Narsky I. V. Western European philosophyXIXcentury. M., 1976.

Abstract

Introduction

The clash of opposing worldviews, the intensity of theoretical debates, the abundance of movements and names make the study of 19th century philosophy. not an easy task, so let’s focus only on the truly great thinkers. Classical German idealism is the central object of study in the book.

Classical idealist dialectics in Germany, in a certain sense, revived the principles of rationalism, and the Enlightenment tradition was comprehended. The 19th century in philosophy inherited from French materialism the belief in progress and reason, then raised to the level of social science by Marx and Engels. On the other hand, many philosophers of the second half of the 19th century were imbued with irrationalism and subjectivism; thinkers took up subjectivist interpretations of classical philosophy, forming more and more new teachings with the prefix “neo”. The struggle between idealism and materialism acquired corresponding new forms.

Thus, XIX century. philosophically does not constitute a single picture.

Immanuel Kant

The origins of classical German idealism. Four great classics of German idealism of the late 18th – first third of the 19th centuries. – Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. In the ideology of the German Enlightenment, compromise was expressed in a tendency to reduce all political and social problems to moral ones. In the works of the classics, compromise was expressed in the form of different interpretations of the relationship between “existence” and “ought.”

Part of their idealism was regressive, since they all opposed materialism. But the backward movement towards idealism revealed the significant shortcomings of the old materialism, but opposed idealist dialectics to the metaphysical method of the French materialists.

Classical German idealism significantly expanded the field of problems under study, laying claim to encyclopedicism.

The beginnings of classical German idealism are already present in the works of Kant, who worked when ideological preparation was taking place in France bourgeois revolution, Rousseau's ideas dominated the minds of Europe, and in Germany literature had influence. "Storm and Drang" movement. Kant accepted the Enlightenment values ​​of human reason and dignity, becoming an enemy of feudal obscurantism and moral impoverishment. But he began to hold back the progress of enlightenment with the motive of self-restraint. Kant believed that he lived not in an enlightened age, but in an age of enlightenment, but before the realization of the ideals of the Enlightenment in real life still far.

Life of Kant. I. Kant was born in 1724 in Konigsberg, was the son of a modest saddlemaker, graduated from the university, and worked as a home teacher for 9 years. In 1755 he began giving lectures on metaphysics and many natural science subjects, and was an assistant librarian at the royal castle. He received the professorship of logic and metaphysics only at the age of 46. He strengthened his weak health from birth with a clear daily routine. In 1794 he was elected a member Russian Academy Sci.

It gained wide popularity only in the last decade of the 18th century. Kant died in 1804.

Milestones of Kant's creativity. I. Pre-critical period (1746 – 1770).

II. 1770 - the beginning of the “critical” period in his philosophy.

In 1781, “Critique of Pure Reason” was published - Kant’s main epistemological work.

1788 - “Critique of Practical Reason”, 1797 - “Metaphysics of Morals”.

1790 - “Critique of Judgment”, the 3rd and final part of Kant’s philosophical system.

1793 - bypassing censorship, Kant publishes a chapter from the treatise “Religion within the Limits of Reason Only,” then the entire book and the article “The End of All Things,” directed against orthodox religion, for which King Frederick William II reprimanded the philosopher. But after the death of the king, Kant in 1798 published a “dispute of faculties”, where he insisted that Holy Bible must be considered “a complete allegory.”

"Precritical" Kant. At first, Kant uncritically combined the ideas of Leibniz and Wolff, then he combined natural science materialism with Wolffian metaphysics, showed interest in issues of cosmology and cosmogony, wrote works on the change in the rotation of the Earth around its axis, “The Universal natural history and the theory of heaven” based on Newton’s mechanics, but the role of divine intervention in Kant is less than in Newton’s natural philosophy.

Kant denied the possibility of absolute rest and sought to prove the universal circulation of matter in the Universe. He viewed the end of worlds as the beginning of new ones. His cosmogonic hypothesis is deistic in nature.

Kant appealed to God as the creator of matter and the laws of its motion. In 1763 he wrote “The only possible basis for proving the existence of God.”

Kant reveals agnostic motives: natural causes cannot explain the origin of living nature, since mechanics will not explain the origin of even one caterpillar.

Kant reveals a tendency to separate consciousness from being, which reached in the 70s. apogee. For example, he insists that real relations, negations and reasons are “of a completely different kind” than logical ones. He is right in emphasizing that the predicate of a thing and the predicate of a thought about this thing are not the same thing. One must distinguish between the real and the logically possible. But the tendency for a deeper and deeper distinction between the two types of foundation led Kant in the direction of Hume. He comes to contrast logical connections with causal ones.

In “pre-critical” creativity there was also a struggle against extreme spiritualism (“Dreams of a Spiritualist, Explained by the Dreams of Metaphysics” (1766)), which undermines all hopes of knowing the essence of psychic phenomena.

Thus, during this period the positions that formed the basis of Kant’s “critical” teaching began to take shape.

Transition to the critical period usually dated to 1770, when Kant defended his dissertation “On the Form and Principles of the Sensibly Perceptible and Intelligible World.” He became disillusioned with the rationalism of Wolff, the empiricism of Locke and Holbach, and was impressed by Leibniz. The hopes of the leaders of the Enlightenment for quick knowledge of the secrets of nature seem naive to him, but the rejection of scientific knowledge is even more harmful.

Kant formulates a double task: “to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith.” Here a “middle path between dogmatism... and skepticism” is outlined, a reconciliation of idealism with materialism on an ontological basis.

Kant called his philosophy critical idealism or transcendental idealism. He divided the abilities of the human soul into the ability of knowledge, the feeling of pleasure and displeasure and desire. The first is characterized by the activity of reason, the second by judgment, the third directs the mind through the search for final goals to achieve morality and freedom. Kant rejects theoretical evidence of the necessity of metaphysics, formulating the task of critical metaphysics.

At the beginning of his epistemological research, Kant poses the question: What can I know? And there are three more loans: What should I do? What can I hope for? What is a person and what can he become?

Epistemological classification of judgments. Syntheticapriori. To answer, Kant builds a typology of knowledge, dividing it into imperfect and perfect (truly scientific). The features of the latter are reliability, universality and necessity; it cannot be acquired from experience. Perfect knowledge is extra-empirical, a priori in nature. Kant distinguishes between empirical (a posteriori) and “pure” (a priori) knowledge.

Kant also distinguishes between analytical and synthetic knowledge.

The relationship between types of judgments is as follows:

	Analytical	Synthetic
A posteriori	Their existence is impossible.	They exist as part of imperfect knowledge, for example: “a lot of gold is mined in Siberia,” “this house is on a hill,” “some bodies are heavy.”
A priori	They exist as part of perfect knowledge, for example: “everything conditioned presupposes the presence of a condition,” “a square has four corners,” “bodies are extended.”	They exist as part of perfect knowledge, for example: “everything that happens has its cause,” “in all changes in the corporeal world, the amount of matter remains unchanged.”

The term “a priori” has several connotations. A priori is something that has some kind of, not further specified, non-experimental and in this sense “pure” origin. In Kant's reasoning about the ideals of behavior, the a priori does not point to what exists, but to what should be and, moreover, what is generally obligatory. The lack of experience of the a priori means that epistemologically it is “before” any experience, including psychological experience.

Kant's principle of the primacy of synthesis over analysis triumphs in synthetic judgments a priori. With the help of his supposedly proven existence of synthetic a priori judgments, he seeks to establish theses about the creative role of non-experiential consciousness and the possibility of rational knowledge, in principle independent of sensory knowledge. Hegel saw a deep dialectic in this desire: single consciousness generates manifold knowledge, and this knowledge is synthesis.

For Kant, the distinction between the analytical and the synthetic stems from the difference between the respective methods: a course of reasoning is analytical if it does not introduce new or even complex objects and does not conclude from the presence of one individual object to the existence (or non-existence) of another. But the line of reasoning is synthetic if it asserts that “due to the fact that there is something, there is also something else ... because something exists, something else is eliminated.”

Affirming the existence of synthetic a priori judgments, Kant, already at the beginning of his system, puts forward the dialectical problem of creative synthesis in knowledge. With the help of synthetic a priori judgments, Kant hoped, first of all, to exhaustively explain and indisputably substantiate the possibility of “pure” (i.e., theoretical mathematics).

The structure of the epistemological field. Kant divides the cognitive ability of consciousness as a whole (“reason” in the broad sense of the word, i.e., intellect) into three different abilities: sensibility, reason, and reason itself in the narrow sense of the word. Each ability corresponds to a specific question: How is pure mathematics possible? How is pure natural science possible? How is metaphysics, i.e. ontology, possible?

According to the questions, Kant's epistemology is divided into three main parts: transcendental aesthetics, transcendental analytics and transcendental dialectics.

“Transcendental” for Kant means “that which, although it precedes experience (a priori), is intended only to make experimental knowledge possible.” We can say that abilities are transcendental, and their results are a priori.

“Transcendent” is that which is beyond the limits of experience and does not relate to experience, as well as those principles that try to go beyond the limits of experience. The transcendental and the a posteriori are almost diametrically opposed areas. Therefore, Kant sometimes calls the thing-in-itself a “transcendental object.”

So, the structure of the epistemological field according to Kant is as follows: 1. The area of ​​sensations. 2. The a posteriori domain of objects of experience, ordered by a priori means (= science = truth = nature). 3. Transcendental abilities of the subject, which generate a priori means. 4. Transcendental apperception. 5. The transcendental region of non-experienced objects, i.e. the world of things in themselves.

Things in themselves (by themselves). Let's consider Kant's transcendental aesthetics. Kant understands by “aesthetics” the doctrine of sensuality in general as an epistemological doctrine, and not just concerning the contemplation of objects of art. Sensory contemplation is the beginning of all knowledge.

Important constituent element Kant considers the science of sensory knowledge and knowledge in general to be the doctrine of the “thing in itself.” He argues that beyond sensory phenomena there is an unknowable reality, about which in the theory of knowledge there is only an extremely abstract “pure” concept (noumenon). In epistemology, nothing definite can be said about things in themselves as such - neither that they are something divine, nor that they are material bodies.

The thing in itself, within the framework of Kant’s philosophical system, performs several functions:

1) The first meaning of the concept of a thing-in-itself in Kant’s philosophy is intended to indicate the presence of an external causative agent of our sensations and ideas. They “excite” our sensuality, awaken it to activity and to the appearance in it of various modifications of its states.

2) The second meaning is that this is any fundamentally unknowable object. We don't know in principle what they are. We know of a thing in itself only that it exists, and to some extent that which it is not. From things in themselves we have nothing except the thought of them as intelligible (intelligible) objects, about which it cannot be said that they are substances. This concept of the unknowable as such is “only the thought of some something in general.”

3) The third meaning embraces everything that lies in the transcendental region, that is, outside experience and the sphere of the transcendental. Among otherworldly things, Kant in his ethics postulates God and the immortal soul, that is, the traditional objects of objective idealism.

4) The fourth and generally idealistic meaning of the “thing in itself” is even broader as a kingdom of unattainable ideals in general, and this kingdom as a whole itself turns out to be a cognitive ideal of an unconditional higher synthesis. The thing in itself turns out to be the object of faith in this case.

Each of the four meanings of “things in themselves” corresponds to its own meaning of noumenon, that is, the concept of things in themselves, indicating the presence of the latter, but not giving positive knowledge about them.

Kant's ethical teaching. Kant affirms the primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason, of activity over knowledge. Kant adheres to the principle of the primacy of issues of morality of human behavior over issues of scientific knowledge.

Ethics is the main part of Kant's philosophy. At the center of Kantian philosophy is man, his dignity and destiny.

Kant's ethics is autonomous. It is focused on a certain ideal independent of any incoming considerations and incentives. Neither sensual desires, nor selfish calculation, nor appeals to benefit or harm should be taken into account at all.

Practical reason prescribes to itself the principles of moral behavior and finds them within itself as an internal a priori impulse. He is the only source of morality, just as reason turned in Kant, as his “criticism” developed, into the only source of the laws of nature.

Legality and morality. An imperative is a rule containing “objective compulsion to act” of a certain type. There are two main types of them, identified by edging: hypothetical in the sense of "condition dependent" and categorical imperative as a general invariant for a priori moral laws. This imperative is apodictic, necessarily unconditional. It follows from human nature, like hypothetical imperatives, but not from empirical, but from transcendental nature. He doesn't accept any "ifs". According to Kant, only that behavior is moral that completely obeys the requirements of the categorical imperative.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Johann Gotbib Fichte is a very original scientist, a contemporary of the Napoleonic Wars. Those who swept away the feudal rubbish of feudalism from the lives of peoples. The origins of Fichte's work are the political ideas of the French Revolution. But the absence of real political forces in Germany led to the fact that Fichte’s anti-feudal protest acquired an abstract form.

Life and work of Fichte. Fichte was born into a poor and large family of a rural weaver in East Saxony, and only the curiosity of a titled patron of the arts for the boy’s extraordinary abilities gave him the opportunity to receive an education.

Fichte read Rousseau with enthusiasm and became imbued with revolutionary democratic convictions. Kant's seeds also fall onto the prepared soil. Fichte abandons the rigid Spinozistic determinism and turns the efforts of his seething mind to finding a theoretical justification for freedom.

The idea of ​​freedom captures Fichte's soul. It is also in tune with his inner character, uncompromising honesty and straightforwardness. It was as if a German sans-culotte had entered the philosophical world.

An important role was played by Fichte's meeting with Kant, to whom he showed his first essay, “The Experience of Criticism of All Revelation.” Kant recognized the guest's strong and original mind, contributed to the publication of his work, and when rumor attributed the authorship to Kant, he publicly explained the misunderstanding, and Fichte immediately gained wide fame.

But Kant did not recognize the direct genetic connection between Fichte’s ideas and his own, and then more decisively dissociated himself from them.

On the recommendation of Goethe, who became interested in the bright thinker, Fichte in 1784 took the position of professor at the University of Jena. During his years as a professor at Jena, Fichte created the basic outline of his philosophical system. Then the reactionaries expelled him, having become obsessed with his careless handling of the categories of religion.

But Fichte was invited to give lectures in Erlangen, Berlin, Koenigsberg and even Kharkov.

When Napoleon occupied Germany in 1806, Fichte plunged headlong into social activities, giving patriotic lectures. Since 1813, he has taken an active part in the bourgeois-democratic movement for the national restoration of Germany. He joined the militia, but in January 1814 he died of typhus, which he contracted from his wife, who worked in a military hospital.

Philosophy as a science. Initial intellectual intuition. Fichte emphasizes that philosophy is a science, and hopes to find in it the “fundamental science”, the science of sciences, knowledge of the processes of obtaining knowledge, the teaching of science and the justification of all knowledge in general. What we have before us is not yet a “science of sciences” in the Hegelian sense, but already a sketch of its concept.

Differences emerged between Kant and Fichte on the issue of knowledge. Fichte rightly considers the combination of idealistic and materialistic tendencies in Kahn's theory of knowledge to be eclecticism, but he sees the way to overcome it in getting rid of the doctrine of things in themselves. Recognizing, in contrast to Kant, intellectual intuition, Fichte brings it somewhat closer to rational activity, but, like Kant, denies the possibility of intuitive penetration into other world(for Kant this world is unknowable, for Fichte it does not exist).

Fichte draws attention to the content of the pure transcendental “H,” i.e., the former Kantian apperception taken in its essence. By constructing the “I,” Fichte tries to reveal it as the very essence of consciousness, not as a thing, but as an action. If for Kant the active transcendental subject is passive in the sense that he is forced to deal with the matter of experience that is given to him, then in Fichte the active creative “I” is passive in the sense that it is not able to create the world otherwise than by influencing on yourself.

Three principles and their dialectics. Fichte builds the system of solipsism of the “I” through three fundamental judgments, which together express his interpretation of transcendental apperception.

1. The universal “I” asserts itself. “I” creates itself, and this is not some kind of permanent state, but a powerful act caused by a special beginning-impetus.

2. “I” cannot be satisfied with the first principle: it strives for self-determination, and this is impossible except through the mediation of another, that is, that which is different from “I”. Consequently, the second principle: “I” opposes itself to “not-I”. In essence, there is an “alienation” of the “not-I” from the “I”, expressing an idealistic solution to the main question of philosophy and anticipating Hegel.

3. The third principle plays the role of synthesis and leads the first two to unity. It says: consciousness posits and unites “I” and “not-I”.

Ethics of action and freedom. Fichte's ethics were developed in the “System of Doctrines of Morality...” (17989) and in a number of works on the purpose of man and scientist as a true person. According to Fichte, man is an organized product of nature. In its entirety, it is not only an object, but also a subject. As an object, it is not passive, and objective necessity, recognized by man as self-determination, turns into subjective freedom.

The historical path of mastery of material nature is a worldwide process of leap-like growth in the ethical culture of mankind.

If duty without feeling is a tedious duty, then feeling without duty is a blind and rude impulse. The combination of duty and feeling occurs precisely thanks to culture. Thus, “I,” in the course of the development of social civilization, must triumph both over nature in general and over its own natural basis.

As a result, the distinction between “legal” and “moral” actions will disappear, reason and feeling, duty and desire, theory and practice will be identified.

Philosophy of history, law and state. Fichte's philosophy of history is imbued with idealistic theology. The absolutely free “I” is not only the source and starting point of historical development, but also its criterion and goal, hovering somewhere in an unusually distant distance. History is a growing and forward-looking process of cultivating practical and theoretical reason, and it is generic in nature, although it occurs through the improvement of the consciousness of individuals.

External condition To realize the moral goals of history, according to Fichte, law and the state constitute. Fichte argues that man can only exist as a social being.

But the state is only a service and therefore temporary institution. It is only a condition, a means of moral progress for the empirical selves. After “myriads of years,” morality will replace the state, law and church. Only then will there truly arise “ natural state» of a person, corresponding to his actual nature and purpose.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Hegel's philosophy can be characterized as a system of dialectical objective idealism. At a new, higher level, he revived the ideas of idealistic rationalism of the 17th century, transforming the thesis about the coincidence of real and logical connections into the position about the dialectical (relative) identity of being and the thought of being.

Hegel's epistemology, in contrast to Kant's theory of knowledge, is not reduced to the study of a person's subjective cognitive abilities, but is aimed at studying the dependence of the laws of cognition of an object on its own properties. Hegel comes to the conclusion that the laws of being are the laws of cognition of being, but on the basis of idealism this conclusion received the opposite meaning - deriving the laws of being from the laws of its cognition, so that Hegel’s ontology coincided with epistemology.

All these motifs can be found in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a work that completes the formation of Hegel’s philosophical views. This is both an introduction to his philosophy and its application to a number of specific issues. “Phenomenology of Spirit”, as it were, programmed the future philosophy of spirit: its first five sections are a sketch of the doctrine of subjective spirit, the sixth section corresponds to the doctrine of objective spirit, and the last two are about the absolute spirit.

Phenomenology of Spirit prepares Hegel's mature system. She proclaims the end of the kingdom of reason and the beginning of the kingdom of reason.

Hegel's philosophy is the completion and highest achievement of German classical idealism. Hegel proclaimed man's ability to create himself, the infinite superiority of social life over nature and the power of the knowing consciousness. He substantiated all these theses through idealistic dialectics.

Hegel's system is completed by the doctrine of absolute spirit. History achieves the unity of the subjective and objective states of the spirit on the basis of the level of rationality that is possible under the conditions of the most rationally structured state.

Ludwig Feuerbach

Young Hegelian movement. The starting point for the philosophical ideology of bourgeois-democratic movements of the late 30s. XIX century In Germany, the radical teachings of the Young Hegelians began. Their significance in the philosophical preparation of the revolution of 1848–1849. no doubt.

As the revolutionary situation approached, a split in the Hegelian school became inevitable. Outwardly, it seemed to be the result of a dispute about whether it would be correct to identify the Hegelian absolute with God, but its participants also differed among themselves in their answers to the question about the nature of the relationship of the absolute to man. But essentially the split was determined by the polemic between supporters of the radical and conservative interpretation of the formula “Everything that is reasonable is real, and everything that is real is reasonable.”

The right, or Old Hegelians, argued that the Hegelian absolute should be understood as the highest spiritual-individual being, representing the subject of rational world governance. But their philosophical activity expressed both their general conservatism and attempts to overcome the crisis of Protestant theology.

The left, or Young Hegelians, declared that their teacher was a pantheist, and some, for example Bruno Bauer, began to prove his atheism, and even reproached Hegel himself for the fact that in practice he himself moved away from his doctrine, which disoriented his students. The Young Hegelians decided to deepen his criticism of political and church reaction and rejected Hegel’s opinion on the need for the coincidence of state power, religion and the principles of philosophy.

Philosophers of the Young Hegelian circle. David Friedrich Strauss (1808 - 1874) wrote the two-volume Life of Jesus in the spirit of pantheism. Attacked both orthodox Christian and Hegelian Christology. According to Strauss, the gospel is a historical document of social psychology, namely a collection of myths of early Christian communities, Christ is a natural person, since the absolute could not inhabit a single person, and God is the image of substantial infinity.

Bruno Bauer (1809 - 1882) went further in denying religion than Strauss. He rejected the real historical existence of Christ altogether. Bauer portrayed Hegel himself as an enemy of religion, the church and the Prussian state, a friend of materialism and the Jacobins. Bauer himself understood that this image did not really correspond to reality, but he wanted to stimulate the development of Young Hegelianism to the left. But the “leftism” of Bauer himself was limited to the fact that he reduced bourgeois revolutionism to intellectual criticism of religion, despotism and clericalism on the part of outstanding “critically thinking individuals.”

