Chapter 21 examines Goethe’s relationship to German Idealism. Although the speculative nature of the Idealist method appears alien to Goethe’s own thought, and he himself expressed reservations about it, his poetic and scientific works display a significant degree of sympathy with the concerns that motivated his contemporaries. The chapter highlights the importance of Spinoza in the alignment between Goethe and Idealist thought, before considering in detail the significance of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and above all Schelling, whose philosophy of nature and art is particularly resonant with Goethe’s own.

This chapter compares Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant with that of the German Idealists. The German Idealists attempt to unify Kant’s faculty psychology by uncovering a “common root” that is the source of sensibility and understanding, where the common root is a homogenous capacity that nevertheless can generate the other faculties. Insofar as these interpretations rely on telling a causal story, where one faculty causes others to arise, they return to a pre-critical position that Kant would reject; on Kant’s critical philosophy, we are precluded from extending categories like causality to our faculties for cognition, since such faculties do not appear sensibly in our experience. The chapter argues that, while Heidegger also seeks a common root, he avoids this problem by insisting that the common root is heterogenous. His common root – the imagination – is a unification of three basic capacities, rather than a single, deeper capacity that causes the others. Thus, Heidegger does not seek a foundation for metaphysics that is beyond the bounds of what Kant thinks we can know; he works with the cognitive capacities that Kant already identifies, but seeks to explain more fully the structural interrelationships between those capacities.

On many fronts, 1916 marked a point of no return. After the collapse of optimism for swift victory following the outbreak of hostilities, the inconclusive bloodlettings at Verdun and the Somme, and mounting economic hardships on the home front, the prospects for German triumph seemed increasingly dim. Attitudes became more resigned to a war like no other, a war without end. Dampened expectations gave way to creeping pessimism matched by defiant fatalism. A number of prominent intellectuals and academics who in 1914 eagerly supported the war now came to express their doubts or else fell conspicuously silent regarding the fate of the nation. Once the most vocal of advocates for the war, Ernst Troeltsch began to see things differently and came to accept the political deficiencies of the Wilhelmine Empire with its deleterious militarism.

For countless soldiers, revelation as to the significance of their lives entwined with the fate of God, the Nation, or whatever Absolute claimed to give meaning to it all could occur in the most fearful of situations, but also in the most inauspicious of moments. For many, the war was experienced as a rite of passage and self-discovery. Many emerged from the war transfigured, set upon a new course of life. There were those, as with Ernst Jünger, who entered the war with an adventurous heart in search of something more than what domestic life had on offer; there were those, as with Karl Löwith, who did not go to war adventuring but in need of an ill-defined alternative, returning from the war scarred for life; there were those, as with Dietrich Mahnke, who through the war found confirmation of what had already been known but as yet existentially evidenced; there were those whose philosophical promise was extinguished on the battlefield, as with the deaths of Emil Lask and Adolf Reinach; and there were those who, philosophically active before 1914, disappeared from the stage of history after 1918, whose postwar quietude, as with Johannes Daubert, poignantly bespoke the extinguishing of thinking.

The opening chapter looks at the role of judgement in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, focusing on the way in which the legislative function of the understanding is central to transcendental idealism. It shows how Kant associates determination with judgement, and how this association is maintained in Hölderlin and Schelling’s efforts to resolve certain aporias in the Kantian system, with being understood as indeterminate because it differs from the world of judgement. It concludes by showing how Hegel resolves difficulties presented by Hölderlin’s distinction between judgement and being by seeing judgement as an abstraction from a richer process of reason. As such, it demonstrates the centrality of judgement in the German Idealist tradition.

The Philosophy of Freedom from Rousseau to Heidegger was not content with modern liberal individualism and materialism, but longed for a noble politics, and this longing for wholeness, while giving rise to brilliant cultural achievements, also fueled the catastrophes of violent revolution, tyranny and genocide on the far Left and Right from the French Revolution down to the present.

Brecht was exposed to schiller, a formative influence throughout his life, from an early age. While schiller supplied brecht with tragic language (both as langue and parole) and an intellectualist attitude towwards drama, his idealistic conception of theatre, human morality and freedom provoked parodic responses from brecht, especially in his st joan of the stockyards.

A historical investigation into Spinozism teaches us at least as much about the interpreters of Spinoza as it does about Spinoza’s thought itself. More than any other philosophy, Spinoza’s has been held up like a mirror to the great currents of thought, providing a particular perspective on them: one can see reflected and revealed in the mirror of Spinozism the inner and outer conflicts and contradictions of Calvinism, Cartesianism, freethinking and libertinism, the Enlightenment, materialism, the Pantheismusstreit, German Idealism, French spiritualism, Marxism, British Idealism, structuralism, and other movements. This chapter provides a condensed overview of the European reception of Spinoza from the seventeenth century until today, in both minor and major thinkers.

This chapter shows that in the German intellectual tradition, Kant, followed by Fichte and Hegel, saw the reliance upon the opinion of others (“recognition”) in a completely different way than the French and British traditions. Specifically, in Germany recognition was seen as a condition not only for self-control, but also for individual self-determination. The chapter provides a detailed explanation of how this shift in orientation became possible, its connection with the “idealistic” presuppositions of German philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century, and the broader political claims of this new interpretation of “recognition”.