The Classical Philosophy

The basic question of all philosophy, the dispute between idealism and materialism, the relationship between subject and object, the question whether thinking or being, mind or nature came first, whether a god created the world, or whether it was eternal, occupied the minds of the thinkers of antiquity and was not even completely stifled in the faith of the medieval church. It emerged with new force at the beginning of the bourgeois age, when economic development and as a consequence science began to grow increasingly rapidly. The home of the new materialism was accordingly England and Bacon its first pioneer.

Although it was a product of the bourgeois mind, materialism was first used as weapon against the revolutionary strivings of the bourgeoisie which, in seventeenth century England, still fought its battles under religious banners. Hobbes, the first consistent materialist, was a straightforward absolutist, even if he was an absolutist of a bourgeois cut. He did not start out from the divine order of the feudal classes, a monarchy by divine right and all the other feudal whims, but rather denied that man was a political animal, a natural builder of states. Hobbes described the natural condition of man as the war of all against all, a catchword that has since become proverbial for bourgeois competition. He derived the state from a contract concluded to limit human greed, a contract which, therefore, had to have absolute authority. Hobbes saw the most advantageous but by no means the only form of absolute state power in the hereditary monarchy. Any church, he thought, must be subordinated to the state; the absolute state power had the right to control the religion and the ways of thinking of its subjects. Here, Hobbes went so far as to recognize the superstitious fear of invisible powers, invented or inherited, as a religion, as long as it was ordained by the state.

The English revolution of the seventeenth century ended in a compromise between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, who set up a common kingdom. Thus English materialism transferred from the absolutist to the constitutional form of the state. Locke taught that there can be nothing in the mind that has not been previously in the senses; he founded the philosophy of common sense; by this he meant that there could be no philosophy apart from the healthy human senses and an understanding based on them. He separated religion and politics. In contrast to Hobbes, he denied the state the right to form or to expunge the opinions of men. He preached bourgeois tolerance. He divided the legislature just as strictly from the executive power. The legislature is in the hands of the people, who elect the legislative assembly. The King stands not above, but under the law, and in misusing his power he forfeits his rank.

Nevertheless, English materialism remained an esoteric doctrine, a secret of the top ten thousand, of the aristocracy rather than of the bourgeoisie. For once the English bourgeoisie gained a share of power, however modest, it became pious, very pious, and almost two centuries before the Kaiser Wilhelm I it discovered the profound wisdom that religion must be maintained among the people. It went so far in the eighteenth century that an English materialist like Hartley upheld biblical miracles and a transcendental life after death in the same book that first derived human thought and sensations from brainwaves, and thus explained them in a materialist manner. The recognised leader of the free thinkers in those days was not a materialist, but the philosopher Hume, who indeed rejected the faith of the church, but also rejected materialism by denying that the human senses could achieve an exhaustive knowledge of the world. Rich as England was in great natural researchers, all of them, from Boyle and Newton to Darwin and Faraday, either believed in a supernatural creation or let the Dear Lord alone.

Nevertheless, Locke was the godfather of French materialism as Hume was of German Idealism. On the continent, the idealist and materialist viewpoints had maintained a kind of equilibrium in the philosophers of the seventeenth century, who were mostly, like Descartes, Spinoza and Leibnitz, important mathematicians and physicists. Descartes dealt with earthly things in a materialist way and with celestial concepts in an idealist way; Spinoza explained the essential unity of mind and nature in the idealization of substance; Leibnitz propounded the eternally fore-ordained harmony of thinking and being. Only at the beginning of the eighteenth century did French materialism emerge as an independent phenomenon. It picked up the threads from Locke, and it too was at first an aristocratic theory, although the seething revolutionary spirit of the bourgeoisie soon recognized what this theory could mean to it in its struggles against the monarchy, the nobility and the clergy.

French materialism in the eighteenth century not only finished with religion, in the course of which it was immaterial whether its exponents were atheists and explained man as a machine, or whether they were deists, and pensioned the Dear Lord off to some quiet corner of the universe; it also intervened profoundly in the political and social life of France. If man formed all his perceptions and knowledge from the sensuous world and his experience of it, then all his happiness and his destiny were to be sought in this world alone. The perfection of human society consisted in its complete harmonisation with the nature of man. Whatever contradicted human nature had to be removed from society. Helvetius, the real founder of French materialism, explained in his book on mankind that the real bases of morals were sensuous attributes and egotism, pleasure and enlightened self-interest. The main points of his system are the equality of human intelligence, the unity between the progress of reason and the progress of industry, the natural goodness of man and the omnipotence of education.

