Classical German Philosophy

German philosophy from the late 18th century to the first half of the 19th century, the immediate theoretical source of Marxist philosophy. Its representatives are Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Feuerbach.

The then Germany was on the eve of a bourgeois democratic revolution. On the one hand, the newborn German bourgeoisie yearned for the capitalist system and was revolutionary; on the other hand, it was extremely weak. As a theoretical expression of the interests and aspirations of the German bourgeoisie, the classical German philosophy had a duality. On the one hand, it expressed the strong aspiration of the German bourgeoisie to bring about a political and economic revolution by dialectics. On the other hand, its revolutionary nature was wrapped in an abstract speculative idealist system; even Feuerbach’s materialist philosophy was far from reality and preached “love of all mankind” with abstract “human nature”.

Serving the development of the newborn industrial production was the historical task for the then philosophy, and epistemology and the theory of knowledge became a frontier area of philosophical research. Kant (1724–1804), the founder of classical German philosophy, raised and emphatically investigated basic questions of philosophy in his book Critique of Pure Reason. He held that man’s capacity for knowledge itself and the possibility of knowledge should be studied first before knowing the external world. This turn was called Kant’s “Copernican Revolution”.

Kant held that for philosophy to be a reliable discipline, its judgments must be both a priori and synthetic. He held that human knowledge consists of a combination of the forms of knowledge a priori and sense representations a posteriori, which is an “a priori synthetic judgment”. An “a priori synthetic judgment” is a knowledge that has both sensory-experimental content and universal necessity.

“A priori synthetic judgment” put forth by Kant embodies the fundamental dualistic and agnostic features of his epistemology. On the one hand, he acknowledged that there is something outside of man that does not depend on his consciousness, i.e., “thing-in-itself”, and that the content or material of knowledge comes from sensation. On the other hand, he also held that the universal and necessary knowledge acquired by man is purely subjective and does not reflect the “thing-in-itself” as an object. “Thing-in-itself” is principally unknowable. What we can know are only the representations, i.e., phenomena, produced in our mind by the action of the “thing-in-itself” on the human senses; whereas the realm of phenomena is inseparable from the faculty of a priori cognition and is, to some extent, a creation of the consciousness itself. In this way, Kant drew an insurmountable gap between “phenomena” and “thing-in-itself” and limited man’s knowledge merely to the realm of phenomena, thus detached thinking from being, and relapsed into agnosticism.

How is “a priori synthetic judgment” possible? Kant held that man’s capacity for knowledge has three levels or stages: sensuousness, understanding and reason. The a priori forms of sensuousness are time and space. In the stage of sensation, with the help of time and space, man brings order to the chaotic state of sensations produced by the action of the “thing-in-itself” on the senses and makes them become phenomena in time and space. A priori forms of understanding are categories. As the mainstay of knowledge, the understanding is the “Ego” that carries out the activity of synthetic unity with the framework of the twelve categories a priori. Man makes use of pure categories a priori to process and arrange the sense representations and renders them logical and regular, by which real knowledge with universality and necessity is formed. The possibility of a priori synthetic judgment lies in the dynamic activity of synthetic unity carried out by categories a priori of understanding on sense-data in general. However, the categories of understanding can only be used to arrange the phenomena provided by sensuousness, and man can only know the phenomena, while the noumena belongs to a sphere that man can never know. But as the capacity for synthesis superior to understanding, human reason, by its very nature, calls for the knowledge of what is ultimate and unconditional, for the holistic and systemic in cognition, thus makes knowledge tend to a complete system of greatest unity. The attempt of reason to transcend the realm of phenomena in order to know the “thing-in-itself” is bound to fall into illusion, into contradiction with itself and failure. Therefore, Kant placed thinking and being in absolute opposition, and held that reason is incapable of knowing the world itself, that human knowledge cannot attain the “thing-in-itself”, and that the objects of knowledge are constituted by the aid of man’s subjective consciousness, i.e., a priori forms of sensuousness and intuition, and categories. In Kant’s view, laws with universality and causality are not inherent in the “thing-in-itself” but the product of man’s subjective consciousness. It is said in this sense that man legislates for nature.

Kantian philosophy is a complex of contradictions bearing the internal logic of classical German philosophy. It started out from dualism, went through agnosticism and led to transcendental idealism. Kant limited the scope of knowledge, demeaned reason, and left the ground open for faith. However, Kant raised and inquired into the basic questions of philosophy and established a method of constructing a system of knowledge that starts out from a priori knowledge with necessity and universality, which played a positive part in overthrowing the “dogmatic” metaphysics of the past and refuting religious theology. Some significant epistemological questions he raised inspired his successors and laid the foundation for the further development of the classical German philosophy.

Fichte (1762–1814) criticized Kantian philosophy from right. He denied Kant’s “thing-in-itself”, opposed Kant’s dualism that divorced thinking from being, and claimed that thinking creates being, established the unity of thinking and being on the basis of idealism, and has put forth the philosophical system of the “doctrine of knowledge” (Wissenschaftslehre). He held that the “Ego” is the common root of all knowledge and all reality and the creator of any possible and real thing. Fichte has overcome Kant’s dualism and agnosticism with the subjective idealist theory of the identity of thinking and being.