Arnold Ruge (1803 - 1880) was the first among the Young Hegelians to draw political conclusions from the criticism of religion, transferring its fire to the Hegelian philosophy of state and law. All the most political episodes of the Young Hegelian movement are associated with the name of Ruge, and it was in his articles that they briefly approached revolutionary democracy.

Stirner and Hess. Max Stirner (pseudonym of Kaspar Schmidt) (1806 - 1856) developed as a thinker in the Young Hegelian circle of the “Free”, but in the book “The One and His Property” he sharply criticizes them and appears as an extreme individualist and nihilist, rejecting any realities and values: morality, law, state, history, society, reason, truth, communism. “I am nothing, and from whom I myself will draw everything, as a creator-creator... My Self is most precious to me!” Many of his ideas formed the basis of the ideology of anarchism.

Moses Hess (1812 – 1875) also broke with the circle of Young Hegelians. His role in philosophy is twofold. On the one hand, as a result of his combination of the principles of historical necessity of Hegel, the humanism of Feuerbach and the utopian communism of Cabet, the theoretical basis of the movement of “true socialists” arose. On the other hand, Hess's critique of capitalism attracted the attention of the young Marx. But Hess himself was influenced by Marx and Engels. In The Philosophy of Action (1843), Hess stated that which It is precisely in this direction that the time has come to remake Hegel’s teaching: “Now the task of the philosophy of spirit is to become a philosophy of action.”

Polish Hegelians.“Prolegomena to Historiosophy (1838) by August Cieszkowski (1814 – 1894)” immediately drew attention to such flaws in the Hegelian system as contemplation, a tendency towards fatalism, indifference to the fate of the individual and exclusion from philosophical analysis of the problems of happiness and the future of humanity. Tseshkovsky’s main idea is not to draw a line under the results of past development, but to put the conclusions of these philosophical results into practice.

Edward Dembosky (1822 – 1846) is the author of the “philosophy of creativity”, the main categories of which were “nationality”, “progress”, “action” and “daring”. He reproaches Hegel (like Fourier, Saint-Simon, the Girondins and the authors of the compromise Polish constitution) for eclecticism, which, in his opinion, means the reconciliation of opposites in theory and unprincipled compromises in political practice.

Life and work of Feuerbach. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 – 1872) considered it his duty to solve the problem posed by life itself and also arising from the contradictions of Hegel’s teachings. What is the true nature of a real person and how can one determine his path to happiness? How to free him from the oppression of the omnipotent absolute? Having devoted his philosophy to the solution of these problems and placing at its center not the abstract “Self-Consciousness”, but a person, he gave it an anthropological character. By anthropological philosophy he understood a teaching in which an integral, real person would be both the starting point and his final goal.

L. Feuerbach was born on July 28, 1804 to the family of a prominent lawyer, listened to Hegel's lectures at the University of Berlin. In the notes of “Doubts” (1827 – 1828), a protest against dictatorship is already brewing idealistic thoughts.

In “Thoughts on Death and Immortality” (1830), he contrasts the Christian dogma of personal immortality with the immortality of the human race in its real, earthly life, which became the starting point for Young Hegelian criticism. The essay was confiscated, Feuerbach was fired, and for six years he unsuccessfully tried to gain access to teaching again. As a sign of protest, he moved to the countryside for a quarter of a century, where he wrote his main works.

His most famous, although not the most mature, work is “The Essence of Christianity,” which caused a huge resonance. He developed the concept of criticism of religion as the alienated existence of the human essence, which took the form of illusory consciousness.

Feuerbach's lectures on the essence of religion were a political act, where he declared the need to become a "political materialist" since the subject of his lectures - religion - was "closely connected with politics."

He enthusiastically embraced the revolution of 1848–1849, and the victorious reaction and the militaristic regime of Bismarck met only hatred on his part. His old age passed in poverty, reaching complete poverty.

A question about dialectics. Anthropological principle. The presence of moments of dialectics in Feuerbach is undeniable. When he broke with Hegel's teaching, he did not reject the dialectic of interpersonal relations, although he retained little of it. But he noticed the dialectical fate of pantheism; a dialectical character is also inherent in the mechanism of religious alienation he denigrates. There are many real transitions to the opposite here, and “what was religion yesterday ceases to be it today; what seems atheism today will become religion tomorrow.” But the dialectic of all these moments is not comprehended by him as dialectics.

Anthropologism was main feature Feuerbachian materialism. Feuerbach’s “man” is no longer a conglomerate of passive atoms, drawn by external influences, “a block”, as it turns out to be among the leaders of French materialism, but an active individual. He is no longer an obedient organ absolute spirit, fatally included in the system of stages of ascent to a goal alien to the aspirations of people and a goal incomprehensible to them. Feuerbach's anthropologism was directed primarily against the interpretation of man as a “servant of God” and a submissive instrument of the world spirit. From the point of view of a philosopher, for understanding a person, not only the affects of fear in religion or interest in knowledge are important, but also “love” as a philosophical category in the sense of not only desires, passion, admiration and dreams, but also effective self-affirmation.

For Feuerbach, “truth is neither materialism, nor idealism, nor physiology, nor psychology, truth is only anthropology.”

The concept of human nature. As M. Hess noted, Feuerbach humanized ontology, turned it towards the interests and needs of man and proclaimed materialistic humanism. The duty of a philosopher is to help people become happier. To do this, it is necessary to consider a person not in isolation from the surrounding world, but in connection with it, and this world is nature. Man and nature, as starting points of philosophizing, are united together by the concept of human nature.

But Feuerbach’s characterizations of man suffer from great social abstraction, since he distinguishes him from animals essentially only by the presence of a “superlative degree of sensualism.” The social aspect of philosophy is reduced by Feuerbach to the interaction in the “binomial” of individuals (“I” and “You”). The combination of two individuals in this “cell” of social life – in a heterosexual pair “I – ​​You” – is a source of social diversity at higher levels.

Criticism of religion as alienation. Religion in the perspective of eras. "Religion of Man". In the analysis of religion, Feuerach took the baton from the materialists and enlighteners of the 18th century. He was the first to highlight and substantiate the idea that religion did not arise by chance, but naturally, and is a product of social psychology, which constantly reflects in the binary system “I – ​​You”, and highlighted the basis of religion as a person’s sense of dependence. Religion turns out to be an expression of egoism. Religion is a “reflex, a reflection” of a person’s powerlessness and at the same time his active reaction to his powerlessness.

In order for a person’s religious self-alienation (self-deception, a vampire sucking out the content of connections between people, taking away love from a person to God) to be abolished, all people must become happy.

What to do with religion in the future? Feuerbach concludes that necessity religion because it makes up for what people lack. He believes that humanity needs "new religion". Feuerbach's thought about the necessity of religion, that is, about its adequate replacement, comes into play. The philosopher proposes to transfer the emotions of religious veneration to Humanity. “By reducing theology to anthropology, I raise anthropology to theology.”

Ethics Feuerbach, his “communism” and “love”. In ethics, Feuerbach took the position of abstract anthropological humanism, having exhausted all those possibilities of metaphysical materialism that could serve the development of anti-religious morality. In his vibrant ethical teaching, he includes all the moral implications of atheism, sharply opposing religious doctrines of morality. His conclusion: true morality and religion are antagonists.

He tries to base his teaching on morality on the principles of biopsychic sensibility. He orients his ethics towards justification, exaltation, glorification and, finally, deification of human impulses towards the utmost completeness and this sense of ideal sensual happiness. He calls for the deification of relationships between people, for their path to happiness lies only through them, to deify the love of “I” for “You” and “You” for “I”. The religion of man turns out to be the religion of sexual love.

The need of people for each other equalizes them and unites them with each other, develops a sense of collectivism. If, instead of faith in God, people gain faith in themselves and achieve that “man is God to man,” then the friendship of all people with each other will be established without distinction of gender - and this will be the path to communism. “Communism” in Feuerbach’s writings is a designation for the general fact that people need each other.

Feuerbach traces his ethics to the principle of rational egoism. Everyone strives for happiness; to be a person means to be happy. But the condition for happiness is also the happiness of the partner. Happiness can only be mutual, and from here Feuerbach wants to reinterpret egoism as altruism, deriving the latter as a necessary requirement from the former.

Theory of knowledge. "Love" again. Feuerbach sharply emphasizes that the objective world is cognized by the subject through human senses, and all nature is cognized through the knowledge of human nature. That's why highest form cognition – sexual intercourse.

In Feuerbach's epistemology, new shades are added to the terms “sensuality” and “love”. Sensuality takes on the meaning of the fullness of life experience, and love is a set of actions that provide people with active communication and unity with nature.

Irrationalism of the middleXIXV. Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860) contrasted his teaching with rationalism and dialectical teaching to Hegel, which he called the “basilisk egg.” He also reacted with hatred to Feuerbach’s materialism.

The deep pessimism characteristic of Schopenhauer had a complex nature: the feudal-aristocratic contempt for the established soulless merchant morals of the order was later added to the gloomy skepticism of a bourgeois ideologist who did not expect anything good from the future.

Metaphysics of Will. Schopenhauer himself admitted that his philosophical system arose as an amalgam of the ideas of Kant, Plato and Indian Buddhists. His philosophy is eclectic, but it is permeated by certain common principles.

Of all Kant’s categories, he recognized only causality, but also included time and space among the categories, and in Kant’s thesis about the primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason he saw the germ of his doctrine of the primacy of the volitional principle. In Indian philosophy, his attention was attracted by the concept of "maya" and the ideal of immersion in "nirvana".

The starting point of Schopenhauer’s reasoning is the assertion that the world of our experience is purely phenomenal, it is just a set of ideas reminiscent of “maya (appearance)”, but categorically ordered.

The philosopher turned the law of sufficient reason into a method of cognition of phenomena, while he proposes to discover philosophical truths through intuition of the Schelling kind. Schopenhauer called this law “the general form of an object,” appearing in 4 different forms depending on the class of objects (1. Class of physical objects-phenomena in the relations of time, space and causality; 2. Abstract concepts related to each other through judgments “ mind”, which is understood as the ability of all theoretical thinking; 3. Mathematical objects generated by the relations of time and space; 4. Empirical “I” as subjects of various expressions of will). Consequently, the law takes on four types: sufficient grounds for becoming, cognition, being and action, or motivation.

The entire world of phenomena around us is a set of sensory and intuitive ideas of human subjects. The earth, seas, houses, bodies of people are objects-representations, but the representing human subjects themselves also turn out to be only representations, so literally all the world of phenomena is not so much imagined as imagined, like a dream, Buddhist "Maya".

“Behind” the phenomena there is a world of things in themselves, which is a kind of metaphysical Will. It is unique, but its manifestations are multiple. Among the most eloquent are gravity, magnetism, the forces of chemical affinity, the desire of animals for self-preservation, the sexual instinct of animals and the various affects of people.

But unlike Kant, Will as a thing in itself in Schopenhauer is recognizable or at least identifiable, and secondly, it would be easier to call it Force or Energy with a capital letter.

Schopenhauer's pessimism. The World Will is irrational, blind and wild, has no plan, is in a state of eternal dissatisfaction, “forced to devour itself, since there is nothing besides it and it is a hungry will.” Hence, people’s lives are full of constant anxiety, bitter disappointments and torment. Chapter 46 of Volume II of “The World as Will and Idea” is entitled: “On the insignificance and sorrows of life.”

Schopenhauer denies in principle the existence of progress in human society. History seems to him to be a meaningless web of events.

Manifestations of will collide and fight with each other. The will, through its creations, finds itself plunged into suffering, tries to overcome them, but this is tantamount to the fact that it fights with itself, but only plunges itself into new troubles: “... in the heat of passion, sinks its teeth into its own body... The tormentor and the tormented are one” .

The doctrine of self-abolition of the Will and its social meaning. Schopenhauer shows how people can cease to be slaves and instruments of such a deceptive and disappointing world Will to live. The way out is in the development by people of vital energy, which must be directed against the Will as such. We must turn our human will against itself.

This activity has two stages. The first gives only temporary liberation from the service of the Will, helps to escape from it for a while. This is aesthetic contemplation.

The second, highest stage of annihilation is associated with the ethical field of human activity. A person must extinguish the will to life and renounce it, surrender to quietism, that is, the cessation of desires, asceticism. The will of the ascetic crushes the will to live and thereby undermines the Will in general. The abolition of the subject also destroys the object, for Schopenhauer accepted the subjective-idealist thesis: without the subject there is no object.

The highest human ideal turns out to be the “holy” hermit. The successor of this system, E. Hartmann, made a direct conclusion about the expediency of collective suicide, but Schopenhauer reasoned that the ascetic flees from the pleasures of life, which means life itself, while the suicide seeks to avoid life's suffering, which means he loves the joys of life, and by his act , on the contrary, affirms it.

Schopenhauer did not believe in progress and denounced humanism, calling it a vile companion of materialism and “bestialism.” Although he recognized the affinity of the Christian message of "compassion", he liked the Buddhist message of submissive self-denial. In it, “compassion” was followed by “chastity”, “poverty” and readiness to suffer, after which - quietism, asceticism and “mysticism”. The ultimate goal is “nirvana” as the abolition of the entire universe of Will, i.e., universal death: if at least one subject remains alive, in his ideas the world of objects will continue to exist, so the task of abolition of being will remain unsolved.

Eduard Hartman. Hegel's dialectics, represented by the system of the “prince of pessimists” Schopenhauer, received a kind of anti-dialectical double. From Schopenhauer, traditions of philosophical decadence begin, which go to the theorist of the “unconscious” E. Hartmann, then to the neo-Kantian G. Vaihinger, the young F. Nietzsche and the entire “philosophy of life”, to Z. Freud and A. Camus.

The immediate impact of Schopenhauer's philosophy was its pessimism. Eduard Hartmann (1842 – 1906) began to improve this theory, who added borrowings from Schelling, Darwin’s evolutionary theory, and most of all from Hegel’s dialectics and rationalism to Schopenhauer’s eclectic structure. In Hartmann’s main works “Philosophy of the Unconscious” (1869) and “The Doctrine of Categories” (1896) the following theoretical concept is outlined: the unconscious principle as the unity of Will and Idea develops through teleological splitting, like Schelling’s absolute, and then through the war of will and reason, i.e. i.e. through the war of opposites, like Hegel’s world spirit. The categories are a priori, like Kant's, but they are unconscious structures of the action of the impersonal mind in human individuals. “Man is completely dependent on the unconscious,” and receives from it only sorrow and suffering. The pursuit of happiness is a foolish illusion. But our world is the best of worlds, because it is capable of self-destruction. People must commit themselves to self-destruction and thereby achieve the “redemption” (Erlösung) of the world.

In the time of Bismarck, the doctrine of self-negation of the will was replaced by Nietzsche’s “will to power,” which was accompanied by an increasingly progressive denigration of reason. These concepts were of a cosmic nature. S. Kierkegaard followed a different path, alien to generalization.

Soren Kierkegaard

Just as Schopenhauer attacked scientific knowledge and Hegel's dialectic. He rejects the Hegelian identity of being and thinking, because under no circumstances does he recognize the rationality of reality. He separates thinking and being, logic and dialectics, objectivity and subjectivity from each other, discards the first and retains only the second. The subject of his reflections is dialectical subjectivity, the subjective dialectics of a unique individual.

The individual and the dialectics of its “existence.” Kierkegaard is an opponent of all philosophical systems, but he also developed a semblance of a system of thoughts. Its central idea is the principle of human individuality. The spiritual individual, the “Single,” forms the rules of his behavior contrary to the social environment and any of its laws, and the more he succeeds in this, the more lonely he is. “After all, one person for another cannot be anything other than an obstacle on his path,” a threat to his existence. The surrounding “mass” of people are “animals or bees,” and therefore “be afraid of friendship.” The people are something faceless, anonymous and “untrue”. Social associations, ideas of collectivism and social progress are a “pagan” illusion.

The mature Kierkegaard proclaimed the rebellion of the individual against the race, social class, state, and society. Everything universal, the universal, is false, only the Individual is “true” and only it has meaning. Only the One has “existence.”

By “existence,” Kierkegaard understands a specifically human category that expresses the existence of a unique individuality through the chain of its internal and also unique experiences, “moments.” “Existence” is, as it were, the apogee of life’s “shudder,” suffering and passionate attempts to escape its power. “To exist” means to realize one’s being through the free choice of one of the alternatives and thereby assert oneself as an individual, and not as a mass phenomenon from the “crowd”.

The category of “existence” is the focus of Kierkegaard’s dialectic, the dialectic of the psychological struggles of the subject in the cage of the opposites “finite” and “infinite,” “fear” as a state of uncertainty and “choice” as a decision that interrupts fluctuations between alternatives. But the dialectical collision of opposites is resolved by the philosopher not through a mediating synthesis, but with the help of a “leap-choice”: the impulse of determination allows one to jump, as if in one fell swoop, into the bosom of one of the alternatives, discarding the other.

Kierkegaard's dialectic is completely alien to the movement of general categories, is purely individualized and covered by an unsteady network of a kind of concepts-experiences. The main ones of these mental-emotional hybrids are: single, existence, moment, paradox, fear, guilt, sin, choice, leap, despair.

Using a complex system of pseudonyms, the philosopher began a series of Socratic dialogues with himself, also resorting to the tried and tested means of the Jena romantics - irony. For Kierkegaard, irony is doubt, which always elevates the doubter above the one “who teaches,” duality and mistrust, which, being convinced, itself turns into faith. However, before us is rather not a “Danish Socrates”, but a “Danish Tertullian”.

The concept of the experience of “choice” plays an important role, which is quite consistent with the history of his life and manifested in his character. Kierkegaard himself sought to emphasize the universal significance of his individual experiences, considering himself man-problem.

Three lifestyles. "Paradox". The three stages of the earthly development of the Individual, the three images (styles) of his life concretize three different moral attitudes in relation to the surrounding world.

1) Aesthetic stage: a sensual way of life, characterized by eroticism and cynicism, chaos and chance.

2) Ethical stage: the individual chooses the position of a strict and universal distinction between good and evil and takes the side of the former, guided in his life by solid principles of morality and the obligations of duty (Kant!). When it becomes clear that a person is never morally self-sufficient and perfect because he is sinful and initially guilty, an ethically thinking individual will find a way out of his contradictions, moving on to the third stage of “existence.”

3) Religious stage. One of the personifications of this stage is long-suffering Job, the other is Abraham, who, to please to his, who personally addressed him in a state individual contact with him, to God, and for the sake of faith in his God showed a willingness to bear the burden of moral responsibility and guilt for violating His own commandments.

Here another very important concept appears - the experience of Kierkegaard’s dialectic - “paradox”, i.e. the suffering of “existence” resulting from the conflict in his mental experiences. Kierkegaard's "paradoxes" are the highest passion of thinking, which is destroyed in this passion, ceasing to be thinking. All stages of the existence, truth and affirmation of the Christian faith are paradoxical. Kierkegaard was the first to notice that paradox is an ineradicable form all sorts of things theological thinking. Therefore, “Tertullian of the 20th Century” calls to believe precisely that faith is a matter of choice, a decision of the will, a leap, a risk, a miracle, an absurdity. Credo, quia absurdum est.

Subjectivity of truth, “fear” and “sickness leading to death.” Kierkegaard understands truth and faith as “subjectivity.” They do not know the truth, in it exist.

At the stage of religious faith-experience, the Individual strives for a synthesis of the finite with the infinite, but it is unattainable, and any attempt to approach it entails new paradoxes, and therefore new yearnings of the spirit. The person here is especially overwhelmed by the languor of “fear,” that is, acute anxiety, which Kierkegaard, in the “concept of fear” (1844), connected in its origins with the ideas of sexuality and sinfulness in general.

“Fear” is a trembling state of burning fear of the unknown, mysterious, mystical. Whoever is engulfed by it is already guilty; faith at the third stage is called upon to save the Individual from the “fear”.

But at this stage, something opposite happens: fear and trepidation increase and bring the individual to extreme exhaustion of spirit: this is cruel languor, permanent despair, a “sickness towards death”, in which the attraction to the promised afterlife is combined with disgust from the expected transcendence.