What the French materialists thought was human nature was actually the political and social needs of what was then the third estate. In the emancipation of bourgeois society they saw the creation of a perfect society. French materialism was a mighty weapon against absolutist, feudal and clerical France. Its literary peak was the famous Encyclopaedia, its political peak was the Declaration of the Rights of Man; and it finally degenerated into utopian socialism. It is easy to see how much this kind of socialism could and did draw from the doctrines of French materialism on the fundamental goodness and the intellectual equality of man, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education, the influence of external circumstances upon man, the extreme importance of industry and the justification of pleasure. Fourier and Owen started out from materialism, and Dezamy returned to it, as the logical basis of socialism.

Despite all its brilliant successes, French materialism rested on very shaky ground. The natural sciences had made great progress, but mechanics was the first to reach definite conclusions. Chemistry and biology were still in the very first stages. Nothing was known of evolution in nature, and accordingly nothing was known of evolution in society. Nature moved in eternal circles, and the human mind had been the same from the very beginning, obscured at times as in the Middle Ages, but now striving once more for its natural rights. Materialism did not even touch the inner relationship of the riddle of existence. Idealism therefore once more took up the task of solving this riddle. It happened in the country where the bourgeoisie was mature enough to father plenty of intelligent thinkers, geniuses even, but not yet mature enough to storm the mouldering castles of absolutism and feudalism.

German philosophy was the continuation of German literature, to the extent that the latter had embodied the bourgeois struggle for emancipation. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason appeared in the year of Lessing’s death, and it first became generally known in the year of the French revolution. An inward feeling of spiritual community with this mighty revolution was common to our great philosophers. Kant, Fichte and Hegel always spoke of it with the greatest appreciation, unperturbed even by the Reign of Terror, which inspired Goethe with his miserable Citizen General and inspired Schiller to write all sorts of doggerel about that blessed daughter of heaven, the divine order of the petty bourgeoisie. German idealism was a reaction to Anglo-French materialism, but in no sense a step backwards from it. Kant triumphantly defeated materialism on its own home ground by introducing the principle of evolution in nature. He abolished the eternal permanence of the solar system by explaining that the sun and all the planets arose out of a rotating cloud of dust. Indeed, in his popular lectures he already talked about the evolution of man from the animal kingdom as something self-evident. He rejected the older idealist theory that all knowledge from experience and from the senses was nothing but appearance, and that truth existed only in the ideas of pure intellect. He put it the other way round, saying that all knowledge of things gained from mere intellect was nothing but appearance, and that truth came from experience alone.

Kant’s real role lay, following Hume, in investigating man’s ability to perceive, and in reversing, in the Critique of Pure Reason, the whole of experience and all the historical and exact sciences by the simple assumption that our concepts do not follow things, but that things follow our concepts, that we do not see external things as they are, but as they appear to be to our imperfect senses, that the whole world of phenomena, including the sensuous perception of space and time, only exists in men’s illusions, while behind it the absolute nature of things, the thing-in-itself, is hidden in impenetrable obscurity. On the one hand this reconciled thinking and being, on the other they gaped as far apart as ever. Kant did not solve the riddle of existence but declared that it was insoluble. There can be no contradiction in things, since whatever contains a contradiction is impossible. Thought, on the other hand, involves us in unavoidable contradictions, Kant’s famous antinomies, such as the finitude and infinity of the universe, the divisibility and indivisibility of matter, and freedom and necessity.

If Kant had destroyed the objective world, dissolving it into the activity of human consciousness, Fichte reconstructed it out of human consciousness, building on Kant’s doctrine and at the same time transforming it. Fichte was a stranger to the natural sciences. The ego, that is man not as an individual but as a species, was for him the real thing-in-itself. Human self-consciousness was not the mirror but the creator of the objective world, whose existence is not explained by forms of pure thought, but the forms of whose existence are begotten by pure thought. From it Fichte derived space and time, quantity and quality, possibility, reality and necessity. Thought is an independent process carried out according to inner necessity. Every proposition brings with it its opposite, and thought moves forward through the constant overcoming of this constant contradiction by a higher unity. Thus Fichte took up again the dialectical method of the ancient Greeks. But if he made the pure inwardness of the subject the begetter of the object, mind and nature were one and the same, and Fichte indeed announced that the ego was a subject-object. Schelling and Hegel on the other hand, carrying on his doctrine and simultaneously transforming it, amplified it as follows: if subject and object are one and the same, then neither of the two is the thing itself, neither the subject nor the object, neither thinking nor being, neither the mind nor nature. Each is only one side of the thing, and the whole thing is the process, which goes through both and comes to consciousness of itself in the mind of man.

