G.W.F. Hegel; Wikimedia Commons
The Philosophy of the 1800s
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831)
Hegel is convinced of the interrelationship between thoughts and the interrelationship between events, between things. Hegel does not believe that reason and understanding are timeless and independent of their place in history. The spirit is something that is developing over time. In and through man nature is seeing itself. History has brought a consciousness that is capable of grasping its own historical conditions. The spirit is guaranteeing the order and direction of history, and the spirit is discovering itself through natural philosophy and philosophy of history.
Hegel showed that the roles of the subject and the object in the process of understanding were not static entities, as considered by most thinkers from Descartes to Kant. Objects are not lying still, waiting to be discovered and examined by an active but fully developed subject. In the ongoing process, the subject and the object are mutually influenced by each other. The subject’s tools and consciousness are under constant development. Hegel rejects Kant’s teachings on the subject and the notion of “Das ding an sich” (the thing in itself).
The experience of the senses is the point of departure for understanding, but this experience needs notions. When the experience of the senses recognizes its need for notions, it is no longer a pure experience of the senses, but something that has developed beyond that. In the Phenomenology of the Spirit this process is developed until all forms of consciousness have shown their strengths and weaknesses. The experiences of the senses need notions, notions need self-consciousness, self-consciousness needs reason, reason discovers that it needs more than its individual reason, and it also discovers that it needs the Spirit as a pre-condition for embarking on this journey. The Spirit represents an order that all humans and objects of study are part of. At every completion of such a process, a change of the whole situation takes place and produces a new context. The Spirit is the whole and the absolute.
This process of development formed by Hegel is called the dialectic method. Hegel’s Spirit is a notion of his own, resembling Spinoza’s Immanent Spirit, but it is different in that it develops itself genetically – which Spinoza’s spirit does not. Hegel’s philosophy of development was, as seen by him, at the heart of the development of world history. The inner contradictions in a given situation are the sources of development. They give rise to a synthesis where these contradictions have found their place in the new situation. This new situation gives rise to new contradictions, which then drive the process onwards.
Both Hume and Kant distinguished between cause-effect on the one hand and assumption-deduction on the other hand, because they made a distinction between the inner reality of thought and the outer reality of things. Cause and effect belonged to the world of things, while assumption and deduction was a relation between entities of thought. With Hegel, like with Leibniz, inner and outer realities are merged. The dialectic process concerns both, in the same way. Neither Hegel nor Goethe embraced the individualism and subjectivism of the Romantics. They saw the individuals as determined by their species, and by the group it belongs to. Hegel divides the Spirit in three: 1) the subjective spirit, which shows itself in anthropology, phenomenology and psychology; 2) the objective spirit, which shows itself in law, morals, and virtue; and 3) the absolute spirit, which shows itself in art, religion, and philosophy.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855)
“Know yourself” is the imperative of both Socrates and of the Existentialists. Kierkegaard used his own personal experiences as examples of the human condition in general. The main thought of his work is that truth has to do with the choices of the individual, and that the subject has to invest itself in every valid truth. He does not reject science or objectivity, but like Leibniz he contends that objective knowledge belongs to God alone. He thinks that the degree of sincerity and intensity contributes to the recognition of the validity of truth. He says that “truth is objective uncertainty held in the most passionate intensity of acquisition”. Truth is to be found in faith.
Kierkegaard wanted to help the individual to find truth in faith, like Socrates wanted to help people to find truth in a more general way. He did not, like Hegel in his time or Plato in Socrates’ time, think that it would help people to deal with their existential problems by presenting a great package of thoughts firmly bound together. Religious or moral truths are something entirely different from views on how things are (in an ontological sense). In connection with objective truths there is a distinction between knowledge and being. With existential truths this distinction disappears. Objective truths may be transferred from those who have them to those who do not have them. Truths that are linked to a person’s attitude to life cannot be transferred in the same way. They can only open up for existential possibilities, which in turn only can be realized by the recipient’s own choices.
