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Hegel and the hermeneutics

of German idealism
a
Tom Rockmore
a
Duquesne University
Published online: 03 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Tom Rockmore (1995) Hegel and the hermeneutics of German
idealism, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 3:1, 111-131, DOI:
10.1080/09672559508570806

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 Hegel and the Hermeneutics of
German Idealism

Tom Rockmore
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Hermeneutics concerns textual interpretation, for instance interpretation

of the philosophical tradition. After some two-and-a-half thousand years of
philosophy, there is still no consensus about its relation to the history of
philosophy or even whether philosophy is intrinsically historical. As Hegel
is distinguished by his efforts to build on prior theories, it is important to
evaluate his contribution to the hermeneutics of the history of philosophy,
particularly German idealism.

On the Hermeneutics of German Idealism

Hermeneutics, which goes back into the tradition to Aristotle,1 has recently
achieved a new focus2 in the writings of Martin Heidegger and his student
Hans-Georg Gadamer. Their deep disagreement about how to approach the
philosophical tradition points to difficult, unresolved issues in understand-
ing the history of philosophy. Roughly speaking, Heidegger, the anti-
Hegelian, takes an initially negative view of the philosophical tradition since
the early Greeks that he later extends to the entire history of philosophy,
which he came to regard as a vast conceptual wasteland. Gadamer, in some
ways deeply Hegelian, remains basically attached to the permanent impor-
tance of the prior philosophical tradition. Yet he is widely perceived as
unable to say anything substantive about method, about how to appropriate
the philosophical tradition. Rorty, for instance, believes that Gadamer's
book is a tract against method.3 Not surprisingly, Gadamer's embarrassment
reveals how little we know about how to interpret the philosophical past,
hence how little we know about how to go about appropriating the history
of philosophy.
It is not surprising, since Hegel invented the conception of the history of
philosophy as we know it,4 that the Hegelian conceptual scheme is widely,
uncritically accepted in the histories of philosophy and other secondary
texts. This scheme took shape at the same time as German idealism

International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 3 (1), 111-131

© Routledge 1995 0967-2559
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
itself. For almost two centuries since Hegel's courses on the history of
philosophy at the beginning of the nineteenth century,5 we have tended to
operate more or less consciously with a specifically Hegelian paradigm,
whose origins lie in Hegel's writings.
There is a distinction between Hegel's theory of the relation of philoso-
phy to the philosophical tradition, and his particular readings of theories in
that tradition. Hegel never explicitly reflects on the problem of interpreta-
tion in general. Unquestionably, the manner in which Hegel understands
the philosophical tradition has proven highly fertile. But his implicit,
underlying conception of the relation between his own position and the
history of philosophy tends to impede a correct reading of his own theory
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and the period to which it belongs. Our task, accordingly, is to discuss

Hegel's pioneer reading of the history of philosophy, to identify the limits
of his interpretation of the German idealist tradition, and to suggest the
outlines of another, post-Hegelian reading of this tradition.

Philosophy and the Philosophical Tradition

Although Greek thinkers were concerned with earlier theories, their
philosophical theories were more sophisticated than their comprehension
of history. They had only simple, undeveloped views of history itself
on which they rarely focused.6 The tardy emergence of a more than
rudimentary theory of history impeded the development of a philosoph-
ical grasp of the link between philosophy and the philosophical tradition.
The Greek philosophical view that philosophy depends on its prior tradi-
tion is manifest in practice but never explicitly formulated within ancient
Greek philosophy.
In the modern philosophical tradition three views of the relation of
philosophy to the philosophical tradition are formulated by Descartes,
Kant and Hegel. The former illustrates the normative view of philosophy
as systematic but not historical, hence as independent of the philosophical
tradition. Kant is comparatively less extreme in assuming a negative
attitude towards prior philosophy that falls short of reaching knowledge.
This attitude later recurs in Husserl who portrays prior philosophy
negatively with regard to its accomplishments, but positively with regard to
its inspiration. Hegel can be regarded as generalizing the Socratic model of
dialogue to the history of philosophy through a teleological perspective.
Philosophy progressively realizes its goal by building upon earlier views
through 'dialogue' between competing theories over time.
Prior to the modern period, there is little explicit concern about the
relation of philosophy to the philosophical tradition. Modern philosophers
tend to follow Descartes's lead in pursuing philosophy with little or no
concern for what has earlier been thought. At least since Descartes, a break
between philosophy and its history has often been regarded as a necessary
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 HEGEL AND GERMAN IDEALISM
condition of philosophy itself. Descartes's conviction that it is necessary to
break with prior thought is a basic element in his theory. In the 'Discourse
on Method', his observation that good sense is equally distributed but
disagreement is widespread7 serves to justify his conviction that all prior
ideas should be rejected as unproven, or instances of mere prejudice
and the related conviction that only a universally applicable method will
guarantee knowledge and truth.
Descartes notoriously aims to defeat skepticism through the establish-
ment of certain knowledge. If prior views are untrustworthy, or at least less
than certain, then philosophy cannot build upon them. The idea, later
echoed by Husserl, that we must begin again since, although much has been
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done, we have still not even arrived at an adequate beginning, mandates