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PAGE_BREAK--On the recommendation of Goethe, who became interested in the bright thinker, Fichte in 1784 took the position of professor at the University of Jena. During his years as a professor at Jena, Fichte created the basic outline of his philosophical system. Then the reactionaries expelled him, having become obsessed with his careless handling of the categories of religion.
But Fichte was invited to give lectures in Erlangen, Berlin, Koenigsberg and even Kharkov.
When Napoleon occupied Germany in 1806, Fichte plunged headlong into social activities, giving patriotic lectures. Since 1813, he has taken an active part in the bourgeois-democratic movement for the national restoration of Germany. He joined the militia, but in January 1814 he died of typhus, which he contracted from his wife, who worked in a military hospital.
Philosophy as a science. Initial intellectual intuition. Fichte emphasizes that philosophy is a science, and hopes to find in it the “fundamental science”, the science of sciences, knowledge of the processes of obtaining knowledge, the teaching of science and the justification of all knowledge in general. What we have before us is not yet a “science of sciences” in the Hegelian sense, but already a sketch of its concept.
Differences emerged between Kant and Fichte on the issue of knowledge. Fichte rightly considers the combination of idealistic and materialistic tendencies in Kahn's theory of knowledge to be eclecticism, but he sees the way to overcome it in getting rid of the doctrine of things in themselves. Recognizing, unlike Kant, intellectual intuition, Fichte brings it somewhat closer to rational activity, but, like Kant, denies the possibility of intuitive penetration into the other world (for Kant this world is unknowable, for Fichte it does not exist).
Fichte draws attention to the content of the pure transcendental “H,” i.e., the former Kantian apperception taken in its essence. By constructing the “I,” Fichte tries to reveal it as the very essence of consciousness, not as a thing, but as an action. If for Kant the active transcendental subject is passive in the sense that he is forced to deal with the matter of experience that is given to him, then in Fichte the active creative “I” is passive in the sense that it is not able to create the world otherwise than by influencing on yourself.
Three principles and their dialectics. Fichte builds the system of solipsism of the “I” through three fundamental judgments, which together express his interpretation of transcendental apperception.
1. The universal “I” asserts itself. “I” creates itself, and this is not some kind of permanent state, but a powerful act caused by a special beginning-impetus.
2. “I” cannot be satisfied with the first principle: it strives for self-determination, and this is impossible except through the mediation of another, that is, that which is different from “I”. Consequently, the second principle: “I” opposes itself to “not-I”. In essence, there is an “alienation” of the “not-I” from the “I”, expressing an idealistic solution to the main question of philosophy and anticipating Hegel.
3. The third principle plays the role of synthesis and leads the first two to unity. It says: consciousness posits and unites “I” and “not-I”.
Ethics of action and freedom. Fichte's ethics were developed in the “System of Doctrines of Morality...” (17989) and in a number of works on the purpose of man and scientist as a true person. According to Fichte, man is an organized product of nature. In its entirety, it is not only an object, but also a subject. As an object, it is not passive, and objective necessity, recognized by man as self-determination, turns into subjective freedom.
The historical path of mastery of material nature is a worldwide process of leap-like growth in the ethical culture of mankind.
If duty without feeling is a tedious duty, then feeling without duty is a blind and rude impulse. The combination of duty and feeling occurs precisely thanks to culture. Thus, “I,” in the course of the development of social civilization, must triumph both over nature in general and over its own natural basis.
As a result, the distinction between “legal” and “moral” actions will disappear, reason and feeling, duty and desire, theory and practice will be identified.
Philosophy of history, law and state. Fichte's philosophy of history is imbued with idealistic theology. The absolutely free “I” is not only the source and starting point of historical development, but also its criterion and goal, hovering somewhere in an unusually distant distance. History is a growing and forward-looking process of cultivating practical and theoretical reason, and it is generic in nature, although it occurs through the improvement of the consciousness of individuals.
The external conditions for the realization of the moral goals of history are, according to Fichte, law and the state. Fichte argues that man can only exist as a social being.
But the state is only a service and therefore temporary institution. It is only a condition, a means of moral progress for the empirical selves. After “myriads of years,” morality will replace the state, law and church. Only then will a truly “natural state” of man arise, corresponding to his actual nature and purpose.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Hegel's philosophy can be characterized as a system of dialectical objective idealism. At a new, higher level, he revived the ideas of idealistic rationalism of the 17th century, transforming the thesis about the coincidence of real and logical connections into the position about the dialectical (relative) identity of being and the thought of being. Hegel's epistemology, in contrast to Kant's theory of knowledge, is not reduced to the study of a person's subjective cognitive abilities, but is aimed at studying the dependence of the laws of cognition of an object on its own properties. Hegel comes to the conclusion that the laws of being are the laws of cognition of being, but on the basis of idealism this conclusion received the opposite meaning - deriving the laws of being from the laws of its cognition, so that Hegel’s ontology coincided with epistemology. All these motifs can be found in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a work that completes the formation of Hegel’s philosophical views. This is both an introduction to his philosophy and its application to a number of specific issues. “Phenomenology of Spirit”, as it were, programmed the future philosophy of spirit: its first five sections are a sketch of the doctrine of subjective spirit, the sixth section corresponds to the doctrine of objective spirit, and the last two are about the absolute spirit. Phenomenology of Spirit prepares Hegel's mature system. She proclaims the end of the kingdom of reason and the beginning of the kingdom of reason. Hegel's philosophy is the completion and highest achievement of German classical idealism. Hegel proclaimed man's ability to create himself, the infinite superiority of social life over nature and the power of the knowing consciousness. He substantiated all these theses through idealistic dialectics. Hegel's system is completed by the doctrine of absolute spirit. History achieves the unity of the subjective and objective states of the spirit on the basis of the level of rationality that is possible under the conditions of the most rationally structured state.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Young Hegelian movement. The starting point for the philosophical ideology of bourgeois-democratic movements of the late 30s. XIX century In Germany, the radical teachings of the Young Hegelians began. Their significance in the philosophical preparation of the revolution of 1848–1849. no doubt.
As the revolutionary situation approached, a split in the Hegelian school became inevitable. Outwardly, it seemed to be the result of a dispute about whether it would be correct to identify the Hegelian absolute with God, but its participants also differed among themselves in their answers to the question about the nature of the relationship of the absolute to man. But essentially the split was determined by the polemic between supporters of the radical and conservative interpretation of the formula “Everything that is reasonable is real, and everything that is real is reasonable.”
The right, or Old Hegelians, argued that the Hegelian absolute should be understood as the highest spiritual-individual being, representing the subject of rational world governance. But their philosophical activity expressed both their general conservatism and attempts to overcome the crisis of Protestant theology.
The left, or Young Hegelians, declared that their teacher was a pantheist, and some, for example Bruno Bauer, began to prove his atheism, and even reproached Hegel himself for the fact that in practice he himself moved away from his doctrine, which disoriented his students. The Young Hegelians decided to deepen his criticism of political and church reaction and rejected Hegel’s opinion on the need for the coincidence of state power, religion and the principles of philosophy.
Philosophers of the Young Hegelian circle. David Friedrich Strauss (1808 - 1874) wrote the two-volume Life of Jesus in the spirit of pantheism. Attacked both orthodox Christian and Hegelian Christology. According to Strauss, the gospel is a historical document of social psychology, namely a collection of myths of early Christian communities, Christ is a natural person, since the absolute could not inhabit a single person, and God is the image of substantial infinity.
Bruno Bauer (1809 - 1882) went further in denying religion than Strauss. He rejected the real historical existence of Christ altogether. Bauer portrayed Hegel himself as an enemy of religion, the church and the Prussian state, a friend of materialism and the Jacobins. Bauer himself understood that this image did not really correspond to reality, but he wanted to stimulate the development of Young Hegelianism to the left. But the “leftism” of Bauer himself was limited to the fact that he reduced bourgeois revolutionism to intellectual criticism of religion, despotism and clericalism on the part of outstanding “critically thinking individuals.”
Arnold Ruge (1803 - 1880) was the first among the Young Hegelians to draw political conclusions from the criticism of religion, transferring its fire to the Hegelian philosophy of state and law. All the most political episodes of the Young Hegelian movement are associated with the name of Ruge, and it was in his articles that they briefly approached revolutionary democracy.
Stirner and Hess. Max Stirner (pseudonym of Kaspar Schmidt) (1806 - 1856) developed as a thinker in the Young Hegelian circle of the “Free”, but in the book “The One and His Property” he sharply criticizes them and appears as an extreme individualist and nihilist, rejecting any realities and values: morality, law, state, history, society, reason, truth, communism. “I am nothing, and from whom I myself will draw everything, as a creator-creator... My Self is most precious to me!” Many of his ideas formed the basis of the ideology of anarchism.
Moses Hess (1812 – 1875) also broke with the circle of Young Hegelians. His role in philosophy is twofold. On the one hand, as a result of his combination of the principles of historical necessity of Hegel, the humanism of Feuerbach and the utopian communism of Cabet, the theoretical basis of the movement of “true socialists” arose. On the other hand, Hess's critique of capitalism attracted the attention of the young Marx. But Hess himself was influenced by Marx and Engels. In The Philosophy of Action (1843), Hess stated that which It is precisely in this direction that the time has come to remake Hegel’s teaching: “Now the task of the philosophy of spirit is to become a philosophy of action.”
Polish Hegelians.“Prolegomena to Historiosophy (1838) by August Cieszkowski (1814 – 1894)” immediately drew attention to such flaws in the Hegelian system as contemplation, a tendency towards fatalism, indifference to the fate of the individual and exclusion from philosophical analysis of the problems of happiness and the future of humanity. Tseshkovsky’s main idea is not to draw a line under the results of past development, but to put the conclusions of these philosophical results into practice.
Edward Dembosky (1822 – 1846) is the author of the “philosophy of creativity”, the main categories of which were “nationality”, “progress”, “action” and “daring”. He reproaches Hegel (like Fourier, Saint-Simon, the Girondins and the authors of the compromise Polish constitution) for eclecticism, which, in his opinion, means the reconciliation of opposites in theory and unprincipled compromises in political practice.
Life and work of Feuerbach. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 – 1872) considered it his duty to solve the problem posed by life itself and also arising from the contradictions of Hegel’s teachings. What is the true nature of a real person and how can one determine his path to happiness? How to free him from the oppression of the omnipotent absolute? Having devoted his philosophy to the solution of these problems and placing at its center not the abstract “Self-Consciousness”, but a person, he gave it an anthropological character. By anthropological philosophy he understood a teaching in which an integral, real person would be both the starting point and his final goal.
L. Feuerbach was born on July 28, 1804 to the family of a prominent lawyer, listened to Hegel's lectures at the University of Berlin. In the notes of “Doubts” (1827 – 1828), a protest against dictatorship is already brewing idealistic thoughts.
In “Thoughts on Death and Immortality” (1830), he contrasts the Christian dogma of personal immortality with the immortality of the human race in its real, earthly life, which became the starting point for Young Hegelian criticism. The essay was confiscated, Feuerbach was fired, and for six years he unsuccessfully tried to gain access to teaching again. As a sign of protest, he moved to the countryside for a quarter of a century, where he wrote his main works.
His most famous, although not the most mature, work is “The Essence of Christianity,” which caused a huge resonance. He developed the concept of criticism of religion as the alienated existence of the human essence, which took the form of illusory consciousness.
Feuerbach's lectures on the essence of religion were a political act, where he declared the need to become a "political materialist" since the subject of his lectures - religion - was "closely connected with politics."
He enthusiastically embraced the revolution of 1848–1849, and the victorious reaction and the militaristic regime of Bismarck met only hatred on his part. His old age passed in poverty, reaching complete poverty.
A question about dialectics. Anthropological principle. The presence of moments of dialectics in Feuerbach is undeniable. When he broke with Hegel's teaching, he did not reject the dialectic of interpersonal relations, although he retained little of it. But he noticed the dialectical fate of pantheism; a dialectical character is also inherent in the mechanism of religious alienation he denigrates. There are many real transitions to the opposite here, and “what was religion yesterday ceases to be it today; what seems atheism today will become religion tomorrow.” But the dialectic of all these moments is not comprehended by him as dialectics.
Anthropologism was the main feature of Feuerbach's materialism. Feuerbach’s “man” is no longer a conglomerate of passive atoms, drawn by external influences, “a block”, as it turns out to be among the leaders of French materialism, but an active individual. It is no longer an obedient organ of the absolute spirit, fatally included in the system of stages of ascent to a goal alien to the aspirations of people and incomprehensible to them. Feuerbach's anthropologism was directed primarily against the interpretation of man as a “servant of God” and a submissive instrument of the world spirit. From the point of view of a philosopher, for understanding a person, not only the affects of fear in religion or interest in knowledge are important, but also “love” as a philosophical category in the sense of not only desires, passion, admiration and dreams, but also effective self-affirmation.
For Feuerbach, “truth is neither materialism, nor idealism, nor physiology, nor psychology, truth is only anthropology.”
The concept of human nature. As M. Hess noted, Feuerbach humanized ontology, turned it towards the interests and needs of man and proclaimed materialistic humanism. The duty of a philosopher is to help people become happier. To do this, it is necessary to consider a person not in isolation from the surrounding world, but in connection with it, and this world is nature. Man and nature, as starting points of philosophizing, are united together by the concept of human nature.
But Feuerbach’s characterizations of man suffer from great social abstraction, since he distinguishes him from animals essentially only by the presence of a “superlative degree of sensualism.” The social aspect of philosophy is reduced by Feuerbach to the interaction in the “binomial” of individuals (“I” and “You”). The combination of two individuals in this “cell” of social life – in a heterosexual pair “I – ​​You” – is a source of social diversity at higher levels.
Criticism of religion as alienation. Religion in the perspective of eras. "Religion of Man". In the analysis of religion, Feuerach took the baton from the materialists and enlighteners of the 18th century. He was the first to highlight and substantiate the idea that religion did not arise by chance, but naturally, and is a product of social psychology, which constantly reflects in the binary system “I – ​​You”, and highlighted the basis of religion as a person’s sense of dependence. Religion turns out to be an expression of egoism. Religion is a “reflex, a reflection” of a person’s powerlessness and at the same time his active reaction to his powerlessness.
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Narsky I. V. Western European philosophyXIXcentury. M., 1976.

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

The clash of opposing worldviews, the intensity of theoretical debates, the abundance of movements and names make the study of 19th century philosophy. not an easy task, so let’s focus only on the truly great thinkers. Classical German idealism is the central object of study in the book.

Classical idealist dialectics in Germany, in a certain sense, revived the principles of rationalism, and the Enlightenment tradition was comprehended. The 19th century in philosophy inherited from French materialism the belief in progress and reason, then raised to the level of social science by Marx and Engels. On the other hand, many philosophers of the second half of the 19th century were imbued with irrationalism and subjectivism; thinkers took up subjectivist interpretations of classical philosophy, forming more and more new teachings with the prefix “neo”. The struggle between idealism and materialism acquired corresponding new forms.

Thus, XIX century. philosophically does not constitute a single picture.

Immanuel KantThe origins of classical German idealism. Four great classics of German idealism of the late 18th - first third of the 19th centuries. - Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. In the ideology of the German Enlightenment, compromise was expressed in a tendency to reduce all political and social problems to moral ones. In the works of the classics, compromise was expressed in the form of different interpretations of the relationship between “existence” and “ought.” In part, their idealism was regressive, since they all opposed materialism. But the backward movement towards idealism revealed the significant shortcomings of the old materialism, but contrasted the metaphysical method of the French materialists with idealistic dialectics. Classical German idealism significantly expanded the field of problems under study, claiming to be encyclopedic. The beginnings of classical German idealism are already in the work of Kant, who worked when the ideological preparation for the bourgeois revolution, Rousseau's ideas dominated the minds of Europe, and in Germany literature had influence. "Storm and Drang" movement. Kant accepted the Enlightenment values ​​of human reason and dignity, becoming an enemy of feudal obscurantism and moral impoverishment. But he began to hold back the progress of enlightenment with the motive of self-restraint. Kant believed that he lived not in an enlightened age, but in an age of enlightenment, and the realization of the ideals of the Enlightenment in real life was still far away. Life of Kant. I. Kant was born in 1724 in Konigsberg, was the son of a modest saddlemaker, graduated from the university, and worked as a home teacher for 9 years. In 1755 he began giving lectures on metaphysics and many natural science subjects, and was an assistant librarian at the royal castle. He received the professorship of logic and metaphysics only at the age of 46. He strengthened his weak health from birth with a clear daily routine. In 1794 he was elected a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He gained wide fame only in the last decade of the 18th century. Kant died in 1804. Milestones of Kant's creativity. I. Pre-critical period (1746 - 1770).II. 1770 - the beginning of the "critical" period in his philosophy. 1781 - "Critique of Pure Reason" - Kant's main epistemological work - published. 1788 - "Critique of Practical Reason", 1797 - "Metaphysics of Morals". 1790 - “Critique of the Power of Judgment”, the 3rd, final part of Kant’s philosophical system. 1793 - bypassing censorship, Kant prints a chapter from the treatise “Religion within the Limits of Reason Only”, then the entire book and article “The End of All Things”, directed against orthodox religion, for which King Frederick William II reprimanded the philosopher. But after the death of the king, Kant published a “dispute of faculties” in 1798, where he insisted that Holy Scripture should be considered “a complete allegory.” "Precritical" Kant. At first, Kant uncritically combined the ideas of Leibniz and Wolff, then he combined natural science materialism with Wolffian metaphysics, showed interest in issues of cosmology and cosmogony, wrote works on the change in the rotation of the Earth around its axis, “The General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens” based on Newtonian mechanics, but the role There is less divine intervention in Kant than in Newton’s natural philosophy. Kant denied the possibility of absolute rest and sought to prove the universal circulation of matter in the Universe. He viewed the end of worlds as the beginning of new ones. His cosmogonic hypothesis is deistic in nature. Kant appealed to God as the creator of matter and the laws of its motion. In 1763 he wrote “The only possible basis for proving the existence of God.” Kant reveals agnostic motives: natural causes cannot explain the origin of living nature, since mechanics will not explain the appearance of even one caterpillar. Kant reveals a tendency to separate consciousness from existence , which reached in the 70s. apogee. For example, he insists that real relations, negations and reasons are “of a completely different kind” than logical ones. He is right in emphasizing that the predicate of a thing and the predicate of a thought about this thing are not the same thing. One must distinguish between the real and the logically possible. But the tendency for a deeper and deeper distinction between the two types of foundation led Kant in the direction of Hume. He comes to contrast logical connections with casual ones. In “pre-critical” creativity there was also a struggle against extreme spiritualism (“Dreams of a Spiritualist, Explained by the Dreams of Metaphysics” (1766)), which undermines all hopes for knowledge of the essence of mental phenomena. T. Thus, during this period, the positions that formed the basis of Kant’s “critical” teaching began to take shape. Transition to the critical period usually dated to 1770, when Kant defended his dissertation “On the Form and Principles of the Sensibly Perceptible and Intelligible World.” He became disillusioned with the rationalism of Wolff, the empiricism of Locke and Holbach, and was impressed by Leibniz. The hopes of the Enlightenment leaders for a quick knowledge of the secrets of nature seem naive to him, but the rejection of scientific knowledge is even more harmful. Kant formulates a double task: “to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith.” Here a “middle path between dogmatism... and skepticism” is outlined, a reconciliation of idealism with materialism on ontological grounds. Kant called his philosophy critical idealism or transcendental idealism. He divided the abilities of the human soul into the ability of knowledge, the feeling of pleasure and displeasure and desire. The first is characterized by the activity of reason, the second by judgment, the third directs the mind through the search for final goals to achieve morality and freedom. Kant rejects theoretical evidence of the necessity of metaphysics, formulating the task of critical metaphysics. At the beginning of his epistemological research, Kant poses the question: What can I know? And there are three more loans: What should I do? What can I hope for? What is a person and what can he become? Epistemological classification of judgments. Syntheticapriori. To answer, Kant builds a typology of knowledge, dividing it into imperfect and perfect (truly scientific). The features of the latter are reliability, universality and necessity; it cannot be acquired from experience. Perfect knowledge is extra-empirical, a priori in nature. Kant distinguishes empirical (a posteriori) and “pure” (a priori) knowledge. Kant also distinguishes analytical and synthetic knowledge. The relationship between types of judgments is as follows:

The term “a priori” has several connotations. A priori is something that has some kind of, not further specified, non-experimental and in this sense “pure” origin. In Kant's reasoning about the ideals of behavior, the a priori does not point to what exists, but to what should be and, moreover, what is generally obligatory. The lack of experience of the a priori means that epistemologically it is “before” any experience, including psychological experience.

Kant's principle of the primacy of synthesis over analysis triumphs in synthetic judgments a priori. With the help of his supposedly proven existence of synthetic a priori judgments, he seeks to establish theses about the creative role of non-experiential consciousness and the possibility of rational knowledge, in principle independent of sensory knowledge. Hegel saw a deep dialectic in this desire: single consciousness generates manifold knowledge, and this knowledge is synthesis.

For Kant, the distinction between the analytical and the synthetic stems from the difference between the respective methods: a course of reasoning is analytical if it does not introduce new or even complex objects and does not conclude from the presence of one individual object to the existence (or non-existence) of another. But the line of reasoning is synthetic if it asserts that “due to the fact that there is something, there is also something else ... because something exists, something else is eliminated.”

Affirming the existence of synthetic a priori judgments, Kant, already at the beginning of his system, puts forward the dialectical problem of creative synthesis in knowledge. With the help of synthetic a priori judgments, Kant hoped, first of all, to exhaustively explain and indisputably substantiate the possibility of “pure” (i.e., theoretical mathematics).

The structure of the epistemological field. Kant divides the cognitive ability of consciousness as a whole (“reason” in the broad sense of the word, i.e., intellect) into three different abilities: sensibility, reason, and reason itself in the narrow sense of the word. Each ability corresponds to a specific question: How is pure mathematics possible? How is pure natural science possible? How is metaphysics, i.e. ontology, possible?

According to the questions, Kant's epistemology is divided into three main parts: transcendental aesthetics, transcendental analytics and transcendental dialectics.

“Transcendental” for Kant means “that which, although it precedes experience (a priori), is intended only to make experimental knowledge possible.” We can say that abilities are transcendental, and their results are a priori.

“Transcendent” is that which is beyond the limits of experience and does not relate to experience, as well as those principles that try to go beyond the limits of experience. The transcendental and the a posteriori are almost diametrically opposed areas. Therefore, Kant sometimes calls the thing-in-itself a “transcendental object.”

So, the structure of the epistemological field according to Kant is as follows: 1. The area of ​​sensations. 2. The a posteriori domain of objects of experience, ordered by a priori means (= science = truth = nature). 3. Transcendental abilities of the subject, which generate a priori means. 4. Transcendental apperception. 5. The transcendental region of non-experienced objects, i.e. the world of things in themselves.