Kierkegaard is not interested in science. He says we know enough. What we lack is a new attitude to life, not knowledge. He seeks to remove people’s illusions and draw their attention to their responsibility for their own lives. “You do not reflect your way into Christianity, but you reflect your way out of everything else and become an ever truer Christian.” His existential philosophy is linked to Christianity as the choice for him. For others, the choice might be different. The important thing is what happens inside and with the person. He therefore puts pressure on people to enter into this process of search for intensity in inner truth.
Kierkegaard presents a philosophy of the stages in life. Each stage is a complete form of consciousness and may represent the context of an entire life. For certain persons, however, the stages may represent stages of an evolution. These stages are: 1) the aesthetic; 2) the ethic; 3) the religious. The aesthetic lives for his entertainment, and his main focus is to fight boredom. The ethic is in all ways different from the aesthetic. The ethic chooses a life of responsibility, where the aim is to be useful and fulfill a calling. He is the everyday hero. However, feelings of guilt and anguish are destabilizing factors in this life. The religious chooses a more daring life, a life that confronts the anguish and the guilt. This life enters the serious and intense realm, and it forces the individual out of all normal human community. He has to drop everything when he hears the call of God.
Kierkegaard’s analysis of anguish has been a model for similar analyses of passions and affectations found in later existentialist thinking in the 20th century, as regards philosophy, psychiatry, and theology. Anguish is, according to him, a human trait linked to freedom. It follows freedom as a shadow. It is a form of dizziness faced with the abyss of void that surrounds freedom on all sides. Death forces the individual to think his existence through, and makes him responsible for his choices. For many people, the flight from freedom, responsibility and decisions becomes a major concern.
Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)
Far more than most thinkers, Karl Marx managed to bring his thoughts into the political arena. Much of modern philosophy in Marx’s time was concerned with the principles of the understanding of natural sciences. With Marx, economics is the basic science, and he attempts to develop critical thinking in conjunction with a practice that can change society. Before Marx, history was in large part seen as spiritual history. This was particularly the case with Hegel, who saw development of religious, political and philosophical ideas as the backbone of historical development. Marx turns Hegel’s view upside-down and considers economic history as the guiding element in development, and thought as a secondary effect of the ideological needs of the rulers.
Changes in those forces (tools and resources), conditions (division of labor and properties) and processes (methods) that have to do with the production of necessary goods are, according to Marx, the key to all historical changes. Marx describes history as a class struggle, between those who possess the means of production (owners) and those who only possess their own capacity to work (workers). The situation of the classes changes from period to period, depending on changes in social organization and conditions of ownership. Changes occur both as a result of actions on the part of owners and workers, and as a result of changes in conditions of production. Marx makes use of Hegel’s dialectic method in his analysis. In general, he considers that the ruling thoughts in a given period are the thoughts of the rulers.
In a capitalist market economy, Marx contends that the only thing that is free is market and trade. No individual is free. Workers live as abstractions of their full humanity, and are judged only by their value as producers. They are themselves a commodity in a market. Marx considers that workers are exploited by those in power, owners and their cooperating politicians. History showed Marx that no political change ever favored workers. New people in power only meant new people to exploit workers. If workers were ever to obtain power, they would have to seize power by revolution – a communist revolution.
Marx was atheist and he contended that man was his own creator, and that there is no alternative to this world.
Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882)
Darwin’s theory of evolution was the 1800s’ most important contribution to the life sciences. Like Copernicus’ and Newton’s works, it had an enormous influence on all areas of thought. The idea of man, the view of history, the notion of time and the idea of society were all influenced by Darwin’s theory. In 1831 he embarked on the ship Beagle for a trip to Latin American waters. During this trip he developed his theory about the common origin of all life. In 1859 he published his revolutionary work “On the Origin of Species….”.
The basic idea is that all forms of life struggle to survive in competition with other species, and the conditions of life vary from place to place. Those species that have the properties that are best adapted to the conditions of life at a given place, will survive at the expense of others. The evolution of these species take place through higher rates of reproduction than for those species that are less well adapted. Over time, the least well adapted disappear and the best adapted multiply. This is a slow process of evolution.