a turn away from the philosophical tradition as a condition of doing
philosophy.
For Descartes, philosophy's history is not germane to philosophy. Any
effort to build upon the philosophical tradition will necessarily fail since it
offers no solid ground on which to raise a conceptual edifice. If certainty
is the criterion of truth and knowledge, then it is indeed certain that, to
formulate an acceptable philosophical theory, we need to free ourselves
from prior views of philosophy.
Descartes's conviction that philosophy must exclude the philosophical
tradition, from which it cannot learn and on which it cannot build, is
widely followed by later thinkers. His effort to determine principles from
which knowledge may rationally be deduced8 was particularly influential
on later thinkers, including Kant. Following Hume's rejection of bad
metaphysics, in the critical philosophy Kant undertakes to provide, not a
system of metaphysics, but a propadeutic for such a system understood as
an analysis of the conditions of the possibility of knowledge whatsoever
through a critique of pure reason. He understands reason as the faculty
of principles, and its critique as the critique of the faculty having to do
with principles.9
The critical philosophy is based on a hypothesis about the correct
procedure for knowledge that, according to Kant, is confirmed by the
elaboration of the theory. He straightforwardly insists that, although his
exposition is faulty, his theory is not subject to alteration in the slightest
degree; for to change anything would bring human reason crashing to the
ground.10 His theory famously rests on a methodological inversion of the
relation of subject and object as a result of which subjectivity no longer
depends on objectivity but objectivity on subjectivity. This is the meaning
of the Copernican Revolution that he initially describes as the view that
reason only a has insight into what it produces according to a plan of its
own.11
In practice, Kant takes a flexible attitude. But his expressed understand-
ing of his task suggests that the relation of the critical philosophy to prior
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views is exclusively negative. He specifically mentions the views of Wolff,
Locke, Berkeley, Descartes, Leibniz, Plato and others. He famously insists
that Hume's theory awoke him from his dogmatic slumber.12 Both in the
Critique of Pure Reason and in the Prolegomena to Any Future Meta-
physics, Kant presents the critical philosophy as a generalized solution to
the problem Hume raised with respect to causality. Yet since, as he insists,
all attempts to achieve knowledge have ended in failure, his intent in
invoking the Copernican turn is to leave behind the prior history of
philosophy in all its forms. This point can be put even more strongly: since
Kant intends his 'experiment' to break with all prior efforts at knowledge,
the logic of his argument requires him to break with all prior philosophy.
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The difference between the Cartesian and Kantian attitudes towards the
philosophical tradition is important. For Descartes, it is necessary to turn
away from all prior theories as the condition of overcoming philosophical
disagreements; for Kant, on the contrary, philosophy rests on the convic-
tion of the failure of prior philosophical theories. What I am calling the
Cartesian view contends that philosophy needs to develop systematically in
isolation from the prior philosophical tradition that is possibly subject to
error. What I am calling the Kantian view rests on the conviction that
philosophy needs to invoke a different strategy for knowledge in virtue of
the known failure of any prior theory to justify its epistemological claims.
In the Cartesian approach, philosophy must ignore the philosophical tradi-
tion in order to begin again whereas in the Kantian approach philosophy
requires a methodological innovation in virtue of the perceived deficiency
of all earlier approaches to knowledge.
A Cartesian approach to the philosophical tradition is widely presup-
posed in Anglo-American analytic philosophy. In virtue of its widespread
ignorance, even intentional disregard of prior theories, analytic philoso-
phers sometimes seem to think of the task of the philosophy as akin -
now varying Neurath's famous metaphor of philosophy as a boat that
philosophers must repair as best they can on the high seas without ever
coming into port - to setting off in search of knowledge without casting
away from any shore.
The Cartesian approach to philosophy as unrelated to the prior philo-
sophical tradition is not a main theme in the original phase of analytic
thought, in the writings of Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore and Ludwig
Wittgenstein. Russell and Moore, if not Wittgenstein, were at least inter-
ested in the history of philosophy. Russell even wrote a A History of
Western Philosophy.13 His historical tendencies were already clear in his
first book,14 where he considers Kant's conception of mathematics in detail,
in subsequent work on logic, where he features the ideas of such prede-
cessors as Frege, but especially in his influential study of Leibniz.15 Moore
was concerned to correct supposed mistakes committed by prior thinkers,
as in his famous diagnosis of the naturalistic fallacy.16
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 HEGEL AND GERMAN IDEALISM
Wittgenstein carries forward the Cartesian mistrust of prior philosophy.
To a greater degree than Russell and Moore, he illustrates the widespread,
contemporary analytic distrust of the philosophical tradition. His influen-
tial, early attack on philosophy itself was intended to show that it had no
proper subject matter since its problems, or the concerns that arose in the
philosophical tradition, were in effect merely pseudo-problems.17 In his
famous Introduction to the Tractatus Lógico-Philosophicus, Russell writes
that Wittgenstein's aim was to show 'in each case how traditional philoso-
phy and traditional solutions arise out of ignorance of the principles of
Symbolism and out of misuse of language'.18 In the Author's Preface, he
writes: 'The book deals with the problems of philosophy, and shows, I
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believe, that the reason why these problems are posed is that the logic
of our language is misunderstood.'19 Later on in the book, he adds: 'Most
of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are
not false but nonsensical.'20
Wittgenstein is more tolerant of other views than are later analytic
thinkers, who make a point of ignoring earlier positions. A consciously intol-
erant attitude that does not come to grips with but rather demeans or simply
dismisses prior thought is exhibited by many analytic thinkers. In a recent
study of the history of philosophy from an analytic point of view, so-called
continental thought is regarded as basically poetic as opposed to the
so-called critical Anglo-Saxon tradition.21 Here non-analytic thought is at
least surveyed. Others regard even that minimal gesture as a bad idea.
Schlick distinguishes between philosophy and the history of philosophy.22
Following Schlick, Quine's reported distinction between those interested in
the history of philosophy and those interested in philosophy recalls the
Cartesian view, widespread among recent analytic thinkers, that the condi-
tion of doing philosophy is to turn away from the history of philosophy.23
Writers on the phenomenological side of the tradition have often been
more sensitive than their analytic counterparts to the philosophical tradi-
tion. No one before Aristotle, and perhaps no one since, exhibits a greater
grasp of the history of philosophy than Hegel. In modern philosophy,
Hegel is the outstanding example of a philosopher who consciously strives
to come to grips with and build on prior philosophy. His reading of the
philosophical tradition characteristically exhibits great insight into particu-
lar positions as well as the tradition as a whole. Examples include his stress
on the concept of activity (energeia) in Aristotle, his criticism of Descartes's
failure to justify the transition from certainty to truth, and his objection to
Kant's supposed incapacity to separate the conditions of knowledge from
the knowledge process.24 He consistently interprets the entire tradition as
a structured whole aiming toward the solution of the problem of knowl-
edge. He applies the Socratic insight that truth can be discovered through
a dialogue between different points of view in his teleological reading of
the history of philosophy as an unfulfilled quest for a theory of knowledge
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based on the unity of thought and being.25 He believes this claim has been
asserted but never demonstrated. His own position can fairly be regarded
as an effort to complete this task. What I am calling Hegel's approach to
the philosophical tradition as a Socratic dialogue requires him to be aware
of the entire preceding tradition in order to identify and take up into his
own position all that is positive within it.

