German philosophy

“ So, too, at this point let there appear before you at last, and unmistakably, what that philosophy, which with good reason calls itself the German philosophy, really wants, and wherein it is strictly, earnestly, and inexorably opposed to any foreign philosophy that believes in death. The German philosophy has as its support what we said above about freedom ”

“ The battle that German philosophy here had to fight was no easy one. Its foe occupied every position of vantage. The real or apparent exactness of its principles, the detailed character of the structure of the world that it bade fair to offer were a power. What we want is facts, not ideas; intelligibility, not profundity—these were the demands with which philosophy was confronted. ”

“ As it is, you have suffered enough on account of the wild German ideals you luckily only partly believed in: for what the German thinker wrote on patient paper in his study, you always had to write the whole world over on tender human skins, black and yellow skins, enveloping ungrateful beings who sometimes had no very high esteem for the depth and beauty of German philosophy. ”

“ The just and humble side of German philosophy—if we can lend it virtues to which it is deeply indifferent—is that it accepts the total relativity of the human mind and luxuriates in it, much as we might expect spiders or porpoises to luxuriate in their special sensibility, making no vain effort to peep through the bars of their psychological prison. ”

“ The great characteristic of German philosophy is that it is deliberately subjective and limits itself to the articulation of self-consciousness. The whole world appears there, but at a certain remove; it is viewed and accepted merely as an idea framed in consciousness, according to principles fetched from the most personal and subjective parts of the mind, such as duty, will, or the grammar of thought. The direction in which German philosophy is profound is the direction of inwardness. ”

“ An exact representation of the universe, of its evolution, of the development of mankind, and of the reflection of this evolution in the minds of men, can therefore only be obtained by the methods of dialectics with its constant regard to the innumerable actions and reactions of life and death, of progressive or retrogressive changes. And in this spirit the new German philosophy has worked. ”

“ Strange that no man acquainted with German philosophy should yet have been struck by the fact—or, being struck, should not have felt it important to call public attention to the fact,—of our inevitable feebleness in a branch of study for which as yet we want the indispensable words. ”

“ The more profound they are the more content and even delighted they are to consider nothing but their own creations. Their theory of knowledge proclaims that knowledge is impossible. You know only your so-called knowledge, which itself knows nothing; and you are limited to the autobiography of your illusions.
The Germans express this limitation of their philosophy by calling it idealism. ”

“ Within this time, the study and translation of German literature have become fashionable pursuits, and on the whole, highly beneficial. The philology of Germany and its profound poetical criticism have taught much: the philosophical tendency of German theology has engaged the attention of teachers of religion, and had its effect both for good and evil, and the accurate study of the highest branches of German philosophy has tended decidedly to elevate the standard of abstract speculation. ”

“ In the nation which to this very day calls itself simply the people, or Germans, originality has broken forth into the light of day in modern times, at any rate up to now, and the power of creating new things has shown itself. Now, at last, by a philosophy that has become clear in itself, the mirror is being held up to this nation, in which it may recognize and form a clear conception of that which it hitherto became by nature without being distinctly conscious of it, and to which it is called by nature ”

“ Nowadays the Germans are bored by intellect, they mistrust intellect; politics have swallowed up all earnestness for really intellectual things—"Germany, Germany above all." [1] I fear this was the death-blow to German philosophy. "Are there any German philosophers? Are there any German poets? Are there any good German books?" ”

“ In all these points it is right, and far surpasses the philosophies prevailing in foreign countries at the present day; for German philosophy in its love of everything foreign is far more thorough and more consistent than the foreign countries themselves. Now this foundation, which is to be the basis of mere appearance, is for those philosophies, however much more incorrectly they may further define it, always fixed Being, which is just what it is and nothing more, chained in itself and bound to its own essence. ”

“ The later German philosophy of life we might mention as a denial of much that humanism asserts. Here we see a doctrine of force, an ideal of life based upon the elevation of conscious will to its first principle. ”

“ It is quite plain, too, that an investigation of the latter kind may be completed sooner and more easily than one of the former.
So we may say that genius in foreign lands will strew with flowers the well-trodden military roads of antiquity, and weave a becoming robe for that wisdom of life which it will easily take for philosophy. The German spirit, on the other hand, will open up new shafts and bring the light of day into their abysses, and hurl up rocky masses of thoughts, out of which ages to come will build their dwellings. ”

“ German philosophy, always prolific, and often productive of monstrous births, has given to the world many elaborate systems, physical and metaphysical, whose most prominent feature is the deification of Nature or of Man. ”

“ Animosity of the Germans against Enlightenment.— Let us consider what the Germans of the earlier portion of our century contributed to the general culture by means of their intellectual work, and take first the German philosophers: they reverted to the first and oldest stage of speculation, for they were satisfied with conceptions instead of explanations, like unto the thinkers of dreamy ages,—thus, & pre-scientific mode of philosophy was resuscitated by them. ”

“ Another thing is that its spirit usurps the mastery over the other sciences whose borders are contiguous with philosophy, and regards them from its own point of view. Finally, since the German after all can never entirely lay aside his seriousness and its direct influence on life, this philosophy influences the habits of public life and the principles and rules that govern it. ”