Darwin showed that this evolution had no teleological basis. This natural order was a cruel amoral order without theological content. The place of man in this evolution was not exceptional or divine. The public debate of this theory was one of the last of the big debates on the modern view of the world.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)
Nietzsche did his best to distance himself from Christianity, humanism and metaphysics. He wanted to be out of his time and against the mainstream of thought. He wanted to be a spokesman for nature’s own forces. The darkness and drama contained in his thought drew from early on inspiration from Schopenhauer, Greek Drama and Wagner’s music. Greek tragedy was an expression of the highest truth; through this the Greek pessimism had reconciled itself with life. Nietzsche says that existence can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon. In his work “The Birth of Tragedies”, he depicts Dionysus as the symbol of blind will to live, and the existence as chaos and suffering.
How is man to form his life when Christianity and idealistic metaphysics no longer can give an answer, when “God is dead”? To start with, this gives man a new freedom and a new responsibility. Man must himself create new values. Nietzsche is primarily concerned with the individual and the realization of the self. The aim is to realize the inherent possibilities to be found in the individual, as described in the thoughts of the “Übermensch” in Zarathustra. This is a whole being which does not suppress its passions and thereby split itself in two, one acceptable part and one that is rejected. The “Übermensch” is undivided, because it has succeeded in organizing its chaos of urges and passions without losing or perverting those forces that these are an expression for. Nietzsche takes his model in Greek gods, because with them norm and existence merges into one whole.
Nietzsche is a strong opponent of the moralism contained in Rousseau’s and Kant’s thinking. He embrases the French Enlightenment’s notions of freedom embodied by Voltaire, and places it in opposition to German philosophy’s moralism. His epistemological thinking (thinking on the nature and scope of knowledge) is centered around the idea that the world is a system of illusions. Aesthetics thereby becomes the basis for morality, policy and science. The body is the main reference for Nietzsche’s anthropology and philosophy of art. He rejects the celebration of reason and the corresponding belief in permanent values in society, morality and history. The body in its reactions reflects the illusions and sentiments that govern man’s life. Music, dance and language are of primary importance to him.
Hegel is convinced of the interrelationship between thoughts and the interrelationship between events, between things. Hegel does not believe that reason and understanding are timeless and independent of their place in history. The spirit is something that is developing over time. In and through man nature is seeing itself. History has brought a consciousness that is capable of grasping its own historical conditions. The spirit is guaranteeing the order and direction of history, and the spirit is discovering itself through natural philosophy and philosophy of history.
Hegel showed that the roles of the subject and the object in the process of understanding were not static entities, as considered by most thinkers from Descartes to Kant. Objects are not lying still, waiting to be discovered and examined by an active but fully developed subject. In the ongoing process, the subject and the object are mutually influenced by each other. The subject’s tools and consciousness are under constant development. Hegel rejects Kant’s teachings on the subject and the notion of “Das ding an sich” (the thing in itself).
The experience of the senses is the point of departure for understanding, but this experience needs notions. When the experience of the senses recognizes its need for notions, it is no longer a pure experience of the senses, but something that has developed beyond that. In the Phenomenology of the Spirit this process is developed until all forms of consciousness have shown their strengths and weaknesses. The experiences of the senses need notions, notions need self-consciousness, self-consciousness needs reason, reason discovers that it needs more than its individual reason, and it also discovers that it needs the Spirit as a pre-condition for embarking on this journey. The Spirit represents an order that all humans and objects of study are part of. At every completion of such a process, a change of the whole situation takes place and produces a new context. The Spirit is the whole and the absolute.
This process of development formed by Hegel is called the dialectic method. Hegel’s Spirit is a notion of his own, resembling Spinoza’s Immanent Spirit, but it is different in that it develops itself genetically – which Spinoza’s spirit does not. Hegel’s philosophy of development was, as seen by him, at the heart of the development of world history. The inner contradictions in a given situation are the sources of development. They give rise to a synthesis where these contradictions have found their place in the new situation. This new situation gives rise to new contradictions, which then drive the process onwards.
