature.

Intelligence gives birth to thesis that has its antithesis. Both of them are unified in synthesis. This is a formulae of primary dialectic. We use it in frames of daily common sense.

Hegel takes Absolute Idea as a dialectical beginning that goes through three stages:
- Logical idea (before the creation of nature);
- Nature;
- Spirit.

Introduction to Hegelian philosophical system is his “Phenomenology of spirit” (1807). Hegel seeks to overcome the opposition of man and nature. This opposition can be solved by the consideration of consciousness, in which individual consciousness comes the path that mankind has passed during its history. As a result, man is able to look at the world and himself as at the ending of the history of the world, in which there is an absolute identity of thinking and being.

Reaching the absolute identity, philosophy achieves its true state of pure thought, inside which, according to Hegel, all definitions of thinking find themselves from thinking as itself. This is the field of LOGIC (first step of Hegel’s system), where understanding of nature is being realized in pure form.

Hegel’s “The Science of Logic” consists of :
Volume One: The Objective Logic
- The Doctrine of Being
- The Doctrine of Essence
Volume Two: The Subjective Logic
- The Doctrine of the Notion

In this book Hegel begins from pure being, then moving to the essences of the things tried to define human notion about ready and understood nature. Finally, human understanding reaches a level of Absolute Idea.

After individual logic Absolute Idea turns to PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE (second step of Hegel’s system), which contains:
Mechanics
Physics
Organics

PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT (third step of Hegel’s system) also passes through three stages:
1.Subjective spirit
(anthropology);
2.Objective spirit (jurisprudence, morality, history)
3.Absolute spirit
(art, religion, philosophy).

Ludwig Andreas von FEUERBACH
(1804-1872)
is the only representative of materialism in German classical philosophy.

Feuerbach criticized idealism or religion, has developed a materialistic doctrine of the nature of knowledge and man. Philosophy should be transformed into doctrine of man, anthropology. Feuerbach considered human as natural, physiological being, who is located out of history.

Thinking can not create matter, otherwise, matter itself generates consciousness.
God is the alienated (отчужденный) essence of man.
Anthropological materialism

But Feuerbach wanted to create a religion of love. Feuerbach called his philosophy as philosophy of future.