Hegel on the Philosophical Tradition and the End of Philosophy

Hegel, who has justly been described as a modern Aristotle, was deeply
influenced by his illustrious predecessor. It is no accident that the
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Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, which sets out the definitive

version of the Hegelian system, ends with a slightly garbled quotation from
Aristotle's Metaphysics. What interests us here is the way in which both
thinkers, each of whom possessed enormously detailed knowledge of prior
thought, employ it in formulating their own theories.
Both thinkers desire to find something of value in earlier theories, and
desire as well to surpass the preceding tradition. Yet Hegel more than
Aristotle has influenced the contemporary approach to the history of
philosophy. Certainly, Aristotle frequently reviews the prior discussion. Yet
no one before Hegel argues for the conceptual unity in the independent
efforts of different authors throughout the philosophical tradition to seize
experienced reality through thought. The dialectical interaction between
different theories constitutes a single tradition that develops as a dialogue
over time. Almost alone Hegel can be said to have created the modern
concept of the history of philosophy.26
If Hegel had done only that, there would scarcely be room for any objec-
tions. Since Hegel, most writers interested in the philosophical tradition
follow him in understanding philosophical theories as constituting, through
their interactions, a conceptual unity extending through time. An exception
can be made for a recent 'historian' of philosophy, Bertrand Russell, who
was never able to contemplate the tradition other than as a mere congeries
of positions unrelated to each other, a way of considering it that perhaps
properly reflects his own intellectual development.
But Hegel further offers a conception of philosophical progress. Later
theories are richer than earlier ones, from which they draw their intellec-
tual sustenance and on which they build. Since Hegel's theory is both the
last and the most complete in the long discussion leading up to it, it is often
thought that for both chronological and logical reasons in his theory
philosophy attains its highest point, perhaps even its end.
Hegel nowhere claims to bring philosophy to an end. Any claim to end
the philosophical tradition implies either that philosophy itself could be
and has been completed or that it has reached a permanent impasse. A
view that it is or even could be completed is contradicted by his consistent
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 HEGEL AND GERMAN IDEALISM
emphasis on the unavoidable link between a given theory and its historical
moment. In his initial philosophical text, he insists that no philosophical
system can escape being treated historically.27 In the Phenomenology, he
relates stoicism and skepticism to the periods in which they arose.28 At
the end of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy he insists that no phi-
losophy surpasses its own period, its historical moment.29 And in the
Philosophy of Right, he famously defines philosophy as its own time com-
prehended in thought.30 Ideas are rooted in their own historical moment,
hence historically limited. At the end of his discussion of the development
of philosophy, Hegel alludes to the intrinsic limitations of his reading of the
tradition.31 Yet whatever his intention might have been, it has often been
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thought that his theory constitutes both the culmination, high point and
end of the philosophical tradition.
Hegel is at least partially to blame for this influential misunderstand-
ing of his theory. He let pass few occasions to express an essentially self-
complimentary way of considering the philosophical tradition. In his
initial philosophical text, he poses as a mediator, whose task is to study
the proliferation of philosophical theories, as someone able to discern
the differences and to choose between more or less successful efforts to
continue the critical philosophy and to grasp reality. He implies that
there is a neutral standard from which to judge perspectives other than
his own.
Hegel maintains this attitude in many other writings, such as Faith and
Knowledge (1802), the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), the
different prefaces to the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817,
1821, 1831), and in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy. In the
Phenomenology, he famously speaks of substance becoming subject.32
In the Philosophy of Right, his even more famous remark that the real is
rational and the rational is real33 can be mistakenly taken as suggesting that
his own position constitutes the final step in the development through
which substance becomes conscious of itself.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence exerted by this con-
ception usually attributed to Hegel in the interpretation of the German
tradition as well as in the reading of his own theory. After Hegel's death,
it was widely held that whatever its significance philosophy itself, not only
a particular philosophy, had come to an end.
At present, when Hegel is not often taken seriously, it might seem
difficult to imagine that he was once taken so seriously that it appeared
not only possible but even plausible that his position had put an end to
philosophy. In an important work, Religion and Philosophy in Germany
(1834), written for the French public several years after Hegel's passing,
Heine, the great German poet, summarizes the course of German philos-
ophy after its origins in German Protestantism, through the profound
changes introduced by Kant, before noting, in a famous passage, that
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philosophy has reached its end with Hegel: 'Our philosophical revolution
is concluded; Hegel has closed its great circle.'34 This student of Hegel and
friend of Marx took seriously the idea that philosophy had come to an end
in Hegel's thought. There were still some details that needed to be supplied
to finish the conceptual edifice, but the edifice itself was now basically
complete.
Heine is representative of many others, intellectuals of all kinds,
including important thinkers, who thought that philosophy had come to
an end. For this reason, in the post-Hegelian period many writers avoided
using the word 'philosophy' to designate their own thought. This was not
the case for Schelling or Schopenhauer, each of whom considered himself
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as an authentic representative of the philosophical tradition. But others

sought to avoid this term, to avoid an identification with a form of
thought that in absolute had reached its end. Bruno Bauer calls his
thought 'critique' and Kierkegaard presents his theory in the form of a
pseudonymous discourse in order that he be not taken as its author.
Nietzsche further objects to the entire philosophical enterprise, in reject-
ing as a lack of good sense the idea of system that dominates German
idealism,35 in criticizing the possibility of epistemology that has long
dominated the philosophical tradition.
It is tempting to think that the philosophical goal is within conceptual
reach, that as a discipline philosophy can complete its task and, in this
way, come to an end. Yet any 'solution' further fuels the discussion,
hence prolonging philosophy. Any summary of the tradition necessarily
belongs to it as only the most recent attempt to consider the philosoph-
ical past. Even the most radical attacks on philosophy, most recently
those of Heidegger and Derrida, cannot evade becoming part of what it
opposes. The most radical critiques of philosophy have often been
launched by philosophers, such as Descartes, Kant and Dewey. In the
post-Hegelian period, philosophy was neither abandoned nor realized.
But new ways of doing philosophy were introduced since it seemed that
the old ways did not fulfill their promises. Philosophy did not come
to an end in Hegel's thought. At most, a certain form of philosophy is
no longer practiced because it no longer appears to be fruitful or even
possible.

