Nineteenth-Century Philosophy

Arthur Schopenhauer Born in Danzig in 1788, into a wealthy merchant family, Arthur Schopenhauer was able to devote himself to philosophy with financial independence. He earned his doctorate with On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813) and at thirty published his major work, The World as Will and Representation (1818) — which, however, was almost entirely ignored for decades. Hostile to the then-dominant Hegel, he even scheduled his lectures at the same hour as his rival’s in Berlin, to no audience. Recognition came only at the end of his life, in the 1850s. He was also the first major Western philosopher to engage seriously with Indian thought (the Upanishads and Buddhism). ...

Auguste Comte French philosopher; founder of positivism and father of sociology as a scientific discipline. Disciple of Saint-Simon, from whom he later broke; proposed to reorganize society on scientific bases following the dual revolution (French and industrial). Comte wrote under the impact of the crisis opened by the French Revolution: the traditional order, sustained by theology and monarchy, had collapsed, yet no new principle of social cohesion had stably replaced it. His central problem is therefore at once intellectual and political — how to rebuild social consensus in an age in which religious authority has lost its force. Comte’s answer is the positive spirit: replacing the search for ultimate causes and hidden essences with the study of the laws that govern observable phenomena. Knowledge ceases to ask “why” in a metaphysical sense and instead describes “how” facts relate to one another in a constant manner, making possible prediction and rational action upon nature and society. ...

Friedrich Nietzsche The son of a Lutheran pastor, Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Röcken, Prussia, in 1844. A precocious classical philologist, he became a professor at the University of Basel at the age of 24 — before he had even completed his doctorate. His admiration for, and later break with, the composer Richard Wagner, together with his fragile health, led him to give up the chair in 1879 and to live as a solitary wanderer through Switzerland and Italy, writing his most important books. In January 1889, in Turin, he suffered a mental collapse from which he never recovered: he spent his last eleven years incapacitated, and his unpublished work was in part distorted by his sister Elisabeth — even though Nietzsche himself had vehemently rejected German nationalism and antisemitism. ...

Friedrich Schleiermacher Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was born in Breslau (present-day Wrocław, Poland) on 21 November 1768 and died in Berlin on 12 February 1834. Son of a Reformed army chaplain, he studied at the Moravian seminary in Barby and subsequently at Halle. He became a preacher in Berlin, held a professorship in Halle (1804–1807), and from 1810 was professor of theology and philosophy at the newly founded University of Berlin — of which he was one of the principal intellectual architects, alongside Wilhelm von Humboldt and Fichte. ...

Gottlob Frege A German mathematician born in 1848, Gottlob Frege spent almost his entire career as a professor at Jena, in relative obscurity — his genius would be fully recognized only after his death, in 1925, above all thanks to Russell, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle. Today he is regarded as the founder of modern logic and one of the fathers of analytic philosophy. His first great achievement was the creation, in the Begriffsschrift (1879), of a predicate logic that retired the old Aristotelian syllogistic: with quantifiers (“for all,” “there exists”), variables, and functions, Frege gave logic the precision and expressive power it needed to analyze mathematics. His larger aim was logicism — to demonstrate that arithmetic reduces to pure logic. The project, set out in the Basic Laws of Arithmetic, was struck head-on by a letter from Russell (1902) revealing a contradiction in the system; Frege never fully recovered from the blow. ...

Jeremy Bentham Founder of Utilitarianism. English jurist and philosopher; radical social reformer. His skeleton (Auto-Icon) is displayed at University College London, in accordance with his will. Trained for the bar, Bentham soon abandoned the practice of law to devote himself to its critique. His first target was the English common law and, in particular, William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which he accused of cloaking privilege and arbitrariness in solemn language. Against that tradition Bentham proposed a single, clear, measurable standard for evaluating laws and institutions: the principle of utility, according to which the worth of any action, law, or policy is measured by the amount of happiness — understood as pleasure and the absence of pain — that it produces for those affected. Morals and legislation would thus cease to rest on tradition, intuition, or supposed natural rights (which he dismissed as “nonsense upon stilts”) and become the object of a rational, secular calculation grounded in the empirical observation of human motives. ...

John Stuart Mill Born in London in 1806, John Stuart Mill was subjected by his father, James Mill, to an extraordinarily precocious and rigorous education — designed by Bentham’s circle to form a utilitarian thinker: he learned Greek at the age of three and devoured the classics and economics in childhood. At twenty he suffered a profound existential crisis, from which he recovered partly through Romantic poetry — an experience that led him to correct the arid utilitarianism in which he had been raised. He was also an economist, a Member of Parliament, and the intellectual companion of Harriet Taylor. He became the most influential liberal of the nineteenth century. ...

