Goethe Kant And Hegel

This immensely readable and absorbing book - the first of a three-volume series on understanding the human mind - concentrates on three major figures who have changed our image of human beings. Kaufmann drastically revises traditional conceptions of Goethe, Kant, and Hegel, showing how their ideas about the mind were shaped by their own distinctive mentalities. Kaufmann's version of psychohistory stays clear of gossip and is carefully documented. He offers us a radically new understanding of two centuries of intellectual history, but his primary focus is on self-knowledge. He is in a unique position to perform this task by virtue of being, according to Stephen Spender, "the best translator of Faust"; and in Sidney Hook's view, "unquestionably the most interesting and informative writer of Hegel in English." The foremost interpreter of Kant, Lewis White Beck, has called this book on Goethe, Kant, and.Hegel "fascinating" - a work which "will stir up a good many people by telling them things they have never heard, and providing an alternative to what is the accepted reading of that part of the history of philosophy. The story of how personality affects philosophy has never been better told." We are shown how Goethe advanced the discovery of the mind more than anyone before him, while Kant was in many ways a disaster. Hegel, like others between 1790 to 1990, tried to reconcile Kant and Goethe. Kaufmann shows this is impossible He paints a large picture, but he is always highly specific and details the major contributions of Goethe and Hegel as well as the ways in which Kant's immense influence proved catastrophic.

Passions of the Sign traces the impact of the French Revolution on Enlightenment thought in Germany as evidenced in the work of three major figures around the turn of the nineteenth century: Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Heinrich von Kleist. Andreas Gailus examines a largely overlooked strand in the philosophical and literary reception of the French Revolution, one which finds in the historical occurrence of revolution the expression of a fundamental mechanism of political, conceptual, and aesthetic practice. With a close reading of a critical essay by Kleist, an in-depth discussion of Kant's philosophical writing, and new readings of the novella form as employed by both Goethe and Kleist, Gailus demonstrates how these writers set forth an energetic model of language and subjectivity whose unstable nature reverberates within the very foundations of society. Unfolding in the medium of energetic signs, human activity is shown to be subject to the counter-symbolic force that lies within and beyond it. History is subject to contingency and is understood not as a progressive narrative but as an expanse of revolutionary possibilities; language is subject to the extra-linguistic context of utterance and is conceived primarily not in semantic but in pragmatic terms; and the individual is subject to impersonal affect and is figured not as the locus of self-determination but as the site of passions that exceed the self and its pleasure principle. At once a historical and a conceptual study, this volume moves between literature and philosophy, and between textual analysis and theoretical speculation, engaging with recent discussions on the status of sovereignty, the significance of performative language in politics and art, and the presence of the impersonal, even inhuman, within the economy of the self.

Schopenhauer's philosophy, at first sight so beautifully rounded, upon analysis reveals itself as the secret arena of two conflicting world-views. The present analysis considers the conflict by confronting Schopenhauer as a `disciple-of-sorts of Kant' with Schopenhauer as `Goethe's one-time collaborator on the theory of colour'. Here the two meet over profound issues which the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century has ineluctably put before us: what is the right level at which to apprehend nature; what is the proper foundation for a consistent ethics; how (if at all) to arrive at a unified conception of a world broken by modern science? In this deeply-delving, lucidly written, humane and erudite study, the history of philosophical currents is blended with history of science, with history of ideas generally, and (to elucidate relevant portions of Schopenhauer's biography and intellectual and social environment) with German history too. The analysis, while benefiting from the scholarly literature, is grounded primarily in original research among the collected works of Schopenhauer, Kant and Goethe, considered in all their philosophical, scientific, and literary variety.

Hegel's holistic metaphysics challenges much recent ontology with its atomistic and reductionist assumptions; Stern offers us an original reading of Hegel and contrasts him with his predecessor, Kant.