Hegel's Appropriation of Preceding Views

The mistaken inference that philosophy comes to an end in Hegel's
thought derives from his conception of the philosophical tradition as lead-
ing up to his own theory. Hegel formulates his theory through a reading of
the prior history of philosophy. A rather different set of issues is raised by
his interpretation of the philosophical tradition, specifically including his
proposed appropriation of valid aspects of prior views.
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 HEGEL AND GERMAN IDEALISM
Hegel consistently seeks to relativize differences. In principle, for Hegel
to carry out this task he must reconcile the differences between different
theories within his own theory. Certainly, he appropriates ideas from an
enormous, even bewildering number of prior thinkers. We find in his
synthesis echoes from the entire history of philosophy, even whole posi-
tions, as in his claim that there is no proposition in Heraclitus that he fails
to take up in his Logic?*" And he famously anticipates a number of later
developments, for instance Kierkegaard's position.37
Yet it is doubtful that all ideas can be successfully reconciled since there
are genuine alternatives in the philosophical tradition that oblige one to
choose. It is a further mistake to hold that if Hegel does not appropriate
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an idea it is for that reason unimportant. Certain ideas not reproduced in

Hegel's theory could not be taken up since they are opposed to the nature
of his speculative thought.

Hegel's Interpretation of German Idealism

The obvious difficulties in Hegel's understanding of the relation between
his own position and the history of philosophy should not lead us to ignore
its influence on the interpretation of classical German philosophy. The
German philosophical tradition is often understood (or perhaps misunder-
stood) from a Hegelian angle of vision as a chronological progression that
can very roughly be depicted as follows: the main figures are Kant and
Hegel. Kant's critical philosophy begins the great period of German
thought. The importance of Fichte and Schelling, who bring about the tran-
sition between two high points, lies only or mainly in the way that they pre-
pare the terrain for Hegel who brings the philosophical tradition to a final
summit. After the death of Hegel, his synthesis disintegrates in a conflict
of interpretations opposing such post-Hegelian thinkers as Kierkegaard,
Marx and Nietzsche, each of whom claims a part of his legacy. But they are
less important and their theories are only partial, hence degenerate forms
of the speculative system.
This sketch of the well-known Hegelian reading of the modern German
tradition is provocative, even tendentious. But it describes a way of inter-
preting German idealism widely represented among historians of philos-
ophy, including the most orthodox among them, such as J.E.A. Erdmann,
Kuno Fischer and Wilhelm Windelband. Richard Kroner's comprehen-
sive study From Kant to HegePs provides a definitive formulation of the
Hegelian reading of the nineteenth-century German tradition. Following
Kroner, in From Hegel to Nietzsche Karl Löwith presents the decline of
the classical German philosophical tradition after Hegel's death as a
struggle between opposing forms of Hegelian orthodoxy.39 Even Marxists
are affected by this line. In the Destruction of Reason,40 following
the lead of Kroner and Löwith, Georg Lukács argues for a decline of
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the philosophical tradition due to the transformation of rationalism into
irrationalism said to derive from the later Schelling.
This Hegelian way of reading the history of philosophy is too simple, not
to say simplistic, to take into account the entire tradition, and even less
adequate to the complex discussion in modern German thought. It has
recently come under increasing attack. The Hegelian paradigm has been
identified and submitted to critical analysis.41 It was suggested above that,
despite Hegel's avowed intentions, we cannot expect him to take up in his
theory all the important themes of the prior discussion. And it does not
follow that the most recent theory is the best one. Earlier views can be
conceptually 'more advanced' than late ones, as in the relation of Kant to
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Reinhold, Kant's enthusiastic but philosophically weak expositor. Further,

there are numerous links between thinkers, even within the German
idealist tradition, that simply bypass his position. Examples are the
relations of Schopenhauer to Kant, and of Schelling to Fichte, which are
important but unmediated by his thought.
The widespread tendency to consider Hegel's philosophy as the high point
of the German tradition sometimes leads to an unfair tendency to slight the
contributions of others from this period. Fichte and Schelling were them-
selves thinkers of the highest rank whose ideas merit study for their own
sake, not only for the light they cast on absolute idealism. For this reason
independent efforts are now underway to rehabilitate Fichte's42 and
Schelling's43 theories, even to defend them against Hegelian objections.44
The idea that Fichte was only a minor figure in the transition from Kant
to Hegel reflects the latter's view of the matter, which was hardly disinter-
ested. Hegel initially sees Fichte as providing the correct reading of Kant's
critical philosophy but also tends to diminish Fichte's importance in his
classification of both Kant and Fichte as merely subjective thinkers.45
Hegel's influential criticism of Fichte, from a Schellingian perspective, as a
philosopher unable to surpass subjectivity, is as popular as it is simplistic.
The renewal of interest in Fichte studies, for which so much is owed to
Reinhard Lauth,46 has shown that this traditional conception, dependent
on Hegel's reading of his predecessor's theory, is largely mistaken. Efforts
by Alexis Philonenko,47 Ludwig Siep,48 Ives Radrizzani49 and others are
now underway to go beyond frequently repeated, simplified interpretations
of Fichte's theory, to reread it in another way, more faithful to the texts,
that not incidentally takes into account the later writings at a point when
Hegel no longer followed the evolution of Fichte's theory. Similar efforts
are also underway to 'rescue' Schelling's theory from its Hegelian reading.
In a chronological study of the unfolding of Schelling's thought, Xavier
Tilliette 'relativizes' the changes in the theory in order to show that it con-
serves throughout a conceptual unity.50 According to Walter Schulz,
German idealism attains its high point not in Hegel but in the development
of Schelling's thought after Hegel's death.51
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 HEGEL AND GERMAN IDEALISM
A certain disregard of Marx can also be imputed to Hegel. That is less
than evident since Marx's theory has given rise to an important Marx
industry resulting in a veritable flood of books (stemmed somewhat since
the dramatic decline of 'official' Marxism from 1989). Yet it is clear to any-
one who has ever dipped into the literature that the amount of agreement
concerning Marx's theory is rather limited, even among the most orthodox
Marxists, and probably goes no further than a consensus concerning the
importance of his theory.
It may come as a surprise that the Marxist view of Marx's theory as
beyond philosophy presupposes the tacit acceptance of the Young
Hegelian paradigm, following from the Hegelian view of absolute idealism
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as the summit of classical German philosophy. In an early essay, Marx