Both Hume and Kant distinguished between cause-effect on the one hand and assumption-deduction on the other hand, because they made a distinction between the inner reality of thought and the outer reality of things. Cause and effect belonged to the world of things, while assumption and deduction was a relation between entities of thought. With Hegel, like with Leibniz, inner and outer realities are merged. The dialectic process concerns both, in the same way. Neither Hegel nor Goethe embraced the individualism and subjectivism of the Romantics. They saw the individuals as determined by their species, and by the group it belongs to. Hegel divides the Spirit in three: 1) the subjective spirit, which shows itself in anthropology, phenomenology and psychology; 2) the objective spirit, which shows itself in law, morals, and virtue; and 3) the absolute spirit, which shows itself in art, religion, and philosophy.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855)
“Know yourself” is the imperative of both Socrates and of the Existentialists. Kierkegaard used his own personal experiences as examples of the human condition in general. The main thought of his work is that truth has to do with the choices of the individual, and that the subject has to invest itself in every valid truth. He does not reject science or objectivity, but like Leibniz he contends that objective knowledge belongs to God alone. He thinks that the degree of sincerity and intensity contributes to the recognition of the validity of truth. He says that “truth is objective uncertainty held in the most passionate intensity of acquisition”. Truth is to be found in faith.
Kierkegaard wanted to help the individual to find truth in faith, like Socrates wanted to help people to find truth in a more general way. He did not, like Hegel in his time or Plato in Socrates’ time, think that it would help people to deal with their existential problems by presenting a great package of thoughts firmly bound together. Religious or moral truths are something entirely different from views on how things are (in an ontological sense). In connection with objective truths there is a distinction between knowledge and being. With existential truths this distinction disappears. Objective truths may be transferred from those who have them to those who do not have them. Truths that are linked to a person’s attitude to life cannot be transferred in the same way. They can only open up for existential possibilities, which in turn only can be realized by the recipient’s own choices.
Kierkegaard is not interested in science. He says we know enough. What we lack is a new attitude to life, not knowledge. He seeks to remove people’s illusions and draw their attention to their responsibility for their own lives. “You do not reflect your way into Christianity, but you reflect your way out of everything else and become an ever truer Christian.” His existential philosophy is linked to Christianity as the choice for him. For others, the choice might be different. The important thing is what happens inside and with the person. He therefore puts pressure on people to enter into this process of search for intensity in inner truth.
Kierkegaard presents a philosophy of the stages in life. Each stage is a complete form of consciousness and may represent the context of an entire life. For certain persons, however, the stages may represent stages of an evolution. These stages are: 1) the aesthetic; 2) the ethic; 3) the religious. The aesthetic lives for his entertainment, and his main focus is to fight boredom. The ethic is in all ways different from the aesthetic. The ethic chooses a life of responsibility, where the aim is to be useful and fulfill a calling. He is the everyday hero. However, feelings of guilt and anguish are destabilizing factors in this life. The religious chooses a more daring life, a life that confronts the anguish and the guilt. This life enters the serious and intense realm, and it forces the individual out of all normal human community. He has to drop everything when he hears the call of God.
Kierkegaard’s analysis of anguish has been a model for similar analyses of passions and affectations found in later existentialist thinking in the 20th century, as regards philosophy, psychiatry, and theology. Anguish is, according to him, a human trait linked to freedom. It follows freedom as a shadow. It is a form of dizziness faced with the abyss of void that surrounds freedom on all sides. Death forces the individual to think his existence through, and makes him responsible for his choices. For many people, the flight from freedom, responsibility and decisions becomes a major concern.
Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)
Far more than most thinkers, Karl Marx managed to bring his thoughts into the political arena. Much of modern philosophy in Marx’s time was concerned with the principles of the understanding of natural sciences. With Marx, economics is the basic science, and he attempts to develop critical thinking in conjunction with a practice that can change society. Before Marx, history was in large part seen as spiritual history. This was particularly the case with Hegel, who saw development of religious, political and philosophical ideas as the backbone of historical development. Marx turns Hegel’s view upside-down and considers economic history as the guiding element in development, and thought as a secondary effect of the ideological needs of the rulers.
