A History of Philosophy, Vol. VII: Fichte to Nietzsche

Summary

Fichte to Nietzsche, the seventh volume of Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy, was published in 1963. It picks up German thought at the point where the previous volume left Kant, and it follows the extraordinary century in which Kant's successors tried to complete his critical philosophy as a single system of reality, then watched that ambition break apart into materialism, existential protest and Nietzsche's revaluation of all values. An introductory chapter explains why Kant's thing-in-itself seemed to his successors an unstable remainder, and why the young idealists thought the whole of experience could be derived from the activity of a self or spirit. Johann Gottlieb Fichte is presented as the philosopher of the striving ego, who treats the world as the field of moral action. Friedrich Schelling moves from a philosophy of nature and of art toward a late philosophy of mythology and revelation. Friedrich Schleiermacher receives a chapter for his account of religion as the feeling of absolute dependence. G. W. F. Hegel then occupies three chapters: the dialectic and the Absolute as spirit, the philosophy of right and of history with its account of the state, and the triad of art, religion and philosophy in which Hegel claimed to give Christian doctrine its rational form. The second part traces the reaction. Copleston follows the split of Hegel's followers into right and left, then gives Arthur Schopenhauer two chapters on the world as blind will, the pessimism that follows, and the partial escapes through art, compassion and ascetic denial. Ludwig Feuerbach turns theology into anthropology, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels turn the dialectic toward economic production and class conflict. Søren Kierkegaard, though Danish, is included for his protest on behalf of the single individual who must choose before God rather than be absorbed into a system. The third part surveys the scientific materialists of mid-century, the neo-Kantian return to epistemology, and the revival of metaphysics in Lotze and others, before two chapters on Friedrich Nietzsche: his early work on tragedy, his critique of Christian morality as slave morality, the will to power, the superman and eternal recurrence. A closing retrospect asks what questions this century handed to the twentieth. Copleston had already written short books on Nietzsche (1942) and Schopenhauer (1946), and those chapters show long familiarity. His evaluations, written from a Catholic and broadly Thomist position, are restrained: he admires the speculative daring of the idealists, judges Hegel's treatment of Christianity to be a transformation of it rather than a defence, and takes Nietzsche's attack seriously as a challenge believers must answer with argument. In a classical Christian upper school the volume is most useful as a guide to the sources of ideas students will meet in history and literature: Marxism, existentialism and the announcement that God is dead. Single chapters can precede a reading of the Communist Manifesto, Fear and Trembling or the Genealogy of Morality. The book is under copyright, so the library provides a summary and study guide only.

Top Lessons

• The ambition of a complete system

  Fichte, Schelling and Hegel believed philosophy could show the whole of reality as the self-development of reason. Copleston conveys both the grandeur and the cost of that hope: in Hegel the Christian story of creation, incarnation and spirit is reinterpreted as moments of the Absolute. Students can learn to admire intellectual daring while asking whether a system that explains everything has left room for a personal God who acts freely.

• Will, suffering and the temptation of pessimism

  Schopenhauer takes suffering seriously and offers art, compassion and renunciation as relief from a world driven by blind will. Copleston's chapters let students see a serious answer to evil that has no Creator and no redemption, and to compare it with the Christian account of a good creation marred by sin.

• From Hegel's spirit to Marx's matter

  Feuerbach declared that theology is anthropology in disguise, and Marx took the step from critique of religion to critique of society. Following this transformation in Copleston's chapters helps students see how a philosophical method detached from its original metaphysics was turned into a program for revolution, and why Marx thought philosophers should change the world rather than interpret it.

• The single individual and the death of God

  Kierkegaard and Nietzsche both attacked the comfortable culture of nineteenth-century Christendom, one in order to call people to costly faith, the other in order to call them beyond faith altogether. Copleston treats both with care, which allows students to see that a critic of nominal Christianity may be either a friend or an enemy of the gospel.

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Medical Lens

Several figures in this volume matter to the history of psychology and psychiatry. Schopenhauer's account of a blind will that operates below conscious reason is often cited as an anticipation of later theories of the unconscious; the link is a reading by historians rather than a claim Schopenhauer made. The mid-century scientific materialists treated thought as a product of brain chemistry, and Lotze, discussed among those who revived metaphysics, also wrote on medical psychology. Nietzsche's mental collapse in Turin in January 1889 ended his working life; its cause has been debated, and the older diagnosis of syphilitic paralysis is contested, so it should be presented as uncertain.

• Schopenhauer chapters, on the will in nature and in man

  The will as an unconscious striving that governs the intellect, read by later writers as a precursor of depth psychology.

• Part III, chapter on non-dialectical materialism

  Mid-nineteenth-century attempts to reduce mind to physiological processes of the brain and nervous system.

• Nietzsche chapters, biographical opening

  Nietzsche's ill health, his resignation from Basel and the collapse of 1889 that ended his writing.