Things in themselves (by themselves). Let's consider Kant's transcendental aesthetics. Kant understands by “aesthetics” the doctrine of sensuality in general as an epistemological doctrine, and not just concerning the contemplation of objects of art. Sensory contemplation is the beginning of all knowledge.

Kant considers the doctrine of the “thing in itself” to be an important component of the science of sensory knowledge and knowledge in general. He argues that beyond sensory phenomena there is an unknowable reality, about which in the theory of knowledge there is only an extremely abstract “pure” concept (noumenon). In epistemology, nothing definite can be said about things in themselves as such - neither that they are something divine, nor that they are material bodies.

The thing in itself, within the framework of Kant’s philosophical system, performs several functions:

1) The first meaning of the concept of a thing-in-itself in Kant’s philosophy is intended to indicate the presence of an external causative agent of our sensations and ideas. They “excite” our sensuality, awaken it to activity and to the appearance in it of various modifications of its states.

2) The second meaning is that this is any fundamentally unknowable object. We don't know in principle what they are. We know of a thing in itself only that it exists, and to some extent that which it is not. From things in themselves we have nothing except the thought of them as intelligible (intelligible) objects, about which it cannot be said that they are substances. This concept of the unknowable as such is “only the thought of some something in general.”

3) The third meaning embraces everything that lies in the transcendental region, that is, outside experience and the sphere of the transcendental. Among otherworldly things, Kant in his ethics postulates God and the immortal soul, that is, the traditional objects of objective idealism.

4) The fourth and generally idealistic meaning of the “thing in itself” is even broader as a kingdom of unattainable ideals in general, and this kingdom as a whole itself turns out to be a cognitive ideal of an unconditional higher synthesis. The thing in itself turns out to be the object of faith in this case.

Each of the four meanings of “things in themselves” corresponds to its own meaning of noumenon, that is, the concept of things in themselves, indicating the presence of the latter, but not giving positive knowledge about them.

Kant's ethical teaching. Kant affirms the primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason, of activity over knowledge. Kant adheres to the principle of the primacy of issues of morality of human behavior over issues of scientific knowledge.

Ethics is the main part of Kant's philosophy. At the center of Kantian philosophy is man, his dignity and destiny.

Kant's ethics is autonomous. It is focused on a certain ideal independent of any incoming considerations and incentives. Neither sensual desires, nor selfish calculation, nor appeals to benefit or harm should be taken into account at all.

Practical reason prescribes to itself the principles of moral behavior and finds them within itself as an internal a priori impulse. He is the only source of morality, just as reason turned in Kant, as his “criticism” developed, into the only source of the laws of nature.

Legality and morality. An imperative is a rule containing “objective compulsion to act” of a certain type. There are two main types of them, identified by edging: hypothetical in the sense of "condition dependent" and categorical imperative as a general invariant for a priori moral laws. This imperative is apodictic, necessarily unconditional. It follows from human nature, like hypothetical imperatives, but not from empirical, but from transcendental nature. He doesn't accept any "ifs". According to Kant, only that behavior is moral that completely obeys the requirements of the categorical imperative.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Johann Gotbib Fichte is a very original scientist, a contemporary of the Napoleonic Wars. Those who swept away the feudal rubbish of feudalism from the lives of peoples. The origins of Fichte's work are the political ideas of the French Revolution. But the absence of real political forces in Germany led to the fact that Fichte’s anti-feudal protest acquired an abstract form.

Life and work of Fichte. Fichte was born into a poor and large family of a rural weaver in East Saxony, and only the curiosity of a titled patron of the arts for the boy’s extraordinary abilities gave him the opportunity to receive an education.

Fichte read Rousseau with enthusiasm and became imbued with revolutionary democratic convictions. Kant's seeds also fall onto the prepared soil. Fichte abandons the rigid Spinozistic determinism and turns the efforts of his seething mind to finding a theoretical justification for freedom.

The idea of ​​freedom captures Fichte's soul. It is also in tune with his inner character, uncompromising honesty and straightforwardness. It was as if a German sans-culotte had entered the philosophical world.

An important role was played by Fichte's meeting with Kant, to whom he showed his first essay, “The Experience of Criticism of All Revelation.” Kant recognized the guest's strong and original mind, contributed to the publication of his work, and when rumor attributed the authorship to Kant, he publicly explained the misunderstanding, and Fichte immediately gained wide fame.

But Kant did not recognize the direct genetic connection between Fichte’s ideas and his own, and then more decisively dissociated himself from them.

On the recommendation of Goethe, who became interested in the bright thinker, Fichte in 1784 took the position of professor at the University of Jena. During his years as a professor at Jena, Fichte created the basic outline of his philosophical system. Then the reactionaries expelled him, having become obsessed with his careless handling of the categories of religion.

But Fichte was invited to give lectures in Erlangen, Berlin, Koenigsberg and even Kharkov.

When Napoleon occupied Germany in 1806, Fichte plunged headlong into social activities, giving patriotic lectures. Since 1813, he has taken an active part in the bourgeois-democratic movement for the national restoration of Germany. He joined the militia, but in January 1814 he died of typhus, which he contracted from his wife, who worked in a military hospital.

Philosophy as a science. Initial intellectual intuition. Fichte emphasizes that philosophy is a science, and hopes to find in it the “fundamental science”, the science of sciences, knowledge of the processes of obtaining knowledge, the teaching of science and the justification of all knowledge in general. What we have before us is not yet a “science of sciences” in the Hegelian sense, but already a sketch of its concept.

Differences emerged between Kant and Fichte on the issue of knowledge. Fichte rightly considers the combination of idealistic and materialistic tendencies in Kahn's theory of knowledge to be eclecticism, but he sees the way to overcome it in getting rid of the doctrine of things in themselves. Recognizing, unlike Kant, intellectual intuition, Fichte brings it somewhat closer to rational activity, but, like Kant, denies the possibility of intuitive penetration into the other world (for Kant this world is unknowable, for Fichte it does not exist).

Fichte draws attention to the content of the pure transcendental “H,” i.e., the former Kantian apperception taken in its essence. By constructing the “I,” Fichte tries to reveal it as the very essence of consciousness, not as a thing, but as an action. If for Kant the active transcendental subject is passive in the sense that he is forced to deal with the matter of experience that is given to him, then in Fichte the active creative “I” is passive in the sense that it is not able to create the world otherwise than by influencing on yourself.

Three principles and their dialectics. Fichte builds the system of solipsism of the “I” through three fundamental judgments, which together express his interpretation of transcendental apperception.

1. The universal “I” asserts itself. “I” creates itself, and this is not some kind of permanent state, but a powerful act caused by a special beginning-impetus.

2. “I” cannot be satisfied with the first principle: it strives for self-determination, and this is impossible except through the mediation of another, that is, that which is different from “I”. Consequently, the second principle: “I” opposes itself to “not-I”. In essence, there is an “alienation” of the “not-I” from the “I”, expressing an idealistic solution to the main question of philosophy and anticipating Hegel.

3. The third principle plays the role of synthesis and leads the first two to unity. It says: consciousness posits and unites “I” and “not-I”.

Ethics of action and freedom. Fichte's ethics were developed in the “System of Doctrines of Morality...” (17989) and in a number of works on the purpose of man and scientist as a true person. According to Fichte, man is an organized product of nature. In its entirety, it is not only an object, but also a subject. As an object, it is not passive, and objective necessity, recognized by man as self-determination, turns into subjective freedom.

The historical path of mastery of material nature is a worldwide process of leap-like growth in the ethical culture of mankind.

If duty without feeling is a tedious duty, then feeling without duty is a blind and rude impulse. The combination of duty and feeling occurs precisely thanks to culture. Thus, “I,” in the course of the development of social civilization, must triumph both over nature in general and over its own natural basis.

As a result, the distinction between “legal” and “moral” actions will disappear, reason and feeling, duty and desire, theory and practice will be identified.

Philosophy of history, law and state. Fichte's philosophy of history is imbued with idealistic theology. The absolutely free “I” is not only the source and starting point of historical development, but also its criterion and goal, hovering somewhere in an unusually distant distance. History is a growing and forward-looking process of cultivating practical and theoretical reason, and it is generic in nature, although it occurs through the improvement of the consciousness of individuals.

The external conditions for the realization of the moral goals of history are, according to Fichte, law and the state. Fichte argues that man can only exist as a social being.

But the state is only a service and therefore temporary institution. It is only a condition, a means of moral progress for the empirical selves. After “myriads of years,” morality will replace the state, law and church. Only then will a truly “natural state” of man arise, corresponding to his actual nature and purpose.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Hegel's philosophy can be characterized as a system of dialectical objective idealism. At a new, higher level, he revived the ideas of idealistic rationalism of the 17th century, transforming the thesis about the coincidence of real and logical connections into the position about the dialectical (relative) identity of being and the thought of being. Hegel’s epistemology, unlike Kant’s theory of knowledge, is not reduced to the study of subjective cognitive abilities of a person, but is aimed at studying the dependence of the laws of cognition of an object on its own properties. Hegel comes to the conclusion that the laws of being are the laws of cognition of being, but on the basis of idealism this conclusion received the opposite meaning - deriving the laws of being from the laws of its cognition, so that Hegel’s ontology coincided with epistemology. All these motives can be found in “Phenomenology of Spirit” , a work that completes the formation of Hegel’s philosophical views. This is both an introduction to his philosophy and its application to a number of specific issues. “Phenomenology of Spirit”, as it were, programmed the future philosophy of spirit: its first five sections are a sketch of the doctrine of subjective spirit, the sixth section corresponds to the doctrine of objective spirit, and the last two are about absolute spirit. “Phenomenology of Spirit” prepares Hegel’s mature system. It proclaims the end of the kingdom of reason and the beginning of the kingdom of reason. Hegel's philosophy is the completion and highest achievement of German classical idealism. Hegel proclaimed man's ability to create himself, the infinite superiority of social life over nature and the power of the knowing consciousness. He substantiated all these theses through idealistic dialectics. Hegel’s system is completed by the doctrine of the absolute spirit. History achieves the unity of the subjective and objective states of the spirit on the basis of the level of rationality that is possible under the conditions of the most rationally structured state. Ludwig FeuerbachYoung Hegelian movement. The starting point for the philosophical ideology of bourgeois-democratic movements of the late 30s. XIX century In Germany, the radical teachings of the Young Hegelians began. Their significance in the philosophical preparation of the revolution of 1848 - 1849. undoubted. As the revolutionary situation approached, a split in the Hegelian school became inevitable. Outwardly, it seemed to be the result of a dispute about whether it would be correct to identify the Hegelian absolute with God, but its participants also differed among themselves in their answers to the question about the nature of the relationship of the absolute to man. But essentially the split was determined by the polemic between supporters of the radical and conservative interpretation of the formula “Everything rational is real, and everything real is rational.” The right, or Old Hegelians, argued that the Hegelian absolute should be understood as the highest spiritual-individual being, representing the subject of rational world governance. But their philosophical activity expressed both their general conservatism and attempts to overcome the crisis of Protestant theology. The left, or Young Hegelians, declared that their teacher was a pantheist, and some, such as Bruno Bauer, began to prove his atheism, and even reproached Hegel himself for that , that in practice he himself moved away from his doctrine, which disoriented his students. The Young Hegelians decided to deepen his criticism of political and church reaction and rejected Hegel’s opinion on the need for the coincidence of state power, religion and the principles of philosophy. Philosophers of the Young Hegelian circle. David Friedrich Strauss (1808 - 1874) wrote the two-volume Life of Jesus in the spirit of pantheism. Attacked both orthodox Christian and Hegelian Christology. According to Strauss, the gospel is a historical document of social psychology, namely a collection of myths of early Christian communities, Christ is a natural man, since the absolute could not inhabit a single person, and God is the image of substantial infinity. Bruno Bauer (1809 - 1882) went further in denying religion than Strauss. He rejected the real historical existence of Christ altogether. Bauer portrayed Hegel himself as an enemy of religion, the church and the Prussian state, a friend of materialism and the Jacobins. Bauer himself understood that this image did not really correspond to reality, but he wanted to stimulate the development of Young Hegelianism to the left. But the “leftism” of Bauer himself was limited to the fact that he reduced bourgeois revolutionism to intellectual criticism of religion, despotism and clericalism on the part of outstanding “critically thinking individuals.” Arnold Ruge (1803 - 1880) was the first among the Young Hegelians to draw political conclusions from criticism of religion, transferring her fire on Hegel's philosophy of state and law. All the most political episodes of the Young Hegelian movement are associated with the name of Ruge, and it was in his articles that they briefly approached revolutionary democracy. Stirner and Hess. Max Stirner (pseudonym of Kaspar Schmidt) (1806 - 1856) developed as a thinker in the Young Hegelian circle of the “Free”, but in the book “The One and His Property” he sharply criticizes them and appears as an extreme individualist and nihilist, rejecting any realities and values: morality, law, state, history, society, reason, truth, communism. “I am nothing, and from whom I myself will draw everything, as a creator-creator... My Self is most precious to me!” Many of his ideas formed the basis of the ideology of anarchism. Moses Hess (1812 - 1875) also broke with the circle of Young Hegelians. His role in philosophy is twofold. On the one hand, as a result of his combination of the principles of historical necessity of Hegel, the humanism of Feuerbach and the utopian communism of Cabet, the theoretical basis of the movement of “true socialists” arose. On the other hand, Hess's critique of capitalism attracted the attention of the young Marx. But Hess himself was influenced by Marx and Engels. In The Philosophy of Action (1843), Hess stated that which It is precisely in this direction that the time has come to remake Hegel’s teaching: “Now the task of the philosophy of spirit is to become a philosophy of action.” Polish Hegelians.“Prolegomena to Historiosophy (1838) by August Cieszkowski (1814 - 1894)” immediately drew attention to such flaws in the Hegelian system as contemplation, a tendency towards fatalism, indifference to the fate of the individual and exclusion from philosophical analysis of the problems of happiness and the future of humanity. Tseshkovsky’s main idea is not to draw a line under the results of past development, but to put the conclusions of these philosophical results into practice. Edward Dembosky (1822 - 1846) - author of the “philosophy of creativity”, the main categories of which were “nationality”, “progress”, “action” and "daring". He reproaches Hegel (like Fourier, Saint-Simon, the Girondins and the authors of the compromise Polish constitution) for eclecticism, which, in his opinion, means the reconciliation of opposites in theory and unprincipled compromises in political practice. Life and work of Feuerbach. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 - 1872) considered it his duty to solve the problem posed by life itself and also arising from the contradictions of Hegel's teachings. What is the true nature of a real person and how can one determine his path to happiness? How to free him from the oppression of the omnipotent absolute? Having devoted his philosophy to the solution of these problems and placing at its center not the abstract “Self-Consciousness”, but a person, he gave it an anthropological character. By anthropological philosophy he understood a teaching in which an integral, real person would be both the starting point and his final goal.L. Feuerbach was born on July 28, 1804 into the family of a prominent lawyer, and listened to Hegel's lectures at the University of Berlin. In the notes of “Doubts” (1827 - 1828), a protest against dictatorship is already brewing idealistic thoughts. In “Thoughts on Death and Immortality” (1830), he contrasts the Christian dogma of personal immortality with the immortality of the human race in its real, earthly life, which became the starting point for Young Hegelian criticism. The essay was confiscated, Feuerbach was fired, and for six years he unsuccessfully tried to gain access to teaching again. As a sign of protest, he moved to the countryside for a quarter of a century, where he wrote his main works. His most famous, although not his most mature, work is “The Essence of Christianity,” which caused a huge resonance. He developed the concept of criticism of religion as the alienated existence of the human essence, which took the form of illusory consciousness. Feuerbach's lectures on the essence of religion were a political act, where he declared the need to become a “political materialist”, since the subject of his lectures - religion - is “closely connected with politics “He enthusiastically embraced the revolution of 1848-1849, and the victorious reaction and the militaristic regime of Bismarck met only hatred on his part. His old age passed in poverty, reaching complete poverty. A question about dialectics. Anthropological principle. The presence of moments of dialectics in Feuerbach is undeniable. When he broke with Hegel's teaching, he did not reject the dialectic of interpersonal relations, although he retained little of it. But he noticed the dialectical fate of pantheism; a dialectical character is also inherent in the mechanism of religious alienation he denigrates. There are many real transitions to the opposite here, and “what was religion yesterday ceases to be it today; what seems atheism today will become religion tomorrow.” But the dialectic of all these moments is not comprehended by him as dialectics.

Anthropologism was the main feature of Feuerbach's materialism. Feuerbach's “man” is no longer a conglomerate of passive atoms, drawn by external influences, the “block” that the leaders of French materialism produce, but an active individual. It is no longer an obedient organ of the absolute spirit, fatally included in the system of steps of ascent to a goal alien to the aspirations of people and not entirely clear to them. Feuerbach's anthropologism was directed primarily against the interpretation of man as a “servant of God” and a submissive instrument of the world spirit. From the point of view of a philosopher, for understanding a person, not only the affects of fear in religion or interest in knowledge are important, but also “love” as a philosophical category in the sense of not only desires, passion, admiration and dreams, but also effective self-affirmation.

For Feuerbach, “truth is neither materialism, nor idealism, nor physiology, nor psychology, truth is only anthropology.”

The concept of human nature. As M. Hess noted, Feuerbach humanized ontology, turned it towards the interests and needs of man and proclaimed materialistic humanism. The duty of a philosopher is to help people become happier. To do this, it is necessary to consider a person not in isolation from the surrounding world, but in connection with it, and this world is nature. Man and nature, as starting points of philosophizing, are united together by the concept of human nature.

But Feuerbach’s characterizations of man suffer from great social abstraction, since he distinguishes him from animals essentially only by the presence of a “superlative degree of sensualism.” The social aspect of philosophy is reduced by Feuerbach to the interaction in the “binomial” of individuals (“I” and “You”). The combination of two individuals in this “cell” of social life - in a heterosexual pair “I - You” - is a source of social diversity already at higher levels.

Criticism of religion as alienation. Religion in the perspective of eras. "Religion of Man". In the analysis of religion, Feuerach took the baton from the materialists and enlighteners of the 18th century. He was the first to highlight and substantiate the idea that religion did not arise by chance, but naturally, and is a product of social psychology, which constantly reflects in the binary system “I - You”, and highlighted the basis of religion as a person’s sense of dependence. Religion turns out to be an expression of egoism. Religion is a “reflex, a reflection” of a person’s powerlessness and at the same time his active reaction to his powerlessness.

In order for a person’s religious self-alienation (self-deception, a vampire sucking out the content of connections between people, taking away love from a person to God) to be abolished, all people must become happy.

What to do with religion in the future? Feuerbach concludes that necessity religion because it makes up for what people lack. He believes that humanity needs "new religion". Feuerbach's thought about the necessity of religion, that is, about its adequate replacement, comes into play. The philosopher proposes to transfer the emotions of religious veneration to Humanity. “By reducing theology to anthropology, I raise anthropology to theology.”

Ethics Feuerbach, his “communism” and “love”. In ethics, Feuerbach took the position of abstract anthropological humanism, having exhausted all those possibilities of metaphysical materialism that could serve the development of anti-religious morality. In his vibrant ethical teaching, he includes all the moral implications of atheism, sharply opposing religious doctrines of morality. His conclusion: true morality and religion are antagonists.

He tries to base his teaching on morality on the principles of biopsychic sensibility. He orients his ethics towards justification, exaltation, glorification and, finally, deification of human impulses towards the utmost completeness and this sense of ideal sensual happiness. He calls for the deification of relationships between people, for their path to happiness lies only through them, to deify the love of “I” for “You” and “You” for “I”. The religion of man turns out to be the religion of sexual love.

The need of people for each other equalizes them and unites them with each other, develops a sense of collectivism. If, instead of faith in God, people gain faith in themselves and achieve that “man is God to man,” then the friendship of all people with each other will be established without distinction of gender - and this will be the path to communism. "Communism" in Feuerbach's writings is a designation for the general fact that people need each other.

Feuerbach traces his ethics to the principle of rational egoism. Everyone strives for happiness; to be a person means to be happy. But the condition for happiness is also the happiness of the partner. Happiness can only be mutual, and from here Feuerbach wants to reinterpret egoism as altruism, deriving the latter as a necessary requirement from the former.

Theory of knowledge. "Love" again. Feuerbach sharply emphasizes that the objective world is cognized by the subject through human senses, and all nature is cognized through the knowledge of human nature. Therefore, the highest form of knowledge is sexual intercourse.

In Feuerbach's epistemology, new shades are added to the terms “sensuality” and “love”. Sensuality takes on the meaning of the fullness of life experience, and love is a set of actions that provide people with active communication and unity with nature.

Irrationalism of the middleXIXV. Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860) contrasted his teaching with rationalism and dialectical teaching to Hegel, which he called the “basilisk egg.” He also reacted with hatred to Feuerbach’s materialism.

The deep pessimism characteristic of Schopenhauer had a complex nature: the feudal-aristocratic contempt for the established soulless merchant morals of the order was later added to the gloomy skepticism of a bourgeois ideologist who did not expect anything good from the future.

Metaphysics of Will. Schopenhauer himself admitted that his philosophical system arose as an amalgam of the ideas of Kant, Plato and Indian Buddhists. His philosophy is eclectic, but it is permeated by certain common principles.

Of all Kant’s categories, he recognized only causality, but also included time and space among the categories, and in Kant’s thesis about the primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason he saw the germ of his doctrine of the primacy of the volitional principle. In Indian philosophy, his attention was attracted by the concept of "maya" and the ideal of immersion in "nirvana".

