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...value of our own work and thus, simultaneously, over our relation to other persons (class colleagues and class enemies) as well as ourselves, we are above all alienated in our species being. We have turned the “freedom” of our own non-necessitated activity into something taken to be necessary.

As German Idealism had already stressed, alienation is fundamentally a matter of our treating as independent something that is of our own making. Marx appropriates this point by turning to economics in a Feuerbachian way: in losing control over the concrete products of our labor, as well as over the very activity and...

... (for Hegel, basic Notions are essentially self-actualizing, very much like the concept of God in traditional ontological arguments).

In Hegel’s three- part system, there is an ultimate source for both life (nature) and consciousness (spirit), namely the domain of Notions (treated in the Logic), which fulfills itself as what Hegel calls the “Idea.” This is not a mental entity, but rather the rational realization of the Notion in actuality...

Schelling claims that “[v]ery few people reflect upon the fact that even the lan- guage in which they express themselves is the most complete work of art,” and the implications of this remark can reveal the basic idea of his whole text. Language, Schelling explains, is “the direct expression of an ideal – of knowledge, thought, feeling, will, etc. – in something real, and, as such, a work of art.”

In the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View Kant suggests that the difference in a child before and after it learns to refer to itself as “I” is that “Previously it just felt itself, now it thinks itself.”

...continually drives me to the opinion of the unhappiness of all being, a conviction which has been voiced in so many pained expressions in past and present. It is precisely man who drives me to the last despairing question: Why is there anything at all? Why is there not nothing?”

In reflections on the groundlessness of reason, the traces of subjectivity become unrecognizable. This sets Schelling apart from Hegel, who held on to the form of subjectivity in every aspect of his work. In the end, the unsolvable mystery is human existence itself:

“Far from making the world, man, and his actions comprehensible, he is himself what is most incomprehensible, and this...

...from Kierkegaard (a one-time student of the late Schelling), through Nietzsche (Schopenhauer’s heir), to Heidegger (who owes more to Fichte and Schelling than he lets on).

We make ourselves, and we can undo and remake ourselves – albeit not at an empirical level but in non-empirical, transcendental self-genesis. It is this notion that our human existence (that we are) precedes our yet to be given – self-given – essence (who we are) that became the anti-essentialist, praeter-rational, voluntarist legacy of German Idealism to concrete, “existential” thinking,...

...the seriousness and perseverance with which Fichte, Schelling, and Schopenhauer undertook the idealist self-critique contrasts remarkably with the strategies of piecemeal adoption and selective recycling practiced by some of their self-appointed heirs in the late twentieth century.

Over the past few decades a number of philosophers and scholars have argued for the superior role of Schelling in the later development of German Idealism and sought to show that it was with Schelling and not Hegel that the movement reached its deepest and most far-reaching insights.

In their different ways, Hölderlin and Novalis both called into question some of the deepest assumptions about reflection and subjectivity shaping not just Fichte’s and later Hegel’s idealism, but much of the philosophical tradition.

Schlegel’s irony is of a very different sort. It involves using some particular set of words to suggest the Absolute; what is not directly, but only indirectly communicated is therefore not some fully determinate thought, but rather something essentially indeterminate.

...poetry uses the things of our world, even the most common, to evoke a sense of the Absolute. This was for Novalis the essence of romanticism: “To the extent that I give to the lowly a high meaning, to the ordinary a mysterious air, and to the well-known the dignity of the unknown, I am romanticizing it.”

...Novalis never concluded that the very idea of the Absolute is incoherent. On the contrary, the first aphorism in Pollen implies that though knowledge of the Absolute lies forever beyond our grasp, we are impelled to seek it all the same. Reason naturally tries to trace things back to their ultimate source in the Unconditioned. The rub is that all we ever come thereby to understand are conditioned things.

German romantic thought is often said to be a longing for wholeness and organic unity, a nostalgic flight from modern man’s alienation from the world. Yet Hölderlin offers a notable exception to this idée reçue. His notion of absolute Being certainly qualifies as an organic whole, but the theme of all his thought is that our aim cannot be to merge with Being.

...For any sense we have of being one with ourselves, arising as it does from some basis other than the I itself, must by the same token embody a sense of being one with everything else. Subjectivity arises as a disruption of this unity and remains at bottom incomprehensible without it.

To grasp subject and object as one in self-consciousness, Hölderlin argued, we must draw upon a sense of their unity antecedent to the standpoint of the judging I. Moreover, this unity or “absolute Being” must underlie the distinction between subject and object inherent in every sort of cognitive attitude – not only in self-consciousness, but also in our relation as knowers to the world. For any sense we have of...

...Schiller protested in his essay of 1793, Über Anmut und Würde: “In Kant’s moral philosophy,” he wrote, “the idea of duty is presented with a harshness that frightens away all grace and that could easily tempt a weak mind to seek moral perfection on the path of a dark and monkish asceticism”.

A benevolent action arising out of fellow-feeling can have “no true moral value.” Indeed, imagining a person without any feeling of sympathy for others, yet disposed to do what is right out of a sense of duty, Kant declared that he would display “beyond compare the highest form of character” (G, Ak 4:398).

[Hölderlin and Novalis] agreed in opposing one of the leading assumptions of Fichte’s and later Hegel’s idealism, namely, that reality is transparent to reason. For both of them, philosophy runs up against limits that poetry alone can point beyond.

After 1799, when Kant repudiated Fichte, it was clear that Kant did not share the monistic interpretation of his philosophy. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel found this to be proof that Kant did not understand himself, while others found it to be proof that they did not understand Kant.

Schiller’s enormous impact on German Idealism is registered in no uncertain terms in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. “Schiller must be paid the great tribute,” he declares, “of having broken through Kantian subjectivity...and of having dared to move beyond it, grasping unity and reconciliation” as the ultimate truth of things. Schiller’s concept of art, he maintains, comes closest to his own.

To achieve the final moral end of the species, Kant thinks, we must join together in an ethical community, which differs from a political or civil society in that it is entirely free, voluntary, and non-coercive, and can therefore deal with our ethical disposition – something regarding which external coercion in any form would be wrongful.

Chapter 3, by Allen Wood

...merely permissible: every possible act is either obligatory or forbidden.)

Chapter 3 by Allen Wood

Kantian morality thus leaves a great deal of latitude in determining which ends to set and how much to do toward each end. The pursuit of our ends, once they have been decided upon, is constrained only by juridical duties, perfect duties to ourselves and duties of respect to others. (In this respect, Kant’s theory contrasts sharply with the terrifying rigorism of Fichte, who allows no actions to be...