For Schelling, the ‘identity of subject and object’ merely remained a bright idea which distracted him into a fantastic natural philosophy and all kinds of romantic junk, until he ran aground in that long-since silted harbour, a belief in divine revelation. Hegel, on the other hand, declared that the absolute idea was the soul that gave the whole world life, although he had nothing to say about it, and in its philosophical derivation it was merely the higher unity of Spinoza’s substance and Fichte’s self-consciousness. But he conceived of it as a logical and historic process. The mind, the ego existing in and for itself, becomes in the various stages of its development first consciousness, then contemplative and active reason, and finally the mind, grasping itself, refined and religious. In nature it operates as blind necessity, but in history it fashions itself from the raw state until it becomes conscious of itself. The historical process is therefore only a reflection of the logical process that fulfils itself, ignorant of when and where. However obscure this concept may be, Hegel’s most original contribution was to portray the historical process as a logical one. If Kant had introduced evolution in nature, Hegel introduced it in history. If Fichte had latched onto the dialectical method, Hegel made it the source of all life. The concept of being brings with it the concept of nothing, and out of the conflict between the two arises the higher concept of becoming. Everything is and at the same time is not, for everything flows, is in constant change, caught up in constant becoming and passing away. And the dialectical movement of German philosophy fulfilled itself in this, that Kant’s proposition: ‘everything that contains a contradiction is impossible’ was transformed into Hegel’s proposition: ‘it is only contradiction that moves the world at all.’

Thus a goal was reached that Anglo-French materialism could not have attained because its knowledge of nature was still on a comparatively low level. To demonstrate the dialectical movement in nature has only become possible through the mighty advances that have fallen to the natural sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century. Here the impetus given by Kant found its conclusion in Darwin’s demonstration that all organic nature, plants and animals and with them of course man, is the product of a process of evolution carried out over millions of years. Here even Hegel could not clear the barriers placed in his way by insufficient knowledge of nature in his day. He still shared the views of the French materialists that nature was a whole, moving in equal cycles, always the same, eternal heavenly bodies and unchanging varieties of organic existence. But he broke out of this viewpoint, particularly insofar as it had been applied to history by the English materialists. He conceived of human history as a process in constant motion, change and transformation, rising from the low to the high. In a tremendous mental task he tried to follow the gradual stages of this process through the most varied branches of historical knowledge, through all apparent diversions and contingencies. Since he took things to be the reflections of concepts, he indeed accomplished some very arbitrary historical constructions, but since such obstinate things as historical facts are not easily subjugated to concepts, he also arrived at some insights of genius into the coherence of human history.

The peculiar greatness, as well as the peculiar weakness, of German philosophy is explained by the economic and political peculiarities of German conditions. They permitted bourgeois ideals on the one hand to be pursued to their boldest and purest conclusions. Kant’s main principle of morality: ‘Always act in such a manner that you use humanity, in your own person as much as in anyone else’s, as an end and never merely as a means’, was only possible in a country where the bourgeoisie had developed only slightly and the proletariat not at all. Only in such a country could Fichte say that no man should use another’s strength for himself, or write: ‘Man should work, but not like a beast of burden that sinks to sleep beneath its load, and, after the shortest of rests, is whipped up again to carry the same load. He should work without fear, with joy and happiness, and have time to spare to raise his mind and his eye to heaven, the sight his body was fashioned to see.’ Fichte, whose proletarian origins can be traced in a fiery succession of revolutionary thoughts throughout his whole life, branded the exploiting feudal nobility as stupid, ignorant, cowardly, lazy and base. All the terrorism of the French revolution breathes in his saying: ’The law absolutely must prevail. Whoever cannot see that for himself must be forced to see it.’ Precisely from the pitiful history of Germany, which for him was no history at all, Fichte deduced that the mission of the Germans was to present a rule of law such as the world has never seen, with all the citizen’s enthusiasm for freedom that we saw in the old world but lacking that sacrifice of the majority of mankind as slaves without which the old states could not survive – for freedom based on the equality of all those who have a human face. If finally Hegel uprooted all authority, heavenly and earthly alike, by the pure thought-play of the dialectical method, this procedure, as thorough as it was airy, was only possible in a nation without great class collisions and struggles. But on the other hand it was only in their thoughts that the German classical philosophers lived in the clouds. Their idealism experienced a very perceptible limitation in the fact that their thoughts could not be separated from their bodies, which breathed under the rod of despotism and the lash of orthodoxy. With pure reason Kant argued the Dear Lord out of the universe, but he smuggled him back in again through the back door of practical reason. When he was put on trial for his atheist outlook, a trial that led to his expulsion from Jena, Fichte vacillated in a manner both strange and unpleasant in such a strong man, between untimely defiance and untimely subservience. In later years a fit of mysticism clouded the hair-sharp logic with which he had annihilated the illusion of a personal God. Hegel even came to terms with the Trinity by incorporating it into his system: God, the bare thought of whom created the real world as his image, as the Son, and, recognizing himself in it, received himself back as Spirit.