The starting point of Schopenhauer’s reasoning is the assertion that the world of our experience is purely phenomenal, it is just a set of ideas reminiscent of “maya (appearance)”, but categorically ordered.

The philosopher turned the law of sufficient reason into a method of cognition of phenomena, while he proposes to discover philosophical truths through intuition of the Schelling kind. Schopenhauer called this law “the general form of an object,” appearing in 4 different forms depending on the class of objects (1. Class of physical objects-phenomena in the relations of time, space and causality; 2. Abstract concepts related to each other through judgments “ mind”, which is understood as the ability of all theoretical thinking; 3. Mathematical objects generated by the relations of time and space; 4. Empirical “I” as subjects of various expressions of will). Consequently, the law takes on four types: sufficient grounds for becoming, cognition, being and action, or motivation.

The entire world of phenomena around us is a set of sensory-intuitive ideas of human subjects. The earth, seas, houses, bodies of people are objects-representations, but the representing human subjects themselves also turn out to be only representations, so literally all the world of phenomena is not so much imagined as imagined, like a dream, Buddhist "Maya".

“Behind” the phenomena there is a world of things in themselves, which is a kind of metaphysical Will. It is unique, but its manifestations are multiple. Among the most eloquent ones are gravity, magnetism, the forces of chemical affinity, the desire of animals for self-preservation, the sexual instinct of animals and the various affects of people.

But unlike Kant, Will as a thing in itself in Schopenhauer is recognizable or at least identifiable, and secondly, it would be easier to call it Force or Energy with a capital letter.

Schopenhauer's pessimism. The World Will is irrational, blind and wild, has no plan, is in a state of eternal dissatisfaction, “forced to devour itself, since there is nothing besides it and it is a hungry will.” Hence, people’s lives are full of constant anxiety, bitter disappointments and torment. Chapter 46 of Volume II of “The World as Will and Idea” is entitled: “On the insignificance and sorrows of life.”

Schopenhauer denies in principle the existence of progress in human society. History seems to him to be a meaningless web of events.

Manifestations of will collide and fight with each other. The will, through its creations, finds itself plunged into suffering, tries to overcome them, but this is tantamount to the fact that it fights with itself, but only plunges itself into new troubles: “... in the heat of passion, sinks its teeth into its own body... The tormentor and the tormented are one” .

The doctrine of self-abolition of the Will and its social meaning. Schopenhauer shows how people can cease to be slaves and instruments of such a deceptive and disappointing world Will to live. The way out is in the development by people of vital energy, which must be directed against the Will as such. We must turn our human will against itself.

This activity has two stages. The first gives only temporary liberation from the service of the Will, helps to escape from it for a while. This is aesthetic contemplation.

The second, highest stage of annihilation is associated with the ethical field of human activity. A person must extinguish the will to life and renounce it, surrender to quietism, that is, the cessation of desires, asceticism. The will of the ascetic crushes the will to live and thereby undermines the Will in general. The abolition of the subject also destroys the object, for Schopenhauer accepted the subjective-idealist thesis: without the subject there is no object.

The highest human ideal turns out to be the “holy” hermit. The successor of this system, E. Hartmann, made a direct conclusion about the expediency of collective suicide, but Schopenhauer reasoned that the ascetic flees from the pleasures of life, which means life itself, while the suicide seeks to avoid life's suffering, which means he loves the joys of life, and by his act , on the contrary, affirms it.

Schopenhauer did not believe in progress and denounced humanism, calling it a vile companion of materialism and “bestialism.” Although he recognized the affinity of the Christian message of "compassion", he liked the Buddhist message of submissive self-denial. In it, “compassion” was followed by “chastity”, “poverty” and readiness to suffer, after which - quietism, asceticism and “mysticism”. The ultimate goal is “nirvana” as the abolition of the entire universe of Will, i.e., universal death: if at least one subject remains alive, in his ideas the world of objects will continue to exist, so the task of abolition of being will remain unsolved.

Eduard Hartman. Hegel's dialectics, represented by the system of the “prince of pessimists” Schopenhauer, received a kind of anti-dialectical double. From Schopenhauer, traditions of philosophical decadence begin, which go to the theorist of the “unconscious” E. Hartmann, then to the neo-Kantian G. Vaihinger, the young F. Nietzsche and the entire “philosophy of life”, to Z. Freud and A. Camus.

The immediate impact of Schopenhauer's philosophy was its pessimism. Eduard Hartmann (1842 - 1906) began to improve this theory, who added borrowings from Schelling, Darwin's evolutionary theory, and most of all - from Hegel's dialectics and rationalism to Schopenhauer's eclectic structure. In Hartmann’s main works “Philosophy of the Unconscious” (1869) and “The Doctrine of Categories” (1896) the following theoretical concept is outlined: the unconscious principle as the unity of Will and Idea develops through teleological splitting, like Schelling’s absolute, and then through the war of will and reason, i.e. i.e. through the war of opposites, like Hegel’s world spirit. The categories are a priori, like Kant's, but they are unconscious structures of the action of the impersonal mind in human individuals. “Man is completely dependent on the unconscious,” and receives from it only sorrow and suffering. The pursuit of happiness is a foolish illusion. But our world is the best of worlds, because it is capable of self-destruction. People must commit themselves to self-destruction and thereby achieve the “redemption” (Erlösung) of the world.

In the time of Bismarck, the doctrine of self-negation of the will was replaced by Nietzsche’s “will to power,” which was accompanied by an increasingly progressive denigration of reason. These concepts were of a cosmic nature. S. Kierkegaard followed a different path, alien to generalization.

Soren Kierkegaard

Like Schopenhauer, he attacked scientific knowledge and Hegel’s dialectics. He rejects the Hegelian identity of being and thinking, because under no circumstances does he recognize the rationality of reality. He separates thinking and being, logic and dialectics, objectivity and subjectivity from each other, discards the first and retains only the second. The subject of his reflections is dialectical subjectivity, the subjective dialectics of a unique individual.

The individual and the dialectics of its “existence.” Kierkegaard is an opponent of all philosophical systems, but he also developed a semblance of a system of thoughts. Its central idea is the principle of human individuality. The spiritual individual, the “Single,” forms the rules of his behavior contrary to the social environment and any of its laws, and the more he succeeds in this, the more lonely he is. “After all, one person for another cannot be anything other than an obstacle on his path,” a threat to his existence. The surrounding “mass” of people are “animals or bees,” and therefore “be afraid of friendship.” The people are something faceless, anonymous and “untrue”. Social associations, ideas of collectivism and social progress are a “pagan” illusion.

The mature Kierkegaard proclaimed the rebellion of the individual against the race, social class, state, and society. Everything universal, the universal, is false, only the Individual is “true” and only it has meaning. Only the One has “existence.”

By “existence,” Kierkegaard understands a specifically human category that expresses the existence of a unique individuality through the chain of its internal and also unique experiences, “moments.” “Existence” is, as it were, the apogee of life’s “shudder,” suffering and passionate attempts to get out of its power. “To exist” means to realize one’s being through the free choice of one of the alternatives and thereby assert oneself precisely as an individual, and not as a mass phenomenon from the “crowd”.

The category of “existence” is the focus of Kierkegaard’s dialectic, the dialectic of the psychological struggles of the subject in the cage of the opposites “finite” and “infinite,” “fear” as a state of uncertainty and “choice” as a decision that interrupts fluctuations between alternatives. But the dialectical collision of opposites is resolved by the philosopher not through a mediating synthesis, but with the help of a “leap-choice”: the impulse of determination allows one to jump, as if in one fell swoop, into the bosom of one of the alternatives, discarding the other.

Kierkegaard's dialectic is completely alien to the movement of general categories, is purely individualized and covered by an unsteady network of a kind of concepts-experiences. The main ones of these mental-emotional hybrids are: single, existence, moment, paradox, fear, guilt, sin, choice, leap, despair.

Using a complex system of pseudonyms, the philosopher began a series of Socratic dialogues with himself, also resorting to the tried and tested means of the Jena romantics - irony. For Kierkegaard, irony is doubt, which always elevates the doubter above the one “who teaches,” duality and mistrust, which, being convinced, itself turns into faith. However, before us is rather not a “Danish Socrates”, but a “Danish Tertullian”.

The concept of the experience of “choice” plays an important role, which is quite consistent with the history of his life and manifested in his character. Kierkegaard himself sought to emphasize the universal significance of his individual experiences, considering himself man-problem.

Three lifestyles. "Paradox". The three stages of the earthly development of the Individual, the three images (styles) of his life concretize three different moral attitudes in relation to the surrounding world.

1) Aesthetic stage: a sensual way of life, characterized by eroticism and cynicism, chaos and chance.

2) Ethical stage: the individual chooses the position of a strict and universal distinction between good and evil and takes the side of the former, guided in his life by solid principles of morality and the obligations of duty (Kant!). When it becomes clear that a person is never morally self-sufficient and perfect because he is sinful and initially guilty, an ethically thinking individual will find a way out of his contradictions, moving on to the third stage of “existence.”

3) Religious stage. One of the personifications of this stage is the long-suffering Job, the other is Abraham, who, to please to his, who personally addressed him in a state individual contact with him, to God, and for the sake of faith in his God showed a willingness to bear the burden of moral responsibility and guilt for violating His own commandments.

Here another very important concept appears - the experience of Kierkegaard’s dialectic - “paradox”, i.e. the suffering of “existence” resulting from the conflict in his mental experiences. Kierkegaard's "paradoxes" are the highest passion of thinking, which is destroyed in this passion, ceasing to be thinking. All stages of the existence, truth and affirmation of the Christian faith are paradoxical. Kierkegaard was the first to notice that paradox is an ineradicable form all sorts of things theological thinking. Therefore, “Tertullian of the 20th Century” calls to believe precisely that faith is a matter of choice, a decision of the will, a leap, a risk, a miracle, an absurdity. Credo, quia absurdum est.

Subjectivity of truth, “fear” and “sickness leading to death.” Kierkegaard understands truth and faith as “subjectivity.” They do not know the truth, in it exist.

At the stage of religious faith-experience, the Individual strives for a synthesis of the finite with the infinite, but it is unattainable, and any attempt to approach it entails new paradoxes, and therefore new yearnings of the spirit. The person here is especially overwhelmed by the languor of “fear,” that is, acute anxiety, which Kierkegaard, in the “concept of fear” (1844), connected in its origins with the ideas of sexuality and sinfulness in general.

“Fear” is a tremulous state of burning fear of the unknown, mysterious, mystical. Whoever is engulfed by it is already guilty; faith at the third stage is called upon to save the Individual from the “fear”.

But at this stage, something opposite happens: fear and trepidation increase and bring the individual to extreme exhaustion of spirit: this is cruel languor, permanent despair, a “sickness towards death”, in which the attraction to the promised afterlife is combined with disgust from the expected transcendence.

Narsky I.V. Western European philosophy of the 19th century. M., 1976.

Abstract

Introduction

The clash of opposing worldviews, the intensity of theoretical debates, the abundance of movements and names make the study of 19th century philosophy. not an easy task, so let’s focus only on the truly great thinkers. Classical German idealism is the central object of study in the book.

Classical idealist dialectics in Germany, in a certain sense, revived the principles of rationalism, and the Enlightenment tradition was comprehended. The 19th century in philosophy inherited from French materialism the belief in progress and reason, then raised to the level of social science by Marx and Engels. On the other hand, many philosophers of the second half of the 19th century were imbued with irrationalism and subjectivism; thinkers took up subjectivist interpretations of classical philosophy, forming more and more new teachings with the prefix “neo”. The struggle between idealism and materialism acquired corresponding new forms.

Thus, XIX century. philosophically does not constitute a single picture.

Immanuel Kant

The origins of classical German idealism. Four great classics of German idealism of the late 18th – first third of the 19th centuries. – Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. In the ideology of the German Enlightenment, compromise was expressed in a tendency to reduce all political and social problems to moral ones. In the works of the classics, compromise was expressed in the form of different interpretations of the relationship between “existence” and “ought.”

Part of their idealism was regressive, since they all opposed materialism. But the backward movement towards idealism revealed the significant shortcomings of the old materialism, but opposed idealist dialectics to the metaphysical method of the French materialists.

Classical German idealism significantly expanded the field of problems under study, laying claim to encyclopedicism.

The beginnings of classical German idealism are already present in the work of Kant, who worked when the ideological preparation of the bourgeois revolution was taking place in France, Rousseau’s ideas dominated the minds of Europe, and in Germany literature had influence. "Storm and Drang" movement. Kant accepted the Enlightenment values ​​of human reason and dignity, becoming an enemy of feudal obscurantism and moral impoverishment. But he began to hold back the progress of enlightenment with the motive of self-restraint. Kant believed that he lived not in an enlightened age, but in an age of enlightenment, and the realization of the ideals of the Enlightenment in real life was still far away.

Life of Kant. I. Kant was born in 1724 in Konigsberg, was the son of a modest saddlemaker, graduated from the university, and worked as a home teacher for 9 years. In 1755 he began giving lectures on metaphysics and many natural science subjects, and was an assistant librarian at the royal castle. He received the professorship of logic and metaphysics only at the age of 46. He strengthened his weak health from birth with a clear daily routine. In 1794 he was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences.

It gained wide popularity only in the last decade of the 18th century. Kant died in 1804.

Milestones of Kant's creativity. I. Pre-critical period (1746 – 1770).

II. 1770 - the beginning of the “critical” period in his philosophy.

In 1781, “Critique of Pure Reason” was published - Kant’s main epistemological work.

1788 - “Critique of Practical Reason”, 1797 - “Metaphysics of Morals”.

1790 - “Critique of Judgment”, the 3rd and final part of Kant’s philosophical system.

1793 - bypassing censorship, Kant publishes a chapter from the treatise “Religion within the Limits of Reason Only,” then the entire book and the article “The End of All Things,” directed against orthodox religion, for which King Frederick William II reprimanded the philosopher. But after the death of the king, Kant published a “dispute of faculties” in 1798, where he insisted that Holy Scripture should be considered “a complete allegory.”

"Precritical" Kant. At first, Kant uncritically combined the ideas of Leibniz and Wolff, then he combined natural science materialism with Wolffian metaphysics, showed interest in issues of cosmology and cosmogony, wrote works on the change in the rotation of the Earth around its axis, “The General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens” based on Newtonian mechanics, but the role there is less divine intervention in Kant than in Newton's natural philosophy.

Kant denied the possibility of absolute rest and sought to prove the universal circulation of matter in the Universe. He viewed the end of worlds as the beginning of new ones. His cosmogonic hypothesis is deistic in nature.

Kant appealed to God as the creator of matter and the laws of its motion. In 1763 he wrote “The only possible basis for proving the existence of God.”

Kant reveals agnostic motives: natural causes cannot explain the origin of living nature, since mechanics will not explain the origin of even one caterpillar.

Kant reveals a tendency to separate consciousness from being, which reached in the 70s. apogee. For example, he insists that real relations, negations and reasons are “of a completely different kind” than logical ones. He is right in emphasizing that the predicate of a thing and the predicate of a thought about this thing are not the same thing. One must distinguish between the real and the logically possible. But the tendency for a deeper and deeper distinction between the two types of foundation led Kant in the direction of Hume. He comes to contrast logical connections with causal ones.

In “pre-critical” creativity there was also a struggle against extreme spiritualism (“Dreams of a Spiritualist, Explained by the Dreams of Metaphysics” (1766)), which undermines all hopes of knowing the essence of psychic phenomena.

Thus, during this period the positions that formed the basis of Kant’s “critical” teaching began to take shape.

The transition to the critical period is usually dated to 1770, when Kant defended his dissertation “On the Form and Principles of the Sensibly Perceptible and Intelligible World.” He became disillusioned with the rationalism of Wolff, the empiricism of Locke and Holbach, and was impressed by Leibniz. The hopes of the leaders of the Enlightenment for quick knowledge of the secrets of nature seem naive to him, but the rejection of scientific knowledge is even more harmful.

Kant formulates a double task: “to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith.” Here a “middle path between dogmatism... and skepticism” is outlined, a reconciliation of idealism with materialism on an ontological basis.

Kant called his philosophy critical idealism or transcendental idealism. He divided the abilities of the human soul into the ability of knowledge, the feeling of pleasure and displeasure and desire. The first is characterized by the activity of reason, the second by judgment, the third directs the mind through the search for final goals to achieve morality and freedom. Kant rejects theoretical evidence of the necessity of metaphysics, formulating the task of critical metaphysics.

At the beginning of his epistemological research, Kant poses the question: What can I know? And there are three more loans: What should I do? What can I hope for? What is a person and what can he become?

Epistemological classification of judgments. Synthetic a priori. To answer, Kant builds a typology of knowledge, dividing it into imperfect and perfect (truly scientific). The features of the latter are reliability, universality and necessity; it cannot be acquired from experience. Perfect knowledge is extra-empirical, a priori in nature. Kant distinguishes between empirical (a posteriori) and “pure” (a priori) knowledge.

Kant also distinguishes between analytical and synthetic knowledge.

The relationship between types of judgments is as follows:

	Analytical	Synthetic
A posteriori	Their existence is impossible.	They exist as part of imperfect knowledge, for example: “a lot of gold is mined in Siberia,” “this house is on a hill,” “some bodies are heavy.”
A priori	They exist as part of perfect knowledge, for example: “everything conditioned presupposes the presence of a condition,” “a square has four corners,” “bodies are extended.”	They exist as part of perfect knowledge, for example: “everything that happens has its cause,” “in all changes in the corporeal world, the amount of matter remains unchanged.”

The term “a priori” has several connotations. A priori is something that has some kind of, not further specified, non-experimental and in this sense “pure” origin. In Kant's reasoning about the ideals of behavior, the a priori does not point to what exists, but to what should be and, moreover, what is generally obligatory. The lack of experience of the a priori means that epistemologically it is “before” any experience, including psychological experience.

Kant's principle of the primacy of synthesis over analysis triumphs in synthetic judgments a priori. With the help of his supposedly proven existence of synthetic a priori judgments, he seeks to establish theses about the creative role of non-experiential consciousness and the possibility of rational knowledge, in principle independent of sensory knowledge. Hegel saw in this desire a deep dialectic: a single consciousness gives rise to a variety of knowledge, and this knowledge is a synthesis.

For Kant, the distinction between the analytical and the synthetic stems from the difference between the respective methods: a course of reasoning is analytical if it does not introduce new or even complex objects and does not conclude from the presence of one individual object to the existence (or non-existence) of another. But the line of reasoning is synthetic if it asserts that “due to the fact that there is something, there is also something else ... because something exists, something else is eliminated.”

Affirming the existence of synthetic a priori judgments, Kant, already at the beginning of his system, puts forward the dialectical problem of creative synthesis in knowledge. With the help of synthetic a priori judgments, Kant hoped, first of all, to exhaustively explain and indisputably substantiate the possibility of “pure” (i.e., theoretical mathematics).

The structure of the epistemological field. Kant divides the cognitive ability of consciousness as a whole (“reason” in the broad sense of the word, i.e., intellect) into three different abilities: sensibility, reason, and reason itself in the narrow sense of the word. Each ability corresponds to a specific question: How is pure mathematics possible? How is pure natural science possible? How is metaphysics, i.e. ontology, possible?

According to the questions, Kant's epistemology is divided into three main parts: transcendental aesthetics, transcendental analytics and transcendental dialectics.

“Transcendental” for Kant means “that which, although it precedes experience (a priori), is intended only to make experimental knowledge possible.” We can say that abilities are transcendental, and their results are a priori.

“Transcendent” is that which is beyond the limits of experience and does not relate to experience, as well as those principles that try to go beyond the limits of experience. The transcendental and the a posteriori are almost diametrically opposed areas. Therefore, Kant sometimes calls the thing-in-itself a “transcendental object.”

So, the structure of the epistemological field according to Kant is as follows: 1. The area of ​​sensations. 2. The a posteriori domain of objects of experience, ordered by a priori means (= science = truth = nature). 3. Transcendental abilities of the subject, which generate a priori means. 4. Transcendental apperception. 5. The transcendental region of non-experienced objects, i.e. the world of things in themselves.

Things in themselves (by themselves). Let's consider Kant's transcendental aesthetics. Kant understands by “aesthetics” the doctrine of sensuality in general as an epistemological doctrine, and not just concerning the contemplation of objects of art. Sensory contemplation is the beginning of all knowledge.

Kant considers the doctrine of the “thing in itself” to be an important component of the science of sensory knowledge and knowledge in general. He argues that beyond sensory phenomena there is an unknowable reality, about which in the theory of knowledge there is only an extremely abstract “pure” concept (noumenon). In epistemology, nothing definite can be said about things in themselves as such - neither that they are something divine, nor that they are material bodies.

The thing in itself, within the framework of Kant’s philosophical system, performs several functions:

1) The first meaning of the concept of a thing-in-itself in Kant’s philosophy is intended to indicate the presence of an external causative agent of our sensations and ideas. They “excite” our sensuality, awaken it to activity and to the appearance in it of various modifications of its states.

2) The second meaning is that this is any fundamentally unknowable object. We don't know in principle what they are. We know of a thing in itself only that it exists, and to some extent that which it is not. From things in themselves we have nothing except the thought of them as intelligible (intelligible) objects, about which it cannot be said that they are substances. This concept of the unknowable as such is “only the thought of some something in general.”

3) The third meaning embraces everything that lies in the transcendental region, that is, outside experience and the sphere of the transcendental. Among otherworldly things, Kant in his ethics postulates God and the immortal soul, that is, the traditional objects of objective idealism.

