Matt’s Reviews > German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism > Status Update

On Kierkegaard’s view, the fate of the modern world was not the establishment of reconciliation in Sittlichkeit [ethical life] and free politics, but a social world of puffed-up conformism populated by despairing individuals engaged in efforts to deny and repress their despair.

There can be no approximation to an ideal outcome in which the kingdom of ends is realized, since there is a tragic flaw, as it were, at the metaphysical heart of the world itself. Satisfaction would consist in attaining one’s goals, but, since “there is no ultimate aim of striving … there is no measure or end of suffering” and thus no satisfaction.
-- Schopenhauer

(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
-- Jagger/Richards

Schelling thought that the idea that “either things are or are not” might itself not be exhaustive of the ways in which the “absolute” – that is, God – can be characterized, and, since our own human ways of thinking require that opposition as normatively basic, any apprehension of God must therefore be intuitive, that is, metaphorical and indirect[…]requires a way of telling a kind of “myth”[…]

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
-- Karl Marx

Hegel was also acutely aware of the problem that extreme poverty and extreme wealth poses for modern civil society, since, at both ends of the spectrum, individuals lose their sense of obligation to the “whole” – one because they have no stake in it, the other because they tend to think that they can buy themselves out of its obligations.

One of the catch phrases [Hegel] adopted to mark out his own distinctive post-Kantian position was not to speak of nature and mind (Geist) as two worlds or two realms that had to be divided into the empirical and the transcendental. Instead, Geist (or, put in the more abstract terms of the Logic, the Idea) is subject only to those reasons of which it can regard itself as the author;[…]

A central claim in Hegel’s Logic […] is that the importance of formal syllogistic logic cannot itself be understood purely formally but depends on a prior understanding of non-formal material such as how the subject and predicate terms were “distributed” in the premises, so as to block syllogisms such as “Socrates is white, white is a color, therefore Socrates is a color.”

In the eyes of the other, the judgmental purist, who refuses to soil his hands with action that might compromise what his “pure” conscience requires, is a hypocrite, pretending to be good but actually concerned only with himself; in the eyes of the judgmental purist, the agent who acts according to what the purity of his conscience tells him is also a hypocrite, for the same reason.

Not surprisingly, interpreters have always had trouble making sense of the [Phenomenology of Spirit]; it has been held, variously, to be a “coming of age” novel (a Bildungsroman), a new version of the divine comedy, a tragedy, a tragi-comedy, a work in epistemology, a philosophy of history, a treatise in Christian theology, and an announcement of the death of God.

Kant thought that, while we have an ethical obligation to keep our promises, with regard to contracts we can only speak of legal obligations […]; Fries argues for the more rigoristic view that “contract” just is “promise,” and that lying therefore ought to be a legal infraction, not merely a reprehensible ethical lapse.