“ For ourselves, we regard the whole history of modern German speculation—the most remarkable instance, in our judgment, of great mental powers ill applied which the world has ever witnessed—as one continuous comment upon this text, the necessity of adhering to careful, honest observation of mental phenomena, however homely may be the results of such observation, and the astounding conclusions to which a train of thought rigidly pursued may conduct us, if, at its very point of departure, it has broken loose from this the first obligation of philosophy. ”

“ What I propose in these pages to call German philosophy is not identical with philosophy in Germany. The religion of the Germans is foreign to them; and the philosophy associated with religion before the Reformation, and in Catholic circles since, is a system native to the late Roman Empire. ”

“ We all accord to the awful and unfathomable German Mind a preternatural gift of philosophy, so far above the contemptibly-limited thing we call human understanding that no man can ever understand a word of it ”

“ The various systems of philosophic Rationalism, mutually subversive, as they are, of each other, will fall to the ground, and the vulgar Rationalism which is but an emanation of the higher, and which still prevails in [Pg 332] some particular schools, and in many of the lower walks of German literature, will finally disappear; in proportion as German philosophy becomes imbued with the spirit of religion, and German science becomes thoroughly Christian, or Catholic. ”

“ As the highest and greatest of man’s endowments, it was almost deified, whatever did not appear at once and easily explicable by reason, being forthwith and indiscriminately pronounced a prejudice, and, as such, to be got rid of with all diligence. In this state of things, modern German philosophy commenced its career with attempting to show that this sovereign reason, which had set itself forth as the first and highest in man, is extremely defective, and comes far short of the requisitions both of science and life. ”

“ German philosophy since Kant reveals, in manifold forms and under various disguises, the attempt to recognize, in Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Ethics, such kinds of Certainty, such domains of Being, such human Volitions and Values, as lie beyond reason, constitute a something that it cannot grasp, and are rooted in some other kind of foundation. ”

“ That history is itself incarnate reason; that history is infinitely more rational than the formal abstracting and generalizing reason of individuals; that individual mind becomes rational only through the absorption and assimilation of the universal reason embodied in historic institutions and historic development, became the articles of faith of the German intellectual creed. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that for almost a century the characteristic philosophy of Germany has been a philosophy of history even when not such in apparent form. ”

“ From this closer kinship it follows also that this philosophy of history, which we call ours, is able to understand the efforts of foreign countries through and through; and, although this view of history is no longer expressed very often in those countries, they go beyond expression, for they are acting in accordance with it and constructing once more a golden age. This philosophy is even able to prophesy, and to point out to them the path they have still to take; it can pay them the tribute of genuine admiration, which one who thinks as a German cannot pretend to do. ”

“ In Lessing, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller, the clergy, the minstrels, and the bookmen were each represented, but philosophy had breathed into them an all-embracing, cosmical spirit of humanity, and under their influence German literature soon lost its exclusive and sectional character, and became cosmopolitan and universal. ”

“ Pietism, the religious influence that began with Spener (1635) and swept Germany in the eighteenth century; (2) The sentimentalism of Rousseau; (3) The empirical psychology of Locke among the younger Germans; (4) The Rationalism of the Leibnitz-Wolffian philosophy, which was most powerful in academic circles; (5) The mathematical rigorism of the nature-philosophy of Newton; (6) The new literary writers in their insistence upon subjectivity and intuition.
The Three Characteristics of German Philosophy. German philosophy will be seen to have three characteristics. ”

“ The object of the German philosophy, or the system 379of professor Kant, as far as I can understand it, is to explode this mechanical ignorance, to take the subject out of the hands of its present possessors, and to admit our own immediate perceptions to be some evidence of what passes in the human mind. ”

“ And finally, to call to mind the enormous influence which "German philosophy"—I hope you understand its right to inverted commas (goosefeet) ?—has exercised throughout the whole of Europe, there is no doubt that a certain VIRTUS DORMITIVA had a share in it; ”

“ Still less have we in mind the assistance of individual members who have fallen behind in the general development. Next, when we speak of mental culture we are to understand thereby, first of all, philosophy, for it is philosophy which scientifically comprehends the eternal archetype of all spiritual life. We must designate it by the foreign name, as the Germans have shown themselves unwilling to adopt the German name [1] that was recently suggested. For this science, and for all science based upon it, the claim is now made that it influences the life of a people who have a living language. ”

“ Let us look both at the alleged natural law and the German creature so camouflaged by it that he deceives himself into believing that he is really the superman that his philosophy paints him. For it is quite true that many Germans, many educated Germans, do believe what they say of themselves and of their Holy Crusade under the banner of Natural Law. ”

“ The contemplation of beauty is not that of an external world, but of the inmost nature of reality. Thus individuality and cosmic reality are one and the same. Life has a joyful outlook, not because our tasks are easy, but because our strength is equal to them; for is not God in us?
The Two Periods of German Philosophy. German philosophy is divided into two epochs: (1) the period of the formation of the critical theory of knowledge by Kant; (2) the period of the metaphysical development of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Herbart, and Schopenhauer. ”

“ The second step, which is really the continuation and completion of the first, namely, to discover in our own selves this religion, and with it all wisdom—this, too, was prepared by foreign countries and completed by the German. The next step forward that we have to make in the plan of eternity is to educate the nation to perfect manhood. Without this, the philosophy that has been won will never be widely comprehended, much less will it be generally applicable in life. ”