echoes this Hegelian reading of the philosophical tradition in proclaiming
the need to realize and to abolish philosophy.52 Marx's suggestion clearly
indicates that philosophy has not yet been realized, that it has not in fact
terminated in Hegel. Marxists tend to accept the Hegelian view of the
tradition in reading Marx, if necessary even against Marx himself.
If philosophy comes to an end in speculative idealism, then whatever
else it may be, and despite Marx's own failure to burn his bridges to the
philosophical tradition, his theory cannot be philosophy.
Marx is responsible for this misleading approach to his theory. In his
writings we find the famous, obscure and misleading claim, the basis of the
Marxist reading of Hegel, to the effect that his position is the result of
putting Hegel's theory on its feet. The widespread tendency to consider
Marx's position as outside the philosophical tradition was initially formu-
lated by Engels, for instance in his classic study Ludwig Feuerbach and the
Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (1888).53 He uncritically
accepted the speculation philosophy as the high-water mark of the entire
philosophical tradition. He claims that the remaining problems must be
resolved outside philosophy. Marx's contribution, from this angle of vision,
consists in expelling philosophy from history. Since it results from a break
with philosophy, Marxism is not philosophy but science.
This way of reading Marx's theory, illustrated by Engels and Lukács, is
as widespread as it is absurd. Generations of students have tried to come
to grips with Marx on the basis of the supposition, literally indemonstrable,
that his position is not and cannot be philosophy. Beside Engels and
Lukács, others who follow this approach include Korsch, in varying degrees
all the members of the Frankfurt School including Habermas54 (with the
possible exception of Horkheimer), Althusser and his disciples, and per-
haps even such non-Marxists as Klaus Hartmann.55 This tendency has long
been dominant in the Marx discussion. Yet recently, several writers, includ-
ing Sartre,56 and then in a more rigorous way Michel Henry57 and Leszek
Kolakowski,58 have shown that by any set of philosophical criteria Marx is
what he may even have thought he was: a German philosopher.
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Some Problems in Hegel's Reading of German Idealism
Hegel's influential reading of the thought of classical German philosophy
is problematic. If we desire to grasp the intrinsic worth of other points of
view, or to consider other theories for their own sake, we must reject the
Hegelian tendency to consider other angles of vision as unilateral and
limited, in short as imperfect anticipations of his own.
Certainly, Hegel is not the only philosopher to see the views of prede-
cessors as leading up to his own. We find a similar attitude in Husserl and
Heidegger. Distantly following Descartes, Husserl, whose grasp of the
philosophical tradition was comparatively rudimentary, treats other
philosophers, in particular Descartes, Kant, and Fichte as if they had uncrit-
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ically begun to philosophize although only he is finally able to begin in the

correct way.59 In virtue of his proposed destruction of the history of ontol-
ogy,60 the later Heidegger regards the history of philosophy as a long series
of incorrect theories of being. He sees others as unable correctly to address
the problem of being central to pre-philosophy in the pre-Socratic period,
then to the entire philosophical tradition that he equates with the history
of ontology or metaphysics, and later, after Nietzsche, to post-philosophi-
cal thought. He consistently treats individual thinkers, above all Kant, as
imperfectly anticipating his own theory.61 Yet if the aim is to understand
philosophical theories, then it is never correct merely to 'reduce' them to
their impact on later views.
Hegel's teleological approach advantageously unifies the different views
in the German idealist tradition at the heavy price of treating each of them
as mere animadversions of his own. Yet if we reject Hegel's teleological
form of hermeneutics as in principle mistaken, the problem remains: is the
German idealist tradition unified? Where does the unity lie?
The answer to these questions is far from obvious. Hegel stresses unity
in order to overcome difference. In reaction against Hegel, recent discus-
sion, especially in France, emphasizes difference at the expense of unity, as
in Foucault's idea that culture develops through discontinuous epistemes62
and in Derrida's attack on definite reference through the idea of the sup-
plement.63 Following this general approach, it could be objected that no
single, unified object corresponding to the terms 'German idealism' or
'philosophical tradition' exists. From this angle of vision, Hegel would
simply be mistaken in pretending that the history of philosophy manifests
a dialectical progression through the intellectual conflict opposing different
positions. Yet clearly the various positions in modern German philosophy
have more in common than the language in which they are formulated.
There is obviously more than one way to understand the interrelations
between these positions. It is just as obviously not possible here to study in
detail, or even to sketch, what has correctly been regarded as one of the
two richest moments in the entire philosophical tradition. But we can

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 HEGEL AND GERMAN IDEALISM
determine if there a common thread in the interaction of these theories
tending to create unity out of mere diversity, such as problems to which
each of them in turn responds. Hegel, who understands the philosophical
tradition from an epistemological angle of vision, suggests that all philoso-
phers since Parmenides have been concerned with the proof of the unity of
thought and being.64 In classical German philosophy, the epistemological
theme is exemplified in various ways. One such way is the systematic recon-
struction of the critical philosophy understood as insisting on but as lack-
ing an adequate system. Beginning with Reinhold, a series of German
thinkers, including G.E. Schulze, Salomon Maimón, J.S. Beck, Fichte, Hegel
and others were concerned with this issue. Another is the vexed problem
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of the deduction of the categories that links together Kant, Fichte, perhaps
Schelling, certainly Hegel, even Marx and succeeding members of the
German idealist tradition.
Yet there is more to philosophy than epistemology. It is perhaps not suf-
ficiently known that Hegel, who is deeply concerned with this theme, is
equally concerned with the much discussed conception of subjectivity.65
Subjectivity is a central philosophical concern at the beginning of modern
philosophy in Montaigne and Descartes, and even earlier in St Augustine.66
The latter has come to be seen as anticipating the Cartesian cogito.67 In this
period, a number of writers are attentive to an approach to the subject as an
active being, more precisely as active not as passive. The German idealist
conception of the subject as active is linked to two problems deriving from
Cartesian ontology. Knowledge obviously requires a cognitive relation
between subject and object, knower and known. The well-known, influen-
tial Cartesian ontology rests on a dichotomy between thought and being,
including a passive, spectator view of the subject that enables us to under-
stand neither the subject nor the possibility of knowledge. On the one hand,
to understand the possibility of knowledge, it must be shown how the sub-
ject can know the object. Since, according to Descartes, subjectivity and
objectivity are independent of each other, and since subjectivity is consti-
tuted in independence from objectivity, there is no epistemological relation
between them. The ontological bifurcation that Descartes invokes simply
fails as a solution to the problem of knowledge. On the other hand, experi-
ence reveals that human being is not only passive but active as well,
although the Cartesian approach seems to exclude such activity.
The widely held view that the modern tradition is inspired by Descartes
is only partially correct. Certainly, many characteristic Cartesian
doctrines, such as the conception of the cogito, the return into oneself, the
combat against skepticism, and so on, are anticipated by Montaigne, who,
in a famous phrase, asked about the subject's knowledge - 'que sais-je?'
- and earlier by Augustine. If these ideas are the basis of modern philos-
ophy, then this basis lies just as much in Montaigne or even earlier in
Augustine.
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Descartes does not begin 'modern philosophy', however this term is
understood. Yet clearly the anti-Cartesian reaction is a main current in this
period, as in the modern conception of the subject as an active being. The
result is to relativize the stark Cartesian opposition between subject and
object. An anti-Cartesian tendency is already apparent in later continental
rationalists: in Spinoza's theory, where the bifurcation between subjectiv-
ity and objectivity is weakened through a doctrine of God as both natura
naturans and natura naturata, or as a unity between potentiality and actu-
ality, potency and act; and somewhat more diffusely in Leibniz's view of
substance as active, as always tending to pass into another state.
The peculiarly anti-Cartesian tendency to reunite subjectivity and activ-
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ity in Spinoza is typical of modern German philosophy. It is usual to stress