4) The fourth and generally idealistic meaning of the “thing in itself” is even broader as a kingdom of unattainable ideals in general, and this kingdom as a whole itself turns out to be a cognitive ideal of an unconditional higher synthesis. The thing in itself turns out to be the object of faith in this case.

Each of the four meanings of “things in themselves” corresponds to its own meaning of noumenon, that is, the concept of things in themselves, indicating the presence of the latter, but not giving positive knowledge about them.

Kant's ethical teaching. Kant affirms the primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason, of activity over knowledge. Kant adheres to the principle of the primacy of issues of morality of human behavior over issues of scientific knowledge.

Ethics is the main part of Kant's philosophy. At the center of Kantian philosophy is man, his dignity and destiny.

Kant's ethics is autonomous. It is focused on a certain ideal independent of any incoming considerations and incentives. Neither sensual desires, nor selfish calculation, nor appeals to benefit or harm should be taken into account at all.

Practical reason prescribes to itself the principles of moral behavior and finds them within itself as an internal a priori impulse. He is the only source of morality, just as reason turned in Kant, as his “criticism” developed, into the only source of the laws of nature.

Legality and morality. An imperative is a rule containing “objective compulsion to act” of a certain type. There are two main types of them, identified by Kant: hypothetical in the sense of “depending on conditions” and the categorical imperative as a general invariant for a priori moral laws. This imperative is apodictic, necessarily unconditional. It follows from human nature, like hypothetical imperatives, but not from empirical, but from transcendental nature. He doesn't accept any "ifs". According to Kant, only that behavior is moral that completely obeys the requirements of the categorical imperative.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Johann Gotbib Fichte is a very original scientist, a contemporary of the Napoleonic Wars. Those who swept away the feudal rubbish of feudalism from the lives of peoples. The origins of Fichte's work are the political ideas of the French Revolution. But the absence of real political forces in Germany led to the fact that Fichte’s anti-feudal protest acquired an abstract form.

Life and work of Fichte. Fichte was born into a poor and large family of a rural weaver in East Saxony, and only the curiosity of a titled patron of the arts for the boy’s extraordinary abilities gave him the opportunity to receive an education.

Fichte read Rousseau with enthusiasm and became imbued with revolutionary democratic convictions. Kant's seeds also fall onto the prepared soil. Fichte abandons the rigid Spinozistic determinism and turns the efforts of his seething mind to finding a theoretical justification for freedom.

The idea of ​​freedom captures Fichte's soul. It is also in tune with his inner character, uncompromising honesty and straightforwardness. It was as if a German sans-culotte had entered the philosophical world.

An important role was played by Fichte's meeting with Kant, to whom he showed his first essay, “The Experience of Criticism of All Revelation.” Kant recognized the guest's strong and original mind, contributed to the publication of his work, and when rumor attributed the authorship to Kant, he publicly explained the misunderstanding, and Fichte immediately gained wide fame.

But Kant did not recognize the direct genetic connection between Fichte’s ideas and his own, and then more decisively dissociated himself from them.

On the recommendation of Goethe, who became interested in the bright thinker, Fichte in 1784 took the position of professor at the University of Jena. During his years as a professor at Jena, Fichte created the basic outline of his philosophical system. Then the reactionaries expelled him, having become obsessed with his careless handling of the categories of religion.

But Fichte was invited to give lectures in Erlangen, Berlin, Koenigsberg and even Kharkov.

When Napoleon occupied Germany in 1806, Fichte plunged headlong into social activities, giving patriotic lectures. Since 1813, he has taken an active part in the bourgeois-democratic movement for the national restoration of Germany. He joined the militia, but in January 1814 he died of typhus, which he contracted from his wife, who worked in a military hospital.

Philosophy as a science. Initial intellectual intuition. Fichte emphasizes that philosophy is a science, and hopes to find in it the “fundamental science”, the science of sciences, knowledge of the processes of obtaining knowledge, the teaching of science and the justification of all knowledge in general. What we have before us is not yet a “science of sciences” in the Hegelian sense, but already a sketch of its concept.

Differences emerged between Kant and Fichte on the issue of knowledge. Fichte rightly considers the combination of idealistic and materialistic tendencies in Kahn's theory of knowledge to be eclecticism, but he sees the way to overcome it in getting rid of the doctrine of things in themselves. Recognizing, unlike Kant, intellectual intuition, Fichte brings it somewhat closer to rational activity, but, like Kant, denies the possibility of intuitive penetration into the other world (for Kant this world is unknowable, for Fichte it does not exist).

Fichte draws attention to the content of the pure transcendental “H,” i.e., the former Kantian apperception taken in its essence. By constructing the “I,” Fichte tries to reveal it as the very essence of consciousness, not as a thing, but as an action. If for Kant the active transcendental subject is passive in the sense that he is forced to deal with the matter of experience that is given to him, then in Fichte the active creative “I” is passive in the sense that it is not able to create the world otherwise than by influencing on yourself.

Three principles and their dialectics. Fichte builds the system of solipsism of the “I” through three fundamental judgments, which together express his interpretation of transcendental apperception.

1. The universal “I” asserts itself. “I” creates itself, and this is not some kind of permanent state, but a powerful act caused by a special beginning-impetus.

2. “I” cannot be satisfied with the first principle: it strives for self-determination, and this is impossible except through the mediation of another, that is, that which is different from “I”. Consequently, the second principle: “I” opposes itself to “not-I”. In essence, there is an “alienation” of the “not-I” from the “I”, expressing an idealistic solution to the main question of philosophy and anticipating Hegel.

3. The third principle plays the role of synthesis and leads the first two to unity. It says: consciousness posits and unites “I” and “not-I”.

Ethics of action and freedom. Fichte's ethics were developed in the “System of Doctrines of Morality...” (17989) and in a number of works on the purpose of man and scientist as a true person. According to Fichte, man is an organized product of nature. In its entirety, it is not only an object, but also a subject. As an object, it is not passive, and objective necessity, recognized by man as self-determination, turns into subjective freedom.

The historical path of mastery of material nature is a worldwide process of leap-like growth in the ethical culture of mankind.

If duty without feeling is a tedious duty, then feeling without duty is a blind and rude impulse. The combination of duty and feeling occurs precisely thanks to culture. Thus, “I,” in the course of the development of social civilization, must triumph both over nature in general and over its own natural basis.

As a result, the distinction between “legal” and “moral” actions will disappear, reason and feeling, duty and desire, theory and practice will be identified.

Philosophy of history, law and state. Fichte's philosophy of history is imbued with idealistic theology. The absolutely free “I” is not only the source and starting point of historical development, but also its criterion and goal, hovering somewhere in an unusually distant distance. History is a growing and forward-looking process of cultivating practical and theoretical reason, and it is generic in nature, although it occurs through the improvement of the consciousness of individuals.

The external conditions for the realization of the moral goals of history are, according to Fichte, law and the state. Fichte argues that man can only exist as a social being.

But the state is only a service and therefore temporary institution. It is only a condition, a means of moral progress for the empirical selves. After “myriads of years,” morality will replace the state, law and church. Only then will a truly “natural state” of man arise, corresponding to his actual nature and purpose.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Hegel's philosophy can be characterized as a system of dialectical objective idealism. At a new, higher level, he revived the ideas of idealistic rationalism of the 17th century, transforming the thesis about the coincidence of real and logical connections into the position about the dialectical (relative) identity of being and the thought of being. Hegel's epistemology, in contrast to Kant's theory of knowledge, is not reduced to the study of a person's subjective cognitive abilities, but is aimed at studying the dependence of the laws of cognition of an object on its own properties. Hegel comes to the conclusion that the laws of being are the laws of cognition of being, but on the basis of idealism this conclusion received the opposite meaning - deriving the laws of being from the laws of its cognition, so that Hegel’s ontology coincided with epistemology. All these motifs can be found in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a work that completes the formation of Hegel’s philosophical views. This is both an introduction to his philosophy and its application to a number of specific issues. “Phenomenology of Spirit”, as it were, programmed the future philosophy of spirit: its first five sections are a sketch of the doctrine of subjective spirit, the sixth section corresponds to the doctrine of objective spirit, and the last two are about the absolute spirit. Phenomenology of Spirit prepares Hegel's mature system. She proclaims the end of the kingdom of reason and the beginning of the kingdom of reason. Hegel's philosophy is the completion and highest achievement of German classical idealism. Hegel proclaimed man's ability to create himself, the infinite superiority of social life over nature and the power of the knowing consciousness. He substantiated all these theses through idealistic dialectics. Hegel's system is completed by the doctrine of absolute spirit. History achieves the unity of the subjective and objective states of the spirit on the basis of the level of rationality that is possible under the conditions of the most rationally structured state.

Ludwig Feuerbach

Young Hegelian movement. The starting point for the philosophical ideology of bourgeois-democratic movements of the late 30s. XIX century In Germany, the radical teachings of the Young Hegelians began. Their significance in the philosophical preparation of the revolution of 1848–1849. no doubt.

As the revolutionary situation approached, a split in the Hegelian school became inevitable. Outwardly, it seemed to be the result of a dispute about whether it would be correct to identify the Hegelian absolute with God, but its participants also differed among themselves in their answers to the question about the nature of the relationship of the absolute to man. But essentially the split was determined by the polemic between supporters of the radical and conservative interpretation of the formula “Everything that is reasonable is real, and everything that is real is reasonable.”

The right, or Old Hegelians, argued that the Hegelian absolute should be understood as the highest spiritual-individual being, representing the subject of rational world governance. But their philosophical activity expressed both their general conservatism and attempts to overcome the crisis of Protestant theology.

The left, or Young Hegelians, declared that their teacher was a pantheist, and some, for example Bruno Bauer, began to prove his atheism, and even reproached Hegel himself for the fact that in practice he himself moved away from his doctrine, which disoriented his students. The Young Hegelians decided to deepen his criticism of political and church reaction and rejected Hegel’s opinion on the need for the coincidence of state power, religion and the principles of philosophy.

Philosophers of the Young Hegelian circle. David Friedrich Strauss (1808 - 1874) wrote the two-volume Life of Jesus in the spirit of pantheism. Attacked both orthodox Christian and Hegelian Christology. According to Strauss, the gospel is a historical document of social psychology, namely a collection of myths of early Christian communities, Christ is a natural person, since the absolute could not inhabit a single person, and God is the image of substantial infinity.

Bruno Bauer (1809 - 1882) went further in denying religion than Strauss. He rejected the real historical existence of Christ altogether. Bauer portrayed Hegel himself as an enemy of religion, the church and the Prussian state, a friend of materialism and the Jacobins. Bauer himself understood that this image did not really correspond to reality, but he wanted to stimulate the development of Young Hegelianism to the left. But the “leftism” of Bauer himself was limited to the fact that he reduced bourgeois revolutionism to intellectual criticism of religion, despotism and clericalism on the part of outstanding “critically thinking individuals.”

Arnold Ruge (1803 - 1880) was the first among the Young Hegelians to draw political conclusions from the criticism of religion, transferring its fire to the Hegelian philosophy of state and law. All the most political episodes of the Young Hegelian movement are associated with the name of Ruge, and it was in his articles that they briefly approached revolutionary democracy.

Stirner and Hess. Max Stirner (pseudonym of Kaspar Schmidt) (1806 - 1856) developed as a thinker in the Young Hegelian circle of the “Free”, but in the book “The One and His Property” he sharply criticizes them and appears as an extreme individualist and nihilist, rejecting any realities and values: morality, law, state, history, society, reason, truth, communism. “I am nothing, and from whom I myself will draw everything, as a creator-creator... My Self is most precious to me!” Many of his ideas formed the basis of the ideology of anarchism.

Moses Hess (1812 – 1875) also broke with the circle of Young Hegelians. His role in philosophy is twofold. On the one hand, as a result of his combination of the principles of historical necessity of Hegel, the humanism of Feuerbach and the utopian communism of Cabet, the theoretical basis of the movement of “true socialists” arose. On the other hand, Hess's critique of capitalism attracted the attention of the young Marx. But Hess himself was influenced by Marx and Engels. In “Philosophy of Action” (1843), Hess stated in what direction the time had come to remake Hegel’s teaching: “Now the task of the philosophy of spirit is to become a philosophy of action.”

Polish Hegelians. “Prolegomena to Historiosophy (1838) by August Cieszkowski (1814 – 1894)” immediately drew attention to such flaws in the Hegelian system as contemplation, a tendency towards fatalism, indifference to the fate of the individual and exclusion from philosophical analysis of the problems of happiness and the future of humanity. Tseshkovsky’s main idea is not to draw a line under the results of past development, but to put the conclusions of these philosophical results into practice.

Edward Dembosky (1822 – 1846) is the author of the “philosophy of creativity”, the main categories of which were “nationality”, “progress”, “action” and “daring”. He reproaches Hegel (like Fourier, Saint-Simon, the Girondins and the authors of the compromise Polish constitution) for eclecticism, which, in his opinion, means the reconciliation of opposites in theory and unprincipled compromises in political practice.

Life and work of Feuerbach. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 – 1872) considered it his duty to solve the problem posed by life itself and also arising from the contradictions of Hegel’s teachings. What is the true nature of a real person and how can one determine his path to happiness? How to free him from the oppression of the omnipotent absolute? Having devoted his philosophy to the solution of these problems and placing at its center not the abstract “Self-Consciousness”, but a person, he gave it an anthropological character. By anthropological philosophy he understood a teaching in which an integral, real person would be both the starting point and his final goal.

L. Feuerbach was born on July 28, 1804 to the family of a prominent lawyer, listened to Hegel's lectures at the University of Berlin. In the notes of “Doubts” (1827 – 1828), a protest against the dictates of idealistic thought is already brewing.

In “Thoughts on Death and Immortality” (1830), he contrasts the Christian dogma of personal immortality with the immortality of the human race in its real, earthly life, which became the starting point for Young Hegelian criticism. The essay was confiscated, Feuerbach was fired, and for six years he unsuccessfully tried to gain access to teaching again. As a sign of protest, he moved to the countryside for a quarter of a century, where he wrote his main works.

His most famous, although not the most mature, work is “The Essence of Christianity,” which caused a huge resonance. He developed the concept of criticism of religion as the alienated existence of the human essence, which took the form of illusory consciousness.

Feuerbach's lectures on the essence of religion were a political act, where he declared the need to become a "political materialist" since the subject of his lectures - religion - was "closely connected with politics."

He enthusiastically embraced the revolution of 1848–1849, and the victorious reaction and the militaristic regime of Bismarck met only hatred on his part. His old age passed in poverty, reaching complete poverty.

A question about dialectics. Anthropological principle. The presence of moments of dialectics in Feuerbach is undeniable. When he broke with Hegel's teaching, he did not reject the dialectic of interpersonal relations, although he retained little of it. But he noticed the dialectical fate of pantheism; a dialectical character is also inherent in the mechanism of religious alienation he denigrates. There are many real transitions to the opposite here, and “what was religion yesterday ceases to be it today; what seems atheism today will become religion tomorrow.” But the dialectic of all these moments is not comprehended by him as dialectics.

Anthropologism was the main feature of Feuerbach's materialism. Feuerbach’s “man” is no longer a conglomerate of passive atoms, drawn by external influences, “a block”, as it turns out to be among the leaders of French materialism, but an active individual. It is no longer an obedient organ of the absolute spirit, fatally included in the system of stages of ascent to a goal alien to the aspirations of people and incomprehensible to them. Feuerbach's anthropologism was directed primarily against the interpretation of man as a “servant of God” and a submissive instrument of the world spirit. From the point of view of a philosopher, for understanding a person, not only the affects of fear in religion or interest in knowledge are important, but also “love” as a philosophical category in the sense of not only desires, passion, admiration and dreams, but also effective self-affirmation.

For Feuerbach, “truth is neither materialism, nor idealism, nor physiology, nor psychology, truth is only anthropology.”

The concept of human nature. As M. Hess noted, Feuerbach humanized ontology, turned it towards the interests and needs of man and proclaimed materialistic humanism. The duty of a philosopher is to help people become happier. To do this, it is necessary to consider a person not in isolation from the surrounding world, but in connection with it, and this world is nature. Man and nature, as starting points of philosophizing, are united together by the concept of human nature.

But Feuerbach’s characterizations of man suffer from great social abstraction, since he distinguishes him from animals essentially only by the presence of a “superlative degree of sensualism.” The social aspect of philosophy is reduced by Feuerbach to the interaction in the “binomial” of individuals (“I” and “You”). The combination of two individuals in this “cell” of social life – in a heterosexual pair “I – ​​You” – is a source of social diversity at higher levels.

Criticism of religion as alienation. Religion in the perspective of eras. "Religion of Man". In the analysis of religion, Feuerach took the baton from the materialists and enlighteners of the 18th century. He was the first to highlight and substantiate the idea that religion did not arise by chance, but naturally, and is a product of social psychology, which constantly reflects in the binary system “I – ​​You”, and highlighted the basis of religion as a person’s sense of dependence. Religion turns out to be an expression of egoism. Religion is a “reflex, a reflection” of a person’s powerlessness and at the same time his active reaction to his powerlessness.

In order for a person’s religious self-alienation (self-deception, a vampire sucking out the content of connections between people, taking away love from a person to God) to be abolished, all people must become happy.

What to do with religion in the future? Feuerbach concludes that religion is necessary because it makes up for what people lack. He believes that humanity needs a “new religion.” Feuerbach’s thought about the need for religion, that is, about its adequate replacement, comes into play. The philosopher proposes to transfer the emotions of religious veneration to Humanity. “By reducing theology to anthropology, I raise anthropology to theology.”

Ethics Feuerbach, his “communism” and “love”. In ethics, Feuerbach took the position of abstract anthropological humanism, having exhausted all those possibilities of metaphysical materialism that could serve the development of anti-religious morality. In his vibrant ethical teaching, he includes all the moral implications of atheism, sharply opposing religious doctrines of morality. His conclusion: true morality and religion are antagonists.

He tries to base his teaching on morality on the principles of biopsychic sensibility. He orients his ethics towards justification, exaltation, glorification and, finally, deification of human impulses towards extremely complete and in this sense ideal sensual happiness. He calls for the deification of relationships between people, for their path to happiness lies only through them, to deify the love of “I” for “You” and “You” for “I”. The religion of man turns out to be the religion of sexual love.

The need of people for each other equalizes them and unites them with each other, develops a sense of collectivism. If, instead of faith in God, people gain faith in themselves and achieve that “man is God to man,” then the friendship of all people with each other will be established without distinction of gender - and this will be the path to communism. “Communism” in Feuerbach’s writings is a designation for the general fact that people need each other.

Feuerbach traces his ethics to the principle of rational egoism. Everyone strives for happiness; to be a person means to be happy. But the condition for happiness is also the happiness of the partner. Happiness can only be mutual, and from here Feuerbach wants to reinterpret egoism as altruism, deriving the latter as a necessary requirement from the former.

Theory of knowledge. "Love" again. Feuerbach sharply emphasizes that the objective world is cognized by the subject through human senses, and all nature is cognized through the knowledge of human nature. Therefore, the highest form of knowledge is sexual intercourse.

In Feuerbach's epistemology, new shades are added to the terms “sensuality” and “love”. Sensuality takes on the meaning of the fullness of life experience, and love is a set of actions that provide people with active communication and unity with nature.

Irrationalism of the mid-19th century. Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860) contrasted his teaching with rationalism and dialectical teaching to Hegel, which he called the “basilisk egg.” He also reacted with hatred to Feuerbach’s materialism.

The deep pessimism characteristic of Schopenhauer had a complex nature: the feudal-aristocratic contempt for the established soulless merchant morals of the order was later added to the gloomy skepticism of a bourgeois ideologist who did not expect anything good from the future.

Metaphysics of Will. Schopenhauer himself admitted that his philosophical system arose as an amalgam of the ideas of Kant, Plato and Indian Buddhists. His philosophy is eclectic, but it is permeated by certain common principles.

Of all Kant’s categories, he recognized only causality, but also included time and space among the categories, and in Kant’s thesis about the primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason he saw the germ of his doctrine of the primacy of the volitional principle. In Indian philosophy, his attention was attracted by the concept of "maya" and the ideal of immersion in "nirvana".

The starting point of Schopenhauer’s reasoning is the assertion that the world of our experience is purely phenomenal, it is just a set of ideas reminiscent of “maya (appearance)”, but categorically ordered.

The philosopher turned the law of sufficient reason into a method of cognition of phenomena, while he proposes to discover philosophical truths through intuition of the Schelling kind. Schopenhauer called this law “the general form of an object,” appearing in 4 different forms depending on the class of objects (1. Class of physical objects-phenomena in the relations of time, space and causality; 2. Abstract concepts related to each other through judgments “ mind”, which is understood as the ability of all theoretical thinking; 3. Mathematical objects generated by the relations of time and space; 4. Empirical “I” as subjects of various expressions of will). Consequently, the law takes on four types: sufficient grounds for becoming, cognition, being and action, or motivation.

The entire world of phenomena around us is a set of sensory and intuitive ideas of human subjects. The earth, seas, houses, bodies of people are objects-representations, but the representing subjects-people themselves also turn out to be only representations, so that literally the entire world of phenomena is not so much imagined as imagined, like a dream, Buddhist “Maya”.

“Behind” the phenomena there is a world of things in themselves, which is a kind of metaphysical Will. It is unique, but its manifestations are multiple. Among the most eloquent are gravity, magnetism, the forces of chemical affinity, the desire of animals for self-preservation, the sexual instinct of animals and the various affects of people.