Politics was even thornier ground than religion. The German philosophers lacked that Archimedes’ fulcrum with which the French materialists had shifted the absolutist, feudal, clerical state: the concept of bourgeois society. But they lacked the concept because they lacked the thing itself, or rather only its scant beginnings were in existence. They only knew the state as the guardian of human morality. In his famous scheme for eternal peace, Kant starts with the sentence: ‘The state is indeed not a possession, like the country in which it resides; it is a society of men which no-one but themselves may command or manage.’ From this he correctly concluded that the constitution of the state should be republican. But how was the state that was the possession of the despots to be transformed into a republic? By the moral progress of the human species, answered Kant; by national education, answered Fichte. However greatly and profoundly they conceived these ideologies, they begat in them what was indeed a tiresome race of moral preachers and school teachers, but for all that they did not shake a single stone of the despotic state, whose representatives suspiciously spied on their every move.

Even Fichte’s treatise on mercantilism , which he called his best and most thoroughly thought-out work, portrays the ideal of the Frederician state as that historical state, reorganized to suit the strict demands of bourgeois reason. The Prussian Finance Minister, Streuensee, a man of the Frederician school, graciously accepted Fichte’s dedication of the treatise to him in 1800. He felt that Fichte had laid down the ideal state for which every state servant who had a share in the administration had a duty to strive, even if it was doubtful whether it would ever be achieved. Streuensee may at the time have been thinking of his brother, who, in Denmark, thirty years previously, had paid with his life for the attempt to reorganize a feudal, absolutist commonwealth according to the laws of bourgeois reason. Fichte is unable to comprehend bourgeois society; he sees in free trade an untenable inheritance from ‘the thinking of our ancestors’; what was fitting for the medieval unity of Christian Europe, he thinks no longer valid for modern nations. When Fichte assigns to the government the task of tying particular classes of the population to particular occupations such as agriculture, the crafts or trade, or when he says that the flow of cash abroad impoverishes the people, these are completely Frederician thoughts. When Fichte says that foreign travel should be forbidden because the idle search for novelty and distraction should no longer be permitted to parade its curiosity from land to land, we seem to hear Old Fritz himself arguing.

Fichte, it is true, wanted to transform Frederick the Great’s state completely into a harmonious commonwealth, whose individual members were to have their right to a happy and satisfying existence guaranteed. But even this he outdid with his Rational State, completely shut off from abroad, which made its own special currency, whose composition in monarchic states was to be a secret of the royal family, a state which was to have nothing in common with the rest of the world except science. It was, in the national arena, the same tragic conflict between means and ends that, in the international arena, turned Fichte’s last years into the most moving drama. He who had once yearned for the arrival of French bayonets as the saviours of free thought, whom the German despots had sought to stifle by force, aroused the German nation in his fiery speeches to fight those selfsame bayonets and died amidst the clamour of victory, without hope, without self-deception, prophesying with shattering clarity all the misery that befell Germany after Waterloo.