Hume's impact on Kant. Yet we should not forget the extent to which the
critical philosophy prolongs the Cartesian view, above all as concerns the
conception of human being. An instance is Kant's strategy of explaining
types of experience and knowledge through types of mental activity.68 He
literally understands the possibility of knowledge and morality through two
types of activity attributed to the subject, in his terminology through theo-
retical and practical forms of reason. The celebrated Copernican
Revolution intended to explain the agreement between the subject and
object of knowledge presupposes that the subject acts to produce its object.
In the same way, for morality to be possible the moral subject must be
capable of freely determining the maxim motivating action according to
the moral law and of so acting.
The Kantian distinction between theoretical and practical forms of activ-
ity raises the question of how to comprehend the subject, or human being,
implicit in his theories of knowledge and morality. Kant, who did not confuse
the transcendental unity of apperception, the highest principle of the criti-
cal philosophy,69 with a conception of human being, tried more than once to
respond to this question. In the Critique of Pure Reason, there is a clear
tension between the concern to elucidate the abstract conditions of knowl-
edge whatsoever and the effort to avoid any link to anthropological consid-
erations. The two introductions to the Critique of Judgment (1789, 1793)
contain different but finally unsatisfactory explanations of the relation
between the different types of human activity. These include the subordina-
tion of theoretical reason to practical reason, as in the Critique of Practical
Reason, or the rather different suggestion that both are based in a third type
of rational activity. Yet in other places, Kant is continually interested in the
question of human being as such. Examples include his Anthropology, where
he studies what man makes of himself and what nature has made of him, and
the Introduction to Logic, where he enumerates four fundamental questions,
of which the fourth is simply: what is man?
Kant's anti-Cartesian concern to understand human being as active is
restated by later thinkers in the German tradition in different ways
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 HEGEL AND GERMAN IDEALISM
compatible with their respective theories. From this angle of vision, we can
distinguish two separate approaches in the post-Kantian discussion.
Simplifying somewhat, we can say that Fichte and Marx understand human
being in terms of the activity of finite human being, whereas Schelling and
Hegel approach finite human being finally through a conception of the
absolute.
Kant's concern with human being and his ambiguous view of subjectiv-
ity from logical and anthropological angles of vision determine the views
of post-Kantian idealists. Fichte, who repeatedly insists that the goal and
end of all philosophy is to answer the question of the vocation
(Bestimmung) of human being,70 understands finite human being as active.
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He expounds this view in the Foundations of the Science of Knowledge

(Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, 1794), the initial version of his
main work and the first major text in post-Kantian German idealism.
Fichte's position in this work can be summarized as follows: In real activ-
ity, the self (das Ich), Fichte's term for finite human being, is limited by its
interaction with the surroundings, or not-self, in his terminology whatever
is not the self. But the self, the not-self, and their interaction can only be
understood on the ideal level in terms of an ideal, hypothetical form of
activity, or positing, attributed to the self in order to explain the possibility
of real experience.
The relation between Fichte and Kant is close, closer than Kant, who
rejects Fichte's theory, admits, but hardly as seamless as Fichte pretends.
One difference, wholly unanticipated in the critical philosophy, lies in
Fichte's idea that theory, which derives from practical concerns, is recipro-
cally linked to practice. The resultant, circular argument anticipates the
Hegelian idea of philosophy and knowledge as intrinsically circular.71
According to Fichte, theory and practice both depend on each other since
every effort, in his terminology striving (streben), requires positing (setzen)
and conversely positing requires striving. Hence each is grounded in the
other, and the two are inseparably conjoined. Finally, the two fundamental
forms of human activity are based in the anti-Cartesian conception of
human being as no longer a passive spectator but as essentially and
radically active.72
Fichte further improves on Kant's unsuccessful effort to demonstrate the
unity of human being. Within the framework of his critical philosophy and
his analytical procedure, Kant neither does nor can provide a general
theory of human being through types of human activity. His regressive
argument from types of experience to types of activity attributed to
subjectivity prevents him from arriving at an unitary conception of the
subject. Despite his claim to present a seamless, in fact wholly orthodox,
form of Kantianism, Fichte in fact inverts the Kantian argument, beginning
from a view of the subject as active in order only then to derive types of
activity.
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 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
Fichte shares Kant's approach to subjectivity through activity, but sur-
passes Kant through his unitary conception of the subject as an active
being. In classical German philosophy, later thinkers tend to accept his
insistence on the unity of subjectivity. But his basic desire to understand
human being only through human activity was immediately questioned
by Schelling and by Hegel, and finally abandoned by Fichte in his later
writings.
In his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), Schelling supplements
Fichte's transcendental philosophy through a philosophy of nature.
Schelling distinguishes opposing types of activity including that going from
objectivity to subjectivity within nature and that possessed by spirit, or
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mind, going in the opposite direction. He resolves this opposition through