But unlike Kant, Will as a thing in itself in Schopenhauer is recognizable or at least identifiable, and secondly, it would be easier to call it Force or Energy with a capital letter.

Schopenhauer's pessimism. The World Will is irrational, blind and wild, has no plan, is in a state of eternal dissatisfaction, “forced to devour itself, since there is nothing besides it and it is a hungry will.” Hence, people’s lives are full of constant anxiety, bitter disappointments and torment. Chapter 46 of Volume II of “The World as Will and Idea” is entitled: “On the insignificance and sorrows of life.”

Schopenhauer denies in principle the existence of progress in human society. History seems to him to be a meaningless web of events.

Manifestations of will collide and fight with each other. The will, through its creations, finds itself plunged into suffering, tries to overcome them, but this is tantamount to the fact that it fights with itself, but only plunges itself into new troubles: “... in the heat of passion, sinks its teeth into its own body... The tormentor and the tormented are one” .

The doctrine of self-abolition of the Will and its social meaning. Schopenhauer shows how people can cease to be slaves and instruments of such a deceptive and disappointing world Will to live. The way out is in the development by people of vital energy, which must be directed against the Will as such. We must turn our human will against itself.

This activity has two stages. The first gives only temporary liberation from the service of the Will, helps to escape from it for a while. This is aesthetic contemplation.

The second, highest stage of annihilation is associated with the ethical field of human activity. A person must extinguish the will to life and renounce it, surrender to quietism, that is, the cessation of desires, asceticism. The will of the ascetic crushes the will to live and thereby undermines the Will in general. The abolition of the subject also destroys the object, for Schopenhauer accepted the subjective-idealist thesis: without the subject there is no object.

The highest human ideal turns out to be the “holy” hermit. The successor of this system, E. Hartmann, made a direct conclusion about the expediency of collective suicide, but Schopenhauer reasoned that the ascetic flees from the pleasures of life, which means life itself, while the suicide seeks to avoid life's suffering, which means he loves the joys of life, and by his act , on the contrary, affirms it.

Schopenhauer did not believe in progress and denounced humanism, calling it a vile companion of materialism and “bestialism.” Although he recognized the affinity of the Christian message of "compassion", he liked the Buddhist message of submissive self-denial. In it, “compassion” was followed by “chastity”, “poverty” and readiness to suffer, after which - quietism, asceticism and “mysticism”. The ultimate goal is “nirvana” as the abolition of the entire universe of Will, i.e., universal death: if at least one subject remains alive, in his ideas the world of objects will continue to exist, so the task of abolition of being will remain unsolved.

Eduard Hartman. Hegel's dialectics, represented by the system of the “prince of pessimists” Schopenhauer, received a kind of anti-dialectical double. From Schopenhauer, traditions of philosophical decadence begin, which go to the theorist of the “unconscious” E. Hartmann, then to the neo-Kantian G. Vaihinger, the young F. Nietzsche and the entire “philosophy of life”, to Z. Freud and A. Camus.

The immediate impact of Schopenhauer's philosophy was its pessimism. Eduard Hartmann (1842 – 1906) began to improve this theory, who added borrowings from Schelling, Darwin’s evolutionary theory, and most of all from Hegel’s dialectics and rationalism to Schopenhauer’s eclectic structure. In Hartmann’s main works “Philosophy of the Unconscious” (1869) and “The Doctrine of Categories” (1896) the following theoretical concept is outlined: the unconscious principle as the unity of Will and Idea develops through teleological splitting, like Schelling’s absolute, and then through the war of will and reason, i.e. i.e. through the war of opposites, like Hegel’s world spirit. The categories are a priori, like Kant's, but they are unconscious structures of the action of the impersonal mind in human individuals. “Man is completely dependent on the unconscious,” and receives from it only sorrow and suffering. The pursuit of happiness is a foolish illusion. But our world is the best of worlds, because it is capable of self-destruction. People must commit themselves to self-destruction and thereby achieve the “redemption” (Erlösung) of the world.

In the time of Bismarck, the doctrine of self-negation of the will was replaced by Nietzsche’s “will to power,” which was accompanied by an increasingly progressive denigration of reason. These concepts were of a cosmic nature. S. Kierkegaard followed a different path, alien to generalization.

Soren Kierkegaard

Like Schopenhauer, he attacked scientific knowledge and Hegel’s dialectics. He rejects the Hegelian identity of being and thinking, because under no circumstances does he recognize the rationality of reality. He separates thinking and being, logic and dialectics, objectivity and subjectivity from each other, discards the first and retains only the second. The subject of his reflections is dialectical subjectivity, the subjective dialectics of a unique individual.

The individual and the dialectics of its “existence.” Kierkegaard is an opponent of all philosophical systems, but he also developed a semblance of a system of thoughts. Its central idea is the principle of human individuality. The spiritual individual, the “Single,” forms the rules of his behavior contrary to the social environment and any of its laws, and the more he succeeds in this, the more lonely he is. “After all, one person for another cannot be anything other than an obstacle on his path,” a threat to his existence. The surrounding “mass” of people are “animals or bees,” and therefore “be afraid of friendship.” The people are something faceless, anonymous and “untrue”. Social associations, ideas of collectivism and social progress are a “pagan” illusion.

The mature Kierkegaard proclaimed the rebellion of the individual against the race, social class, state, and society. Everything universal, the universal, is false, only the Individual is “true” and only it has meaning. Only the One has “existence.”

By “existence,” Kierkegaard understands a specifically human category that expresses the existence of a unique individuality through the chain of its internal and also unique experiences, “moments.” “Existence” is, as it were, the apogee of life’s “shudder,” suffering and passionate attempts to escape its power. “To exist” means to realize one’s being through the free choice of one of the alternatives and thereby assert oneself as an individual, and not as a mass phenomenon from the “crowd”.

The category of “existence” is the focus of Kierkegaard’s dialectic, the dialectic of the psychological struggles of the subject in the cage of the opposites “finite” and “infinite,” “fear” as a state of uncertainty and “choice” as a decision that interrupts fluctuations between alternatives. But the dialectical collision of opposites is resolved by the philosopher not through a mediating synthesis, but with the help of a “leap-choice”: the impulse of determination allows one to jump, as if in one fell swoop, into the bosom of one of the alternatives, discarding the other.

Kierkegaard's dialectic is completely alien to the movement of general categories, is purely individualized and covered by an unsteady network of a kind of concepts-experiences. The main ones of these mental-emotional hybrids are: single, existence, moment, paradox, fear, guilt, sin, choice, leap, despair.

Using a complex system of pseudonyms, the philosopher began a series of Socratic dialogues with himself, also resorting to the tried and tested means of the Jena romantics - irony. For Kierkegaard, irony is doubt, which always elevates the doubter above the one “who teaches,” duality and mistrust, which, being convinced, itself turns into faith. However, before us is rather not a “Danish Socrates”, but a “Danish Tertullian”.

The concept of the experience of “choice” plays an important role, which is quite consistent with the history of his life and manifested in his character. Kierkegaard himself sought to emphasize the universal significance of his individual experiences, considering himself a man-problem.

Three lifestyles. "Paradox". The three stages of the earthly development of the Individual, the three images (styles) of his life concretize three different moral attitudes in relation to the surrounding world.

1) Aesthetic stage: a sensual way of life, characterized by eroticism and cynicism, chaos and chance.

2) Ethical stage: the individual chooses the position of a strict and universal distinction between good and evil and takes the side of the former, guided in his life by solid principles of morality and the obligations of duty (Kant!). When it becomes clear that a person is never morally self-sufficient and perfect because he is sinful and initially guilty, an ethically thinking individual will find a way out of his contradictions, moving on to the third stage of “existence.”

3) Religious stage. One of the personifications of this stage is the long-suffering Job, the other is Abraham, who, to please his God, who personally turned to him in a state of individual contact with him, and for the sake of faith in his God, showed a willingness to bear the burden of moral responsibility and guilt for violating His commandments .

Here another very important concept appears - the experience of Kierkegaard’s dialectic - “paradox”, i.e. the suffering of “existence” resulting from the conflict in his mental experiences. Kierkegaard's "paradoxes" are the highest passion of thinking, which is destroyed in this passion, ceasing to be thinking. All stages of the existence, truth and affirmation of the Christian faith are paradoxical. Kierkegaard was the first to notice that paradox is an ineradicable form of all theological thinking. Therefore, “Tertullian of the 20th Century” calls to believe precisely that faith is a matter of choice, a decision of the will, a leap, a risk, a miracle, an absurdity. Credo, quia absurdum est.

Subjectivity of truth, “fear” and “sickness leading to death.” Kierkegaard understands truth and faith as “subjectivity.” They do not know the truth, they exist in it.

At the stage of religious faith-experience, the Individual strives for a synthesis of the finite with the infinite, but it is unattainable, and any attempt to approach it entails new paradoxes, and therefore new yearnings of the spirit. The person here is especially overwhelmed by the languor of “fear,” that is, acute anxiety, which Kierkegaard, in the “concept of fear” (1844), connected in its origins with the ideas of sexuality and sinfulness in general.

“Fear” is a trembling state of burning fear of the unknown, mysterious, mystical. Whoever is engulfed by it is already guilty; faith at the third stage is called upon to save the Individual from the “fear”.

But at this stage, something opposite happens: fear and trepidation increase and bring the individual to extreme exhaustion of spirit: this is cruel languor, permanent despair, a “sickness towards death”, in which the attraction to the promised afterlife is combined with disgust from the expected transcendence.

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Abstract

Introduction

The clash of opposing worldviews, the intensity of theoretical debates, the abundance of movements and names make the study of 19th century philosophy. not an easy task, so let’s focus only on the truly great thinkers. Classical German idealism is the central object of study in the book.

Classical idealist dialectics in Germany, in a certain sense, revived the principles of rationalism, and the Enlightenment tradition was comprehended. The 19th century in philosophy inherited from French materialism the belief in progress and reason, then raised to the level of social science by Marx and Engels. On the other hand, many philosophers of the second half of the 19th century were imbued with irrationalism and subjectivism; thinkers took up subjectivist interpretations of classical philosophy, forming more and more new teachings with the prefix “neo”. The struggle between idealism and materialism acquired corresponding new forms.

Thus, XIX century. philosophically does not constitute a single picture.

Immanuel Kant

The origins of classical German idealism. Four great classics of German idealism of the late 18th - first third of the 19th centuries. - Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. In the ideology of the German Enlightenment, compromise was expressed in a tendency to reduce all political and social problems to moral ones. In the works of the classics, compromise was expressed in the form of different interpretations of the relationship between “existence” and “ought.”

Part of their idealism was regressive, since they all opposed materialism. But the backward movement towards idealism revealed the significant shortcomings of the old materialism, but opposed idealist dialectics to the metaphysical method of the French materialists.

Classical German idealism significantly expanded the field of problems under study, laying claim to encyclopedicism.

The beginnings of classical German idealism are already present in the work of Kant, who worked when the ideological preparation of the bourgeois revolution was taking place in France, Rousseau’s ideas dominated the minds of Europe, and in Germany literature had influence. "Storm and Drang" movement. Kant accepted the Enlightenment values ​​of human reason and dignity, becoming an enemy of feudal obscurantism and moral impoverishment. But he began to hold back the progress of enlightenment with the motive of self-restraint. Kant believed that he lived not in an enlightened age, but in an age of enlightenment, and the realization of the ideals of the Enlightenment in real life was still far away.

Life of Kant. I. Kant was born in 1724 in Konigsberg, was the son of a modest saddlemaker, graduated from the university, and worked as a home teacher for 9 years. In 1755 he began giving lectures on metaphysics and many natural science subjects, and was an assistant librarian at the royal castle. He received the professorship of logic and metaphysics only at the age of 46. He strengthened his weak health from birth with a clear daily routine. In 1794 he was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences.

It gained wide popularity only in the last decade of the 18th century. Kant died in 1804.

Milestones of Kant's creativity. I. Pre-critical period (1746 - 1770).

II. 1770 - the beginning of the “critical” period in his philosophy.

In 1781, “Critique of Pure Reason” was published - Kant’s main epistemological work.

1788 - “Critique of Practical Reason”, 1797 - “Metaphysics of Morals”.

1790 - “Critique of Judgment”, the 3rd and final part of Kant’s philosophical system.

1793 - bypassing censorship, Kant publishes a chapter from the treatise “Religion within the Limits of Reason Only,” then the entire book and the article “The End of All Things,” directed against orthodox religion, for which King Frederick William II reprimanded the philosopher. But after the death of the king, Kant published a “dispute of faculties” in 1798, where he insisted that Holy Scripture should be considered “a complete allegory.”

"Precritical" Kant. At first, Kant uncritically combined the ideas of Leibniz and Wolff, then he combined natural science materialism with Wolffian metaphysics, showed interest in issues of cosmology and cosmogony, wrote works on the change in the rotation of the Earth around its axis, “The General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens” based on Newtonian mechanics, but the role there is less divine intervention in Kant than in Newton's natural philosophy.

Kant denied the possibility of absolute rest and sought to prove the universal circulation of matter in the Universe. He viewed the end of worlds as the beginning of new ones. His cosmogonic hypothesis is deistic in nature.

Kant appealed to God as the creator of matter and the laws of its motion. In 1763 he wrote “The only possible basis for proving the existence of God.”

Kant reveals agnostic motives: natural causes cannot explain the origin of living nature, since mechanics will not explain the origin of even one caterpillar.

Kant reveals a tendency to separate consciousness from being, which reached in the 70s. apogee. For example, he insists that real relations, negations and reasons are “of a completely different kind” than logical ones. He is right in emphasizing that the predicate of a thing and the predicate of a thought about this thing are not the same thing. One must distinguish between the real and the logically possible. But the tendency for a deeper and deeper distinction between the two types of foundation led Kant in the direction of Hume. He comes to contrast logical connections with causal ones.

In “pre-critical” creativity there was also a struggle against extreme spiritualism (“Dreams of a Spiritualist, Explained by the Dreams of Metaphysics” (1766)), which undermines all hopes of knowing the essence of psychic phenomena.

Thus, during this period the positions that formed the basis of Kant’s “critical” teaching began to take shape.

Transition to the critical period usually dated to 1770, when Kant defended his dissertation “On the Form and Principles of the Sensibly Perceptible and Intelligible World.” He became disillusioned with the rationalism of Wolff, the empiricism of Locke and Holbach, and was impressed by Leibniz. The hopes of the leaders of the Enlightenment for quick knowledge of the secrets of nature seem naive to him, but the rejection of scientific knowledge is even more harmful.

Kant formulates a double task: “to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith.” Here a “middle path between dogmatism... and skepticism” is outlined, a reconciliation of idealism with materialism on an ontological basis.

Kant called his philosophy critical idealism or transcendental idealism. He divided the abilities of the human soul into the ability of knowledge, the feeling of pleasure and displeasure and desire. The first is characterized by the activity of reason, the second by judgment, the third directs the mind through the search for final goals to achieve morality and freedom. Kant rejects theoretical evidence of the necessity of metaphysics, formulating the task of critical metaphysics.

At the beginning of his epistemological research, Kant poses the question: What can I know? And there are three more loans: What should I do? What can I hope for? What is a person and what can he become?

Epistemological classification of judgments. Synthetic a priori. To answer, Kant builds a typology of knowledge, dividing it into imperfect and perfect (truly scientific). The features of the latter are reliability, universality and necessity; it cannot be acquired from experience. Perfect knowledge is extra-empirical, a priori in nature. Kant distinguishes between empirical (a posteriori) and “pure” (a priori) knowledge.

Kant also distinguishes between analytical and synthetic knowledge.

The relationship between types of judgments is as follows:

The term “a priori” has several connotations. A priori is something that has some kind of, not further specified, non-experimental and in this sense “pure” origin. In Kant's reasoning about the ideals of behavior, the a priori does not point to what exists, but to what should be and, moreover, what is generally obligatory. The lack of experience of the a priori means that epistemologically it is “before” any experience, including psychological experience.

Kant's principle of the primacy of synthesis over analysis triumphs in synthetic judgments a priori. With the help of his supposedly proven existence of synthetic a priori judgments, he seeks to establish theses about the creative role of non-experiential consciousness and the possibility of rational knowledge, in principle independent of sensory knowledge. Hegel saw a deep dialectic in this desire: single consciousness generates manifold knowledge, and this knowledge is synthesis.

For Kant, the distinction between the analytical and the synthetic stems from the difference between the respective methods: a course of reasoning is analytical if it does not introduce new or even complex objects and does not conclude from the presence of one individual object to the existence (or non-existence) of another. But the line of reasoning is synthetic if it asserts that “due to the fact that there is something, there is also something else ... because something exists, something else is eliminated.”

Affirming the existence of synthetic a priori judgments, Kant, already at the beginning of his system, puts forward the dialectical problem of creative synthesis in knowledge. With the help of synthetic a priori judgments, Kant hoped, first of all, to exhaustively explain and indisputably substantiate the possibility of “pure” (i.e., theoretical mathematics).

The structure of the epistemological field. Kant divides the cognitive ability of consciousness as a whole (“reason” in the broad sense of the word, i.e., intellect) into three different abilities: sensibility, reason, and reason itself in the narrow sense of the word. Each ability corresponds to a specific question: How is pure mathematics possible? How is pure natural science possible? How is metaphysics, i.e. ontology, possible?

According to the questions, Kant's epistemology is divided into three main parts: transcendental aesthetics, transcendental analytics and transcendental dialectics.

“Transcendental” for Kant means “that which, although it precedes experience (a priori), is intended only to make experimental knowledge possible.” We can say that abilities are transcendental, and their results are a priori.

“Transcendent” is that which is beyond the limits of experience and does not relate to experience, as well as those principles that try to go beyond the limits of experience. The transcendental and the a posteriori are almost diametrically opposed areas. Therefore, Kant sometimes calls the thing-in-itself a “transcendental object.”

So, the structure of the epistemological field according to Kant is as follows: 1. The area of ​​sensations. 2. The a posteriori domain of objects of experience, ordered by a priori means (= science = truth = nature). 3. Transcendental abilities of the subject, which generate a priori means. 4. Transcendental apperception. 5. The transcendental region of non-experienced objects, i.e. the world of things in themselves.

Things in themselves (by themselves). Let's consider Kant's transcendental aesthetics. Kant understands by “aesthetics” the doctrine of sensuality in general as an epistemological doctrine, and not just concerning the contemplation of objects of art. Sensory contemplation is the beginning of all knowledge.

Kant considers the doctrine of the “thing in itself” to be an important component of the science of sensory knowledge and knowledge in general. He argues that beyond sensory phenomena there is an unknowable reality, about which in the theory of knowledge there is only an extremely abstract “pure” concept (noumenon). In epistemology, nothing definite can be said about things in themselves as such - neither that they are something divine, nor that they are material bodies.

The thing in itself, within the framework of Kant’s philosophical system, performs several functions:

1) The first meaning of the concept of a thing-in-itself in Kant’s philosophy is intended to indicate the presence of an external causative agent of our sensations and ideas. They “excite” our sensuality, awaken it to activity and to the appearance in it of various modifications of its states.

2) The second meaning is that this is any fundamentally unknowable object. We don't know in principle what they are. We know of a thing in itself only that it exists, and to some extent that which it is not. From things in themselves we have nothing except the thought of them as intelligible (intelligible) objects, about which it cannot be said that they are substances. This concept of the unknowable as such is “only the thought of some something in general.”

3) The third meaning embraces everything that lies in the transcendental region, that is, outside experience and the sphere of the transcendental. Among otherworldly things, Kant in his ethics postulates God and the immortal soul, that is, the traditional objects of objective idealism.

4) The fourth and generally idealistic meaning of the “thing in itself” is even broader as a kingdom of unattainable ideals in general, and this kingdom as a whole itself turns out to be a cognitive ideal of an unconditional higher synthesis. The thing in itself turns out to be the object of faith in this case.

Each of the four meanings of “things in themselves” corresponds to its own meaning of noumenon, that is, the concept of things in themselves, indicating the presence of the latter, but not giving positive knowledge about them.

Kant's ethical teaching. Kant affirms the primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason, of activity over knowledge. Kant adheres to the principle of the primacy of issues of morality of human behavior over issues of scientific knowledge.

Ethics is the main part of Kant's philosophy. At the center of Kantian philosophy is man, his dignity and destiny.

Kant's ethics is autonomous. It is focused on a certain ideal independent of any incoming considerations and incentives. Neither sensual desires, nor selfish calculation, nor appeals to benefit or harm should be taken into account at all.

Practical reason prescribes to itself the principles of moral behavior and finds them within itself as an internal a priori impulse. He is the only source of morality, just as reason turned in Kant, as his “criticism” developed, into the only source of the laws of nature.

Legality and morality. An imperative is a rule containing “objective compulsion to act” of a certain type. There are two main types of them, identified by edging: hypothetical in the sense of "condition dependent" and categorical imperative as a general invariant for a priori moral laws. This imperative is apodictic, necessarily unconditional. It follows from human nature, like hypothetical imperatives, but not from empirical, but from transcendental nature. He doesn't accept any "ifs". According to Kant, only that behavior is moral that completely obeys the requirements of the categorical imperative.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Johann Gotbib Fichte is a very original scientist, a contemporary of the Napoleonic Wars. Those who swept away the feudal rubbish of feudalism from the lives of peoples. The origins of Fichte's work are the political ideas of the French Revolution. But the absence of real political forces in Germany led to the fact that Fichte’s anti-feudal protest acquired an abstract form.

Life and work of Fichte. Fichte was born into a poor and large family of a rural weaver in East Saxony, and only the curiosity of a titled patron of the arts for the boy’s extraordinary abilities gave him the opportunity to receive an education.