Changes in those forces (tools and resources), conditions (division of labor and properties) and processes (methods) that have to do with the production of necessary goods are, according to Marx, the key to all historical changes. Marx describes history as a class struggle, between those who possess the means of production (owners) and those who only possess their own capacity to work (workers). The situation of the classes changes from period to period, depending on changes in social organization and conditions of ownership. Changes occur both as a result of actions on the part of owners and workers, and as a result of changes in conditions of production. Marx makes use of Hegel’s dialectic method in his analysis. In general, he considers that the ruling thoughts in a given period are the thoughts of the rulers.
In a capitalist market economy, Marx contends that the only thing that is free is market and trade. No individual is free. Workers live as abstractions of their full humanity, and are judged only by their value as producers. They are themselves a commodity in a market. Marx considers that workers are exploited by those in power, owners and their cooperating politicians. History showed Marx that no political change ever favored workers. New people in power only meant new people to exploit workers. If workers were ever to obtain power, they would have to seize power by revolution – a communist revolution.
Marx was atheist and he contended that man was his own creator, and that there is no alternative to this world.
Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882)
Darwin’s theory of evolution was the 1800s’ most important contribution to the life sciences. Like Copernicus’ and Newton’s works, it had an enormous influence on all areas of thought. The idea of man, the view of history, the notion of time and the idea of society were all influenced by Darwin’s theory. In 1831 he embarked on the ship Beagle for a trip to Latin American waters. During this trip he developed his theory about the common origin of all life. In 1859 he published his revolutionary work “On the Origin of Species….”.
The basic idea is that all forms of life struggle to survive in competition with other species, and the conditions of life vary from place to place. Those species that have the properties that are best adapted to the conditions of life at a given place, will survive at the expense of others. The evolution of these species take place through higher rates of reproduction than for those species that are less well adapted. Over time, the least well adapted disappear and the best adapted multiply. This is a slow process of evolution.
Darwin showed that this evolution had no teleological basis. This natural order was a cruel amoral order without theological content. The place of man in this evolution was not exceptional or divine. The public debate of this theory was one of the last of the big debates on the modern view of the world.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)
Nietzsche did his best to distance himself from Christianity, humanism and metaphysics. He wanted to be out of his time and against the mainstream of thought. He wanted to be a spokesman for nature’s own forces. The darkness and drama contained in his thought drew from early on inspiration from Schopenhauer, Greek Drama and Wagner’s music. Greek tragedy was an expression of the highest truth; through this the Greek pessimism had reconciled itself with life. Nietzsche says that existence can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon. In his work “The Birth of Tragedies”, he depicts Dionysus as the symbol of blind will to live, and the existence as chaos and suffering.
How is man to form his life when Christianity and idealistic metaphysics no longer can give an answer, when “God is dead”? To start with, this gives man a new freedom and a new responsibility. Man must himself create new values. Nietzsche is primarily concerned with the individual and the realization of the self. The aim is to realize the inherent possibilities to be found in the individual, as described in the thoughts of the “Übermensch” in Zarathustra. This is a whole being which does not suppress its passions and thereby split itself in two, one acceptable part and one that is rejected. The “Übermensch” is undivided, because it has succeeded in organizing its chaos of urges and passions without losing or perverting those forces that these are an expression for. Nietzsche takes his model in Greek gods, because with them norm and existence merges into one whole.
Nietzsche is a strong opponent of the moralism contained in Rousseau’s and Kant’s thinking. He embrases the French Enlightenment’s notions of freedom embodied by Voltaire, and places it in opposition to German philosophy’s moralism. His epistemological thinking (thinking on the nature and scope of knowledge) is centered around the idea that the world is a system of illusions. Aesthetics thereby becomes the basis for morality, policy and science. The body is the main reference for Nietzsche’s anthropology and philosophy of art. He rejects the celebration of reason and the corresponding belief in permanent values in society, morality and history. The body in its reactions reflects the illusions and sentiments that govern man’s life. Music, dance and language are of primary importance to him.