other forms of activity. On the level of the individual, following Schiller, he
insists that the work of art combines objectivity due to necessity and the
subjective desire of the individual to produce it. On the level of history,
where the human species taken as a whole acts through necessity, he
regards change as deriving from the self-manifestation of the absolute
through which individuals act freely.
With respect to the active subject, Schelling's innovation lies in his rein-
terpretation of Fichte's initial concept of the absolute as both indifferent
activity and the source of all its other forms. To understand finite human
being, Schelling transforms what for Fichte is a mere regulative concept in
the service of epistemology into an ontologically constitutive concept. In
the Phenomenology, Hegel famously compares Schelling's view of the
absolute to the night in which all cows are black,73 in order to denounce the
abstract nature of this concept. But he follows Schelling's own attempt to
understand history, knowledge and human being through a transcendent
absolute that develops immanently.
In the Phenomenology, following Schelling, Hegel clearly presupposes a
basic distinction between finite and non-finite, or infinite, forms of subjec-
tivity. The subject of the book, the famous 'we' (Wir) is both the individual
as well as all humanity, and substance in the process of becoming subject.
On a deeper level, Hegel maintains that the final subject through which all
others must be grasped is the absolute itself. History, for instance, is a
process through which an individual becomes conscious and self-conscious,
as well as the historical process thanks to which the human species acquires
self-consciousness, culminating in the philosophical discussion of the stages
of this process in the Phenomenology. Although he analyzes knowledge
from the perspective of the finite subject,74 Hegel's appeal to the cunning
of reason (List der Vernunft) shows that history is only a phase in the man-
ifestation of the absolute in time and in space.
Marx, who misunderstands the concept of human being in Hegel, con-
gratulates Hegel for grasping the historical process of human self-produc-
tion, but he complains in different ways that in the speculative philosophy
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 HEGEL AND GERMAN IDEALISM
the finite individual finally disappears. In 'Contribution to the Critique of
Hegel's Philosophy of Right' (1843), he suggests that to be radical consists
in grasping things by the root in order to insist on the importance of an
anthropological perspective. In his 'Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the
State', he objects to Hegel's effort to renew a supposedly 'medieval' analy-
sis of the relation of human being to the state that simply ignores human
particularity. In the Paris Manuscripts (1844), he draws attention to the
'fact' that human being is not only rational but also social. And in the first
of the Theses on Feuerbach (1845), he criticizes Feuerbach, his Young
Hegelian ally, for supposedly failing to notice that man is an active being.
In Marx's account of man as an active being, German philosophy comes
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full circle. In the later Fichte and in Schelling, the insistence by Kant and
the early Fichte on finite human activity retreats before the appeal to a
transfinite conception of the absolute. Perhaps there is a similar problem
in Marx's theory. Certainly, his early interest in human being as an explana-
tory factor, as in his celebrated account of alienation, later gives way to a
theory of capital as the real subject of modern society. Yet when Marx
criticizes Hegel, and implicitly Schelling, for having lost sight of the role of
finite human being in knowledge and history he comes close to the young
Fichte's stress on human finitude.75

German Idealism and Aristotelian Activity (energeia)

Hegel's immense achievement is to discover the idea of the history of
philosophy as we know it. In applying the Socratic conception of dialogue
diachronically, he discovers the intrinsic link between system and history,
philosophy and the history of philosophy. He properly sees the philo-
sophical tradition as a unity. Yet he also errs - as perhaps any original
thinker must - in reading the history of the prior philosophical tradition
that he simply but implausibly regards as leading up to his own theory.
His demonstration of the unity of the philosophical tradition in relating
philosophy distorts our understanding of classical German philosophy
that incorrectly appears not only to lead up to, but to culminate, even to
end in the Hegelian synthesis. And it diverts our attention from aspects
of the German idealist discussion incompatible with his theoretical
commitment.
Hegel's interpretation of German idealism is powerful, influential, but
only one among other possibilities. The anti-Cartesian conception of
human being as active suggested, but not developed here suggests the need
for a non-Hegelian reading of this classical German philosophy that does
not merely reduce it to a series of anticipations of absolute idealism.
We can bring this discussion to a close by anticipating an important
objection. According to Heidegger, the translation of the Greek term
energeia through the Latin actualitas was doubly inconvenient: the Greek
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 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
insistence on becoming disappears, and the Greek inspiration is lost for the
later tradition.76
On the contrary, in the modern association of activity and subjectivity,
we see clear traces of the Greek concept of energeia. Aristotle invokes this
concept in order to go beyond the Platonic dualism of reality and appear-
ance. More recently, say, since Spinoza, a similar concept has been utilized
to relativize the Cartesian dualism between thought and being and to
understand human being. But the desire to consider human being as an
active subject and to find in human activity a necessary condition of the
cognitive relation between subject and object represents only one form of
the Aristotelian conception of unity in diversity. It follows that in turning
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to human being as active, in studying the reciprocal relation between activ-

ity and subjectivity, modern thinkers make a qualified return to the
Aristotelian conception of activity that, despite Heidegger's counter-claim,
plays a fundamental role in the continuing revolt against Cartesianism.

Duquesne University

Notes
1 'De Interpretatione', in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 25-38.
2 For a survey, see Jean Grondin, Einführung in die philosophische Hermeneutik
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991).
3 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1979), p. 358.
4 Klaus Düsing, Hegel und die Geschichte der Philosophie, Ontologie und
Dialektik in Antike und Neuzeit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchges-
ellschaft, 1983).
5 Hegel held lectures on the history of philosophy nine times from
Wintersemester 1805/1806 in Jena to the tenth time, in November 1831 in
Berlin, that ended with his death. These lectures were collected and published
in the form of a book in three volumes after his death. See G.W.F. Hegel,
Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel
(Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1971), XX, pp. 520-7.
6 An example is Aristotle's remark about poetry as more important than history
since it is universal whereas history is concerned with singulars. See Poetics, 9,
1451 b 7, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), II, p. 2323.
7 'Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking for
Truth in the Sciences', in René Descartes, The Philosophical Works of
Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1970), I, pp. 81-2.
8 Ibid., p. 206.
9 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith
(London and New York: Macmillan and St Martin's, 1961), 356, p. 301.
10 Ibid., xxxviii, p. 33.
11 Ibid., xiii, p. 20.
12 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Lewis White
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 HEGEL AND GERMAN IDEALISM
Beck (Indianapolis and New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1950), p. 8.
13 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1945).
14 Bertrand Russell, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (1897) (New
York: Dover, 1955).
15 Bertrand Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (London:
Allen & Unwin, 1967).
16 G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
17 Rorty adopted this view early on when he held that 'philosophical problems
may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understand-
ing more about the language we presently use'. The Linguistic Turn: Recent
Essays in Philosophical Method, Richard Rorty (ed.), (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1967), p. 3.
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18 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and