Fichte read Rousseau with enthusiasm and became imbued with revolutionary democratic convictions. Kant's seeds also fall onto the prepared soil. Fichte abandons the rigid Spinozistic determinism and turns the efforts of his seething mind to finding a theoretical justification for freedom.

The idea of ​​freedom captures Fichte's soul. It is also in tune with his inner character, uncompromising honesty and straightforwardness. It was as if a German sans-culotte had entered the philosophical world.

An important role was played by Fichte's meeting with Kant, to whom he showed his first essay, “The Experience of Criticism of All Revelation.” Kant recognized the guest's strong and original mind, contributed to the publication of his work, and when rumor attributed the authorship to Kant, he publicly explained the misunderstanding, and Fichte immediately gained wide fame.

But Kant did not recognize the direct genetic connection between Fichte’s ideas and his own, and then more decisively dissociated himself from them.

On the recommendation of Goethe, who became interested in the bright thinker, Fichte in 1784 took the position of professor at the University of Jena. During his years as a professor at Jena, Fichte created the basic outline of his philosophical system. Then the reactionaries expelled him, having become obsessed with his careless handling of the categories of religion.

But Fichte was invited to give lectures in Erlangen, Berlin, Koenigsberg and even Kharkov.

When Napoleon occupied Germany in 1806, Fichte plunged headlong into social activities, giving patriotic lectures. Since 1813, he has taken an active part in the bourgeois-democratic movement for the national restoration of Germany. He joined the militia, but in January 1814 he died of typhus, which he contracted from his wife, who worked in a military hospital.

Philosophy as a science. Initial intellectual intuition. Fichte emphasizes that philosophy is a science, and hopes to find in it the “fundamental science”, the science of sciences, knowledge of the processes of obtaining knowledge, the teaching of science and the justification of all knowledge in general. What we have before us is not yet a “science of sciences” in the Hegelian sense, but already a sketch of its concept.

Differences emerged between Kant and Fichte on the issue of knowledge. Fichte rightly considers the combination of idealistic and materialistic tendencies in Kahn's theory of knowledge to be eclecticism, but he sees the way to overcome it in getting rid of the doctrine of things in themselves. Recognizing, unlike Kant, intellectual intuition, Fichte brings it somewhat closer to rational activity, but, like Kant, denies the possibility of intuitive penetration into the other world (for Kant this world is unknowable, for Fichte it does not exist).

Fichte draws attention to the content of the pure transcendental “H,” i.e., the former Kantian apperception taken in its essence. By constructing the “I,” Fichte tries to reveal it as the very essence of consciousness, not as a thing, but as an action. If for Kant the active transcendental subject is passive in the sense that he is forced to deal with the matter of experience that is given to him, then in Fichte the active creative “I” is passive in the sense that it is not able to create the world otherwise than by influencing on yourself.

Three principles and their dialectics. Fichte builds the system of solipsism of the “I” through three fundamental judgments, which together express his interpretation of transcendental apperception.

1. The universal “I” asserts itself. “I” creates itself, and this is not some kind of permanent state, but a powerful act caused by a special beginning-impetus.

2. “I” cannot be satisfied with the first principle: it strives for self-determination, and this is impossible except through the mediation of another, that is, that which is different from “I”. Consequently, the second principle: “I” opposes itself to “not-I”. In essence, there is an “alienation” of the “not-I” from the “I”, expressing an idealistic solution to the main question of philosophy and anticipating Hegel.

3. The third principle plays the role of synthesis and leads the first two to unity. It says: consciousness posits and unites “I” and “not-I”.

Ethics of action and freedom. Fichte's ethics were developed in the “System of Doctrines of Morality...” (17989) and in a number of works on the purpose of man and scientist as a true person. According to Fichte, man is an organized product of nature. In its entirety, it is not only an object, but also a subject. As an object, it is not passive, and objective necessity, recognized by man as self-determination, turns into subjective freedom.

The historical path of mastery of material nature is a worldwide process of leap-like growth in the ethical culture of mankind.

If duty without feeling is a tedious duty, then feeling without duty is a blind and rude impulse. The combination of duty and feeling occurs precisely thanks to culture. Thus, “I,” in the course of the development of social civilization, must triumph both over nature in general and over its own natural basis.

As a result, the distinction between “legal” and “moral” actions will disappear, reason and feeling, duty and desire, theory and practice will be identified.

Philosophy of history, law and state. Fichte's philosophy of history is imbued with idealistic theology. The absolutely free “I” is not only the source and starting point of historical development, but also its criterion and goal, hovering somewhere in an unusually distant distance. History is a growing and forward-looking process of cultivating practical and theoretical reason, and it is generic in nature, although it occurs through the improvement of the consciousness of individuals.

The external conditions for the realization of the moral goals of history are, according to Fichte, law and the state. Fichte argues that man can only exist as a social being.

But the state is only a service and therefore temporary institution. It is only a condition, a means of moral progress for the empirical selves. After “myriads of years,” morality will replace the state, law and church. Only then will a truly “natural state” of man arise, corresponding to his actual nature and purpose.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Hegel's philosophy can be characterized as a system of dialectical objective idealism. At a new, higher level, he revived the ideas of idealistic rationalism of the 17th century, transforming the thesis about the coincidence of real and logical connections into the position about the dialectical (relative) identity of being and the thought of being.

Hegel's epistemology, in contrast to Kant's theory of knowledge, is not reduced to the study of a person's subjective cognitive abilities, but is aimed at studying the dependence of the laws of cognition of an object on its own properties. Hegel comes to the conclusion that the laws of being are the laws of cognition of being, but on the basis of idealism this conclusion received the opposite meaning - deriving the laws of being from the laws of its cognition, so that Hegel’s ontology coincided with epistemology.

All these motifs can be found in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a work that completes the formation of Hegel’s philosophical views. This is both an introduction to his philosophy and its application to a number of specific issues. “Phenomenology of Spirit”, as it were, programmed the future philosophy of spirit: its first five sections are a sketch of the doctrine of subjective spirit, the sixth section corresponds to the doctrine of objective spirit, and the last two are about the absolute spirit.

Phenomenology of Spirit prepares Hegel's mature system. She proclaims the end of the kingdom of reason and the beginning of the kingdom of reason.

Hegel's philosophy is the completion and highest achievement of German classical idealism. Hegel proclaimed man's ability to create himself, the infinite superiority of social life over nature and the power of the knowing consciousness. He substantiated all these theses through idealistic dialectics.

Hegel's system is completed by the doctrine of absolute spirit. History achieves the unity of the subjective and objective states of the spirit on the basis of the level of rationality that is possible under the conditions of the most rationally structured state.

Ludwig Feuerbach

Young Hegelian movement. The starting point for the philosophical ideology of bourgeois-democratic movements of the late 30s. XIX century In Germany, the radical teachings of the Young Hegelians began. Their significance in the philosophical preparation of the revolution of 1848 - 1849. no doubt.

As the revolutionary situation approached, a split in the Hegelian school became inevitable. Outwardly, it seemed to be the result of a dispute about whether it would be correct to identify the Hegelian absolute with God, but its participants also differed among themselves in their answers to the question about the nature of the relationship of the absolute to man. But essentially the split was determined by the polemic between supporters of the radical and conservative interpretation of the formula “Everything that is reasonable is real, and everything that is real is reasonable.”

The right, or Old Hegelians, argued that the Hegelian absolute should be understood as the highest spiritual-individual being, representing the subject of rational world governance. But their philosophical activity expressed both their general conservatism and attempts to overcome the crisis of Protestant theology.

The left, or Young Hegelians, declared that their teacher was a pantheist, and some, for example Bruno Bauer, began to prove his atheism, and even reproached Hegel himself for the fact that in practice he himself moved away from his doctrine, which disoriented his students. The Young Hegelians decided to deepen his criticism of political and church reaction and rejected Hegel’s opinion on the need for the coincidence of state power, religion and the principles of philosophy.

Philosophers of the Young Hegelian circle. David Friedrich Strauss (1808 - 1874) wrote the two-volume Life of Jesus in the spirit of pantheism. Attacked both orthodox Christian and Hegelian Christology. According to Strauss, the gospel is a historical document of social psychology, namely a collection of myths of early Christian communities, Christ is a natural person, since the absolute could not inhabit a single person, and God is the image of substantial infinity.

Bruno Bauer (1809 - 1882) went further in denying religion than Strauss. He rejected the real historical existence of Christ altogether. Bauer portrayed Hegel himself as an enemy of religion, the church and the Prussian state, a friend of materialism and the Jacobins. Bauer himself understood that this image did not really correspond to reality, but he wanted to stimulate the development of Young Hegelianism to the left. But the “leftism” of Bauer himself was limited to the fact that he reduced bourgeois revolutionism to intellectual criticism of religion, despotism and clericalism on the part of outstanding “critically thinking individuals.”

Arnold Ruge (1803 - 1880) was the first among the Young Hegelians to draw political conclusions from the criticism of religion, transferring its fire to the Hegelian philosophy of state and law. All the most political episodes of the Young Hegelian movement are associated with the name of Ruge, and it was in his articles that they briefly approached revolutionary democracy.

Stirner and Hess. Max Stirner (pseudonym of Kaspar Schmidt) (1806 - 1856) developed as a thinker in the Young Hegelian circle of the “Free”, but in the book “The One and His Property” he sharply criticizes them and appears as an extreme individualist and nihilist, rejecting any realities and values: morality, law, state, history, society, reason, truth, communism. “I am nothing, and from whom I myself will draw everything, as a creator-creator... My Self is most precious to me!” Many of his ideas formed the basis of the ideology of anarchism.

Moses Hess (1812 - 1875) also broke with the circle of Young Hegelians. His role in philosophy is twofold. On the one hand, as a result of his combination of the principles of historical necessity of Hegel, the humanism of Feuerbach and the utopian communism of Cabet, the theoretical basis of the movement of “true socialists” arose. On the other hand, Hess's critique of capitalism attracted the attention of the young Marx. But Hess himself was influenced by Marx and Engels. In The Philosophy of Action (1843), Hess stated that which It is precisely in this direction that the time has come to remake Hegel’s teaching: “Now the task of the philosophy of spirit is to become a philosophy of action.”

Polish Hegelians.“Prolegomena to Historiosophy (1838) by August Cieszkowski (1814 - 1894)” immediately drew attention to such flaws in the Hegelian system as contemplation, a tendency towards fatalism, indifference to the fate of the individual and exclusion from philosophical analysis of the problems of happiness and the future of humanity. Tseshkovsky's main idea is not to draw a line under the results of past development, but to put the conclusions of these philosophical results into practice.

Edward Dembosky (1822 - 1846) - author of the “philosophy of creativity”, the main categories of which were “nationality”, “progress”, “action” and “daring”. He reproaches Hegel (like Fourier, Saint-Simon, the Girondins and the authors of the compromise Polish constitution) for eclecticism, which, in his opinion, means the reconciliation of opposites in theory and unprincipled compromises in political practice.

Life and work of Feuerbach. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804 - 1872) considered it his duty to solve the problem posed by life itself and also arising from the contradictions of Hegel's teachings. What is the true nature of a real person and how can one determine his path to happiness? How to free him from the oppression of the omnipotent absolute? Having devoted his philosophy to the solution of these problems and placing at its center not the abstract “Self-Consciousness”, but a person, he gave it an anthropological character. By anthropological philosophy he understood a teaching in which an integral, real person would be both the starting point and his final goal.

L. Feuerbach was born on July 28, 1804 to the family of a prominent lawyer, listened to Hegel's lectures at the University of Berlin. In the notes of “Doubts” (1827 - 1828), a protest against dictatorship is already brewing idealistic thoughts.

In “Thoughts on Death and Immortality” (1830), he contrasts the Christian dogma of personal immortality with the immortality of the human race in its real, earthly life, which became the starting point for Young Hegelian criticism. The essay was confiscated, Feuerbach was fired, and for six years he unsuccessfully tried to gain access to teaching again. As a sign of protest, he moved to the countryside for a quarter of a century, where he wrote his main works.

His most famous, although not the most mature, work is “The Essence of Christianity,” which caused a huge resonance. He developed the concept of criticism of religion as the alienated existence of the human essence, which took the form of illusory consciousness.

Feuerbach's lectures on the essence of religion were a political act, where he declared the need to become a "political materialist" since the subject of his lectures - religion - was "closely connected with politics."

He enthusiastically embraced the revolution of 1848-1849, and the victorious reaction and the militaristic regime of Bismarck met only hatred on his part. His old age passed in poverty, reaching complete poverty.

A question about dialectics. Anthropological principle. The presence of moments of dialectics in Feuerbach is undeniable. When he broke with Hegel's teaching, he did not reject the dialectic of interpersonal relations, although he retained little of it. But he noticed the dialectical fate of pantheism; a dialectical character is also inherent in the mechanism of religious alienation he denigrates. There are many real transitions to the opposite here, and “what was religion yesterday ceases to be it today; what seems atheism today will become religion tomorrow.” But the dialectic of all these moments is not comprehended by him as dialectics.

Anthropologism was the main feature of Feuerbach's materialism. Feuerbach's “man” is no longer a conglomerate of passive atoms, drawn by external influences, the “block” that the leaders of French materialism produce, but an active individual. It is no longer an obedient organ of the absolute spirit, fatally included in the system of stages of ascent to a goal alien to the aspirations of people and incomprehensible to them. Feuerbach's anthropologism was directed primarily against the interpretation of man as a “servant of God” and a submissive instrument of the world spirit. From the point of view of a philosopher, for understanding a person, not only the affects of fear in religion or interest in knowledge are important, but also “love” as a philosophical category in the sense of not only desires, passion, admiration and dreams, but also effective self-affirmation.

For Feuerbach, “truth is neither materialism, nor idealism, nor physiology, nor psychology, truth is only anthropology.”

The concept of human nature. As M. Hess noted, Feuerbach humanized ontology, turned it towards the interests and needs of man and proclaimed materialistic humanism. The duty of a philosopher is to help people become happier. To do this, it is necessary to consider a person not in isolation from the surrounding world, but in connection with it, and this world is nature. Man and nature, as starting points of philosophizing, are united together by the concept of human nature.

But Feuerbach’s characterizations of man suffer from great social abstraction, since he distinguishes him from animals essentially only by the presence of a “superlative degree of sensualism.” The social aspect of philosophy is reduced by Feuerbach to the interaction in the “binomial” of individuals (“I” and “You”). The combination of two individuals in this “cell” of social life - in a heterosexual pair “I - You” - is a source of social diversity already at higher levels.

Criticism of religion as alienation. Religion in the perspective of eras. "Religion of Man". In the analysis of religion, Feuerach took the baton from the materialists and enlighteners of the 18th century. He was the first to highlight and substantiate the idea that religion did not arise by chance, but naturally, and is a product of social psychology, which constantly reflects in the binary system “I - You”, and highlighted the basis of religion as a person’s sense of dependence. Religion turns out to be an expression of egoism. Religion is a “reflex, a reflection” of a person’s powerlessness and at the same time his active reaction to his powerlessness.

In order for a person’s religious self-alienation (self-deception, a vampire sucking out the content of connections between people, taking away love from a person to God) to be abolished, all people must become happy.

What to do with religion in the future? Feuerbach concludes that necessity religion because it makes up for what people lack. He believes that humanity needs "new religion". Feuerbach's thought about the necessity of religion, that is, about its adequate replacement, comes into play. The philosopher proposes to transfer the emotions of religious veneration to Humanity. “By reducing theology to anthropology, I raise anthropology to theology.”

Ethics Feuerbach, his “communism” and “love”. In ethics, Feuerbach took the position of abstract anthropological humanism, having exhausted all those possibilities of metaphysical materialism that could serve the development of anti-religious morality. In his vibrant ethical teaching, he includes all the moral implications of atheism, sharply opposing religious doctrines of morality. His conclusion: true morality and religion are antagonists.

He tries to base his teaching on morality on the principles of biopsychic sensibility. He orients his ethics towards justification, exaltation, glorification and, finally, deification of human impulses towards the utmost completeness and this sense of ideal sensual happiness. He calls for the deification of relationships between people, for their path to happiness lies only through them, to deify the love of “I” for “You” and “You” for “I”. The religion of man turns out to be the religion of sexual love.

The need of people for each other equalizes them and unites them with each other, develops a sense of collectivism. If, instead of faith in God, people gain faith in themselves and achieve that “man is God to man,” then the friendship of all people with each other will be established without distinction of gender - and this will be the path to communism. "Communism" in Feuerbach's writings is a designation for the general fact that people need each other.

Feuerbach traces his ethics to the principle of rational egoism. Everyone strives for happiness; to be a person means to be happy. But the condition for happiness is also the happiness of the partner. Happiness can only be mutual, and from here Feuerbach wants to reinterpret egoism as altruism, deriving the latter as a necessary requirement from the former.

Theory of knowledge. "Love" again. Feuerbach sharply emphasizes that the objective world is cognized by the subject through human senses, and all nature is cognized through the knowledge of human nature. Therefore, the highest form of knowledge is sexual intercourse.

In Feuerbach's epistemology, new shades are added to the terms “sensuality” and “love”. Sensuality takes on the meaning of the fullness of life experience, and love is a set of actions that provide people with active communication and unity with nature.

Irrationalism of the mid-19th century. Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860) contrasted his teaching with rationalism and dialectical teaching to Hegel, which he called the “basilisk egg.” He also reacted with hatred to Feuerbach’s materialism.

The deep pessimism characteristic of Schopenhauer had a complex nature: the feudal-aristocratic contempt for the established soulless merchant morals of the order was later added to the gloomy skepticism of a bourgeois ideologist who did not expect anything good from the future.

Metaphysics of Will. Schopenhauer himself admitted that his philosophical system arose as an amalgam of the ideas of Kant, Plato and Indian Buddhists. His philosophy is eclectic, but it is permeated by certain common principles.

Of all Kant’s categories, he recognized only causality, but also included time and space among the categories, and in Kant’s thesis about the primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason he saw the germ of his doctrine of the primacy of the volitional principle. In Indian philosophy, his attention was attracted by the concept of "maya" and the ideal of immersion in "nirvana".

The starting point of Schopenhauer’s reasoning is the assertion that the world of our experience is purely phenomenal, it is just a set of ideas reminiscent of “maya (appearance)”, but categorically ordered.

The philosopher turned the law of sufficient reason into a method of cognition of phenomena, while he proposes to discover philosophical truths through intuition of the Schelling kind. Schopenhauer called this law “the general form of an object,” appearing in 4 different forms depending on the class of objects (1. Class of physical objects-phenomena in the relations of time, space and causality; 2. Abstract concepts related to each other through judgments “ mind”, which is understood as the ability of all theoretical thinking; 3. Mathematical objects generated by the relations of time and space; 4. Empirical “I” as subjects of various expressions of will). Consequently, the law takes on four types: sufficient grounds for becoming, cognition, being and action, or motivation.

The entire world of phenomena around us is a set of sensory-intuitive ideas of human subjects. The earth, seas, houses, bodies of people are objects-representations, but the representing human subjects themselves also turn out to be only representations, so literally all the world of phenomena is not so much imagined as imagined, like a dream, Buddhist "Maya".

“Behind” the phenomena there is a world of things in themselves, which is a kind of metaphysical Will. It is unique, but its manifestations are multiple. Among the most eloquent are gravity, magnetism, the forces of chemical affinity, the desire of animals for self-preservation, the sexual instinct of animals and the various affects of people.

But unlike Kant, Will as a thing in itself in Schopenhauer is recognizable or at least identifiable, and secondly, it would be easier to call it Force or Energy with a capital letter.

Schopenhauer's pessimism. The World Will is irrational, blind and wild, has no plan, is in a state of eternal dissatisfaction, “forced to devour itself, since there is nothing besides it and it is a hungry will.” Hence, people’s lives are full of constant anxiety, bitter disappointments and torment. Chapter 46 of Volume II of “The World as Will and Idea” is entitled: “On the insignificance and sorrows of life.”

Schopenhauer denies in principle the existence of progress in human society. History seems to him to be a meaningless web of events.

Manifestations of will collide and fight with each other. The will, through its creations, finds itself plunged into suffering, tries to overcome them, but this is tantamount to the fact that it fights with itself, but only plunges itself into new troubles: “... in the heat of passion, sinks its teeth into its own body... The tormentor and the tormented are one” .

The doctrine of self-abolition of the Will and its social meaning. Schopenhauer shows how people can cease to be slaves and instruments of such a deceptive and disappointing world Will to live. The way out is in the development by people of vital energy, which must be directed against the Will as such. We must turn our human will against itself.

This activity has two stages. The first gives only temporary liberation from the service of the Will, helps to escape from it for a while. This is aesthetic contemplation.

The second, highest stage of annihilation is associated with the ethical field of human activity. A person must extinguish the will to life and renounce it, surrender to quietism, that is, the cessation of desires, asceticism. The will of the ascetic crushes the will to live and thereby undermines the Will in general. The abolition of the subject also destroys the object, for Schopenhauer accepted the subjective-idealist thesis: without the subject there is no object.

The highest human ideal turns out to be the “holy” hermit. The successor of this system, E. Hartmann, made a direct conclusion about the expediency of collective suicide, but Schopenhauer reasoned that the ascetic flees from the pleasures of life, which means life itself, while the suicide seeks to avoid life's suffering, which means he loves the joys of life, and by his act , on the contrary, affirms it.

Schopenhauer did not believe in progress and denounced humanism, calling it a vile companion of materialism