Intro to German Idealism: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, & Hegel

Very Good. A good way to differentiate them is to look at their relations to the French Revolution. Because there you can draw neat analogies to the Russian Revolution. First you have the indecisive Centrism of Kant, who does not want to fully commit neither to the French revolution, nor to the consequences of his philosophical discorvery. In a way, he combines both analytic and "continental" philosophy, though not as synthesis but as a limp half-half. Not surprising that he is one of the most popular bourgeois philosophers. Then you have his successors. First Fichte, who is the left opportunist. He goes all in with the Kantian subjectivism and the promise of the French Revolution to consciously and freely create society. He came from a proletarian background, broke "natural" class boundaries and rose to fame seemingly by his own will. He overemphasises the subject while at the same time overestimating the subjective factor in the Revolution. In a proto-trotskyist fashion he is bitterly disappointed by the Napoleonic compromise and switches sides to a fiery anti-napoleonic German Nationalism. Schelling ist the right wing opportunist. He come from an old and established clerical family and folds back subjectivity into the laws of nature. He overemphasises the natural order and evolutionary progress. He sympathises with the Revolution at first, but turns on the prospect of a clear break with the old world. He is later employed in Berlin to purge the university of Hegelians and his late philosphy marks the beginning of the romantic reaction to Hegel. Hegel is the true stalinist archetype. He fully accepts both the revolution - in alls its unromantic severity - as well as the post-revolutionary compromise in order to survive and make the results of the revolution last. The areas freed from the yoke of the Catholic Church by Napoleon are not conincidentally the birthplaces of Marx and Engels. With Hegel, bourgeois philosophy reaches its peak, from which socialism can already be conceived. The vertigo that causes within the bourgeoisie leads them to spend most of the rest of their philosophy to destroy this achievement (Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger et al.). Lukacs' "Destruction of Reason" gives a brilliant account of that. Highly recommend this for communist philosophers, allthough an English translation might be hard to get.

Max