Schelling (1775–1854) criticized Fichtean philosophy and established his own system of “identity philosophy”. Schelling held that the starting point and highest principle of philosophy can be neither the subject nor the object, nor both at once, but only the absolute identity. “Absolute identity” as put by Schelling is a transcendental spiritual substance. He described “absolute identity” as a particular unconscious state of a certain cosmic spirit. Schelling’s “absolute identity” was strongly tinged with transcendental idealism and had obvious elements of irrationalism.

In Hegel’s (1770–1831) philosophy, the transcendental and irrational spiritual substance in Schelling’s “identity philosophy” was developed into the “absolute spirit”. Hegel founded his vast system of objective idealism and gave a systematic rational and dialectical answer to the question concerning the relation of thinking and being, and subject and object. Hegel claimed that the unity of thinking and being, subject and object is a “concrete identity”, i.e., an identity that contains differences in itself, and that the cause of the identity is the absolute spirit. Absolute spirit or absolute Idea is an eternal primary origin, from which nature and human society are derived. Absolute spirit grows and develops according to the sequence of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. It goes through the three stages of logic, nature and spirit, and, due to its development, alienates itself into nature, goes through further development, overcomes its alienation, returns to itself in the intellectual life of mankind and finally recognizes itself in the highest stage of development of spirit—the absolute spirit. With his vast system of absolute idealism, Hegel has established a unified world-picture that includes nature, society and human thinking in itself; using the logical power of dialectics, he described the world-picture as a process of development with an intrinsic unity. This process is a process of dialectical unification of thinking and being, subject and object on the basis of idealism, a process in which the subject establishes the object and appropriates it. With his dialectical, absolute and vast idealist system, Hegel has solved basic questions of philosophy explored by the classical German philosophy since Kant, which marked the completion of the classical German idealist philosophy. It was the greatest achievement of the classical German philosophy to have explored the basic questions of philosophy from the height of the unity of world outlook and methodology and to have replaced metaphysics with dialectics.

Hegel’s system of dialectical idealism is the accomplished form of the dialectical exploration of the classical German philosophy. In Hegel’s philosophy, dialectics has acquired the meaning of motion, change, development, comprehensiveness and contradiction, and is opposite to metaphysics. Engels pointed out that Hegel’s great merit is that for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process—i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the inner connection that makes a continuous whole of all this motion and development. In the history of philosophy, Hegel was the first to creatively give a new meaning to dialectics by comprehensively and systematically elaborating its basic categories (being and nothing, general and individual, essence and phenomenon, form and content, possibility and reality, chance and necessity, freedom and necessity) and its basic laws (the law of the transmutation between quality and quantity, the law of the interpenetration of opposites and the law of the negation of the negation), and to build a dialectical edifice on the basis of idealism. Hegelian dialectics is essentially the dialectics of concept, the logical evolutionary process of thinking itself. The dialectical edifice built on the basis of idealism has produced a contradiction between “system” and “method”. Dialectics which is essentially critical and revolutionary was in constant contradiction with Hegel’s closed and conservative idealist system. Under the weight of his rigorous conservative system, the revolutionary factor of dialectics were stifled by idealism.

The materialistic factor in the classical German philosophy was inherited and developed by Feuerbach (1804–1872). Feuerbach pointed out that the main mistake of Hegelian philosophy was its idealist doctrine of the identity of thinking and being. In the Hegelian philosophy “being” was not distinguished from thinking, its identity of “being” and thinking was merely the identity of thinking with itself; “thinking” could never step out of itself to be able to reach the real world, and the “alienation” of the spirit into the nature was but a logical trick. He called Hegelian philosophy “speculative theology”, “rational mysticism”, and held that Hegelian idealist philosophy is the same as theology in that both rendered the objective essence subjective and supposed the essence of nature outside nature, the essence of man outside man; the “absolute spirit” in Hegelian philosophy is the abstract reason, spirit of man separated from man, God in the Christian theology who created the world out of nothing; the doctrine of the “alienation” of the absolute spirit into nature is merely the rational expression of the theological doctrine that nature is created by God. Idealism was a philosophical proof for theology, while Hegelian philosophy was last place of refuge and the last rational support of theology. Therefore, whoever failed to give up the Hegelian philosophy, failed to give up theology. Feuerbach gave a materialistic answer to the question concerning the relation of thinking and being, and of subject and object, holding that being is the subject and thinking the object; that thinking comes from being but being does not come from thinking, that the essence of being is the essence of nature. Only nature and man are true beings, and the identity of thinking and being is embodied in the unity of human body and soul. His philosophy is an “anthropology” or “humanism” with man at its core. Feuerbach’s criticism of the Hegelian philosophy hit the nail on the head, and his materialistic answer to the question concerning the relation of thinking and being had a subversive significance. However, abandoning the rational kernel of Hegelian dialectics together with his idealist system, his “anthropology” was metaphysical materialism. Feuerbach’s denial of Hegel’s philosophy marked the end of the classical German philosophy.

The classical German philosophy was the “first violinist” on the arena of European philosophy during the Industrial Revolution, embodying the subjective and revolutionary nature of the rising bourgeoisie in an oblique way. The chief representatives of classical German philosophy have raised and investigated some new major questions of philosophy, raising philosophical thinking to a new level. Marx and Engels critically assimilated the rational kernel of Hegel’s dialectics and the fundamental kernel of Feuerbach’s materialism, criticized their idealism and metaphysics, and founded dialectical and historical materialism by combining materialism with dialectics.