B.F. McGuinness (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul and
Humanities Press, 1963), p. ix.
19 Ibid., p. 3.
20 Ibid., proposition 4.003, p. 37.
21 Jorge E. Gracia, Philosophy and Its History: Issues in Philosophical
Historiography (Albany: SUNY, 1992), p. 1.
22 Moritz Schlick, 'The Future of Philosophy', in Rorty, op. cit. note 17, pp. 43-53.
23 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 211.
24 G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, trans. T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting and
H.S. Harris (Indianapolis, MN: Hackett, 1991), § 10, Anmerkung, p. 34.
25 Despite his rejection of the prior history of philosophy, Kant inconsistently
takes a teleological line on occasion, for instance in his assertion that 'philos-
ophy is a mere idea of a possible science which nowhere exists in concreto, but
to which, by many different paths, we endeavour to approximate'. Kant, op.
cit. note 9, 866, p. 657.
26 According to Heidegger, Hegel's is the first philosophical history of philoso-
phy. See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), I, p. 450.
27 Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy,
trans. H.S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), p. 85.
28 Hegel, 'Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness', in
Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1977), pp. 119-38.
29 Sämtliche Werke, ed. H. Glockner (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1927-1940), XIX, p.
685: 'Keine Philosophie geht über ihre Zeit hinaus.'
30 Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1967), p. 11.
31 Sämtliche Werke op. cit. note 29, p. 690: 'Dies ist nun der Standpunkt der jet-
zigen Zeit, und die Reihe der geistigen Gestaltungen ist für jetzt damit
geschlossen.'
32 G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 14.
33 Philosophy of Right, op. cit. note 30, p. 10.
34 Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany, trans. John Snodgrass
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), p. 156.
35 Götzen-Dämmerung oder Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert, in
Friedrich Nietzsche Werke, ed. Karl Schlechta (Frankfurt a. M.: Ullstein Verlag,
1972), III, § 26, p. 392.
36 G.W.F. Hegel, Werke, op. cit. note 5, XVIII, p. 320.
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37 For discussion, see Jean Wahl, Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie
de Hegel (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1951).
38 Richard Kroner, Von Kant bis Hegel (Tübingen: Siebeck, 1921-1924), 2 vols.
39 Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, trans. David E. Green (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, 1967).
40 Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (Atlantic
Highlands N. J.: Humanities Press, 1981).
41 See for example Xavier Tilliette, 'La Nouvelle image de l'idéalisme allemand',
Revue philosophique de Louvain, 71 (February 1973).
42 For a short treatment of the Fichte discussion, centered on English contribu-
tions, see Tom Rockmore, 'Fichte in the New World', The Owl of Minerva, 23
(1) (fall 1991), pp. 126-8.
43 For an account of the current state of the Schelling discussion, with special
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attention to France, see Xavier Tilliette, 'Le Point sur les recherches schellingi-
ennes', Archives de philosophie, tome 56, cahier 1, (January-March 1993), pp.
123-38.
44 See for example Reinhard Lauth, Hegel vor der Wissenschaftslehre (Mainz and
Stuttgart: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur and Franz Steiner
Verlag, 1987).
45 G.W.F. Hegel, op. cit. note 27.
46 Reinhard Lauth, Die transzendentale Naturlehre Fichtes nach den Prinzipien
der Wissenschaftslehre (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1984).
47 See for example Alexis Philonenko, La Liberté dans la philosophie de Fichte
(Paris: Vrin, 1966).
48 Ludwig Siep, Hegels Fichtekritik und die Wissenshaftslehre von 1801 (Freiburg
i. B: Alber, 1970).
49 Ives Radrizzani, Vers la fondation de l'intersubjectivité chez Fichte, Des
Príncipes à la Nova Methodo (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1993).
50 Xavier Tilliette, Schelling, Une philosophie en devenir (Paris: Vrin, 1970), 2
vols.
51 Walter Schulz, Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie
Schellings (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1955).
52 'Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Introduction', in
Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. T.B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1964), pp. 41-60.
53 See Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German
Philosophy, trans. C.P. Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1941 ).
54 For discussion, see Tom Rockmore, Habermas on Historical Materialism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
55 Klaus Hartmann, Eine philosophische Untersuchung zu den Hauptschriften
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970).
56 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).
57 Michel Henry, Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, trans. Kathleen
McLaughlin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
58 Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, trans. P.S. Falla (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1978), 3 vols, esp. Vol. 1.
59 This is a main theme in his programmatic Logos article. See 'Philosophy as
Rigorous Science', in Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of
Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper, 1965).
60 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), [s] 6, pp. 41-8.
61 Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
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 HEGEL AND GERMAN IDEALISM
62 Michel Foucault, L'Archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).
63 This idea is constant in his writings, beginning with his edition of Husserl's
essay on the 'Origins of Geometry'. See his Introduction to Edmund Husserl,
L'origine de la géométrie, trans. Jacques Derrida (Paris: Presses universitaires
France, 1962, 1974).
64 Hegel, Werke, op. cit. note 5, XX, p. 314.
65 For instance, in one of the best general discussions of this period, Royce char-
acterizes 'the general problem of idealism' as consisting in an effort 'to define
the relation between the external world, or apparent outside of experience,
and the nature of the self. See Josiah Royce, Lectures on Modern Idealism
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 161.
66 St Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Anna S. Benjamin and L.H.
Hackstaff (Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, 1964).
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67 Etienne Gilson, La Liberté chez Descartes et la théologie (Paris: Alcan, 1913),

and Etudes sur le role de la pensée médiévale dans la formation du système
cartésien (Paris: Vrin, 1930).
68 See Robert Paul Wolf, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1963).
69 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit. note 9, [s] 16: 'The Original Synthetic
Unity of Apperception', 136, pp. 152-5.
70 See for example Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. Roderick
M. Chisholm (Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, 1956).
71 Hegel often emphasizes this idea. See for example The Encyclopedia Logic,
trans. T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting and H.S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1991), § 15, p. 39.
72 See Fichte, Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) with First and Second
Introductions, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Indianapolis: Appleton-
Century-Crofts, 1970), p. 240.
73 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, op. cit. note 28, p. 9.
74 See Tom Rockmore, Hegel's Phenomenology as Epistemology: From Cognition
to Absolute Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcom-
ing).
75 See Tom Rockmore, Fichte, Marx, and German Philosophy (Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1980).
76 See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), II, p. 412: 'Das
Sein ist, aus dem beginnlichen Wesen der energeia fortgegangen, zur actualitas
geworden.' See also p. 413: 'Weil die Wesensbestimmung des Seins als actuali-
tas alle Geschichte zum voraus trägt . . . deshalb is alle abendländische
Geschichte seitdem in einem Sinne römisch und niemals mehr griechisch.'

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