Karl Marx Born in Trier, in the Prussian Rhineland, in 1818, Karl Marx studied law and philosophy in Bonn and Berlin, where he drew close to the Young Hegelians. Barred from an academic career by his radical positions, he turned to journalism and, hounded by censorship, went into exile in Paris, Brussels, and finally London, where he lived through decades of poverty, sustained by his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels and poring over the economists in the Reading Room of the British Museum. More than to interpret the world, he wanted to transform it: “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (Thesis 11 on Feuerbach). ...

Ludwig Feuerbach German philosopher; dissident disciple of Hegel. His materialist and anthropological critique of religion was the fundamental link between Hegelian idealism and Marx’s historical materialism. He inverted Hegel by dissolving theology into anthropology: the real subject of philosophy is not the Spirit, but sensible man. Feuerbach first studied theology before turning to philosophy and attending Hegel’s lectures in Berlin. He gradually broke with his master: his academic career was blocked by heterodox writings on immortality, and he ended up living apart from the universities, writing from private life. It was in this context that he published his most famous work, devoted to the essence of Christianity, which had an immediate impact on a whole generation of young German intellectuals and made him the central figure of what came to be called Left Hegelianism. The starting point of his thought is a methodical operation he himself describes as an inversion: where idealist speculation makes thought, the Spirit, or God the subject and concrete man the mere predicate, Feuerbach proposes to reverse the roles and recognise in sensible, corporeal, finite man the true subject of which those concepts are projected predicates. ...

Søren Kierkegaard Danish philosopher; the “father of existentialism”. Wrote frequently under pseudonyms to present opposing perspectives. His philosophy is a reaction to Hegel’s speculative system and the bourgeois comfort of institutional Christianity. Key Concepts Three stages of existence: Aesthetic: life oriented toward pleasure, novelty, aesthetics — the despair of inevitable boredom Ethical: commitment to duty, universal morality, marriage — the despair of unforgivable guilt Religious: suspension of the ethical by the singular before God — the “leap of faith” beyond reason Anxiety (Begrebet Angest, 1844): human freedom as “vertigo of possibility”; anxiety has no determinate object (unlike fear) — it is dizziness before the abyss of the possible Despair (The Sickness Unto Death, 1849): unwilling to be oneself, or willing to be other than oneself — the universal condition of humanity without relation to God Subjectivity (“Subjectivity is truth”): existential truth is not attained through Hegel’s objective speculation, but through subjective and passionate commitment Leap of faith: Abraham who goes to sacrifice Isaac — an act that suspends the ethical and makes sense only before the singular of God; Camus criticizes it as “philosophical suicide” Pseudonyms: Victor Eremita, Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, Constantine Constantius — each represents a stage or perspective Influenced by Hegel — point of departure and principal adversary; rejects the speculative system Socrates — irony and indirect method; identified with him Plato — dialogues and Socratic position Luther — individual faith against institution Influenced Heidegger — anxiety, authenticity, being-toward-death Sartre — radical freedom, bad faith, existential project Camus — the absurd (but rejects Kierkegaard’s leap of faith) Simone de Beauvoir — concrete existential situation Existential theology (Karl Barth, Paul Tillich) Works Either/Or (1843); Fear and Trembling (1843); The Concept of Anxiety (1844); Stages on Life’s Way (1845); Philosophical Fragments (1844); The Sickness Unto Death (1849); The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1859, posthumous). ...

Vladímir Soloviov Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (28 January 1853, Moscow — 13 August 1900, the Uzkoye estate near Moscow) was a philosopher, theologian, poet, and critic — the first Russian thinker to build a comprehensive metaphysical system and the founder of the tradition of Russian religious philosophy. The son of the great historian Sergei Solovyov, he was a friend of Dostoevsky and a central figure in the intellectual life of his time. His work cast its shadow over the entire following generation — from Berdyaev and Bulgakov to Russian poetic Symbolism. ...

Wilhelm Dilthey Wilhelm Dilthey was born in Biebrich am Rhein (present-day Wiesbaden, Germany) on 19 November 1833 and died in Seis am Schlern (present-day northern Italy) on 1 October 1911. He held professorships in Basel, Kiel, and from 1882 in Berlin — where he occupied the chair once held by Hegel — and devoted his life to a project that remained unfinished yet profoundly influential: providing the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) with their own philosophical foundation, comparable to what Kant had given the natural sciences in the Critique of Pure Reason. ...