Hegel, too, sensed what the victory of European reaction meant. He had once called his philosophy the forerunner of the time when there would be a free people. After the defeat of the French he declared that the natural mission of the Germans was to be able to preserve undisturbed the holy flame of philosophy as the chief fruit of the independence they had regained. When, called to Berlin, he wrote Philosophy of Right to portray the law as a rational organism developing out of itself, he started from the proposition: All that is real is rational and all that is rational is real. His ideal of the state based on the rule of law reflected the Prussian state of 1821 as much as Fichte’s closed trading state had reflected the Prussian state of 1800, with the understandable difference that Hegel, under the pressure of the Karlsbad Decrees, idealized his model less than had Fichte in all the excitement following the French Revolution. Hegel does know bourgeois society, but his estimation of it is very low. It is indeed the state, but only the external state, the site of necessity and intellect, the showplace of debauchery and misery, of physical and moral ruin. The state itself on the other hand is the reality of the moral idea, absolutely rational and an absolute end in itself, and therefore the highest law over against individuals, whose highest duty is to be members of the state. This conception fits the persecution of the ‘demagogues’ like a glove.

Now the state according to Hegel’s philosophy of law is always the monarchy. The republic can no longer exist in the face of the developed idea. A people without monarchs is a formal mass without structure. In the monarchy however the word ‘the people’ describes those members of the state who do not know what they want. The Estates are raised above the mass of the people as the legislative power that has to decide on general questions, but here, too there is little that can be done. The servants of the state can do best without it, and within the assembly of the Estates they must do best. They are the exponents of the second power, the government, and as such the real men of the state, who understand everything best. The third is the princely power. Its will makes the final decisions, dots the i’s and crosses the t’s, and contains within itself the ideal form of the three powers as a totality. As well as being the substantial will and the ideal powers as form of the whole it is identical with the true reality as opposed to the yellow press. The press represents public opinion, ’existing contradiction’ according to Hegel, and is fed by those who have no other way of making themselves heard. Completely in the spirit of the Karlsbad Decrees, Hegel wishes to impose upon the press regulations that are partly preventive and partly punitive. His philosophy of law is in advance of the Prussia of the 1820’s in little more than in demanding that the administration of justice should be public, and trial by jury.

However, in its incomprehensible words alone pulsed the spiritual life of the age. The polemic against the Historical School of law and the Romantic theory of government in the same work are sufficient to prove that for Hegel it was not a matter of a thoughtless idealization of existing conditions or even a return to the Middle Ages. To his tortuous efforts to find the reason in the then existing reality, his own saying is best applicable: in our age that is so rich in reflection and given to reasoning, someone who cannot establish a cause for everything, even the worst, has achieved very little. For all that he recognized nonetheless the reality of reason.

Reason is historical necessity, the eternal flux of the process of historical development. What it creates is real and rational because it is necessary; as soon as it ceases to be necessary it becomes unreal and irrational. The Prussian monarchy was real and rational because in the given historical conditions it could be no other than it was, because the people did not know what they wanted, and were thus very irrational. If the people were to become rational, then the Prussian monarchy would have to be posited as a real state, and according to Hegel’s definition of a real state, the monarch would have to be posited as an ideal, and both negated into the public good.

Hegel himself had no illusions about the revolutionary character of his dialectic, and he even feared his Philosophy of Right would be banned. Nor was the Prussian state entirely easy in its mind for all its idealization. Proudly leaning on its police truncheon, it was unwilling to have its reality justified merely by its reason. Even the dull-witted King saw the serpent lurking beneath the rose: when some distant rumour of his state philosopher’s teachings reached him he asked suspiciously: ’But what if I don’t dot the i’s? The Prussian bureaucracy meanwhile was grateful for such generous laurels, especially since the strict Hegelians clarified their master’s obscure words for the understanding of the common subjects, and one of them wrote a history of Prussian law and the Prussian state, where the Prussian state was proved to be a gigantic harp strung in God’s garden to lead the universal anthem. Despite its sinister secrets, Hegel’s philosophy was declared to be the Prussian state philosophy, surely one of the wittiest of history’s ironies. Hegel had brought together the rich culture of German idealism in one mighty system, he had led all the springs and streams of our classical age into one bed, where they now froze in the icy air of reaction. But the rash fools who imagined they were safely hidden behind this mass of ice, who presumptuously rejoiced when bold attackers fell from its steep and slippery slopes, little suspected that with the storms of spring the frozen waters would melt and engulf them. Hegel himself experienced the first breath of these storms. He rejected the July revolution of 1830, he railed at the first draft of the English Reform Bill as a stab in the ‘noble vitals’ of the British Constitution. Thereupon his audience left him in hordes and turned to his pupil Eduard Gans, who lectured on his master’s Philosophy of Right but emphasized its revolutionary side and polemicized sharply against the Historical School of Law. At the time they said in Berlin that it was this bitter experience that killed the great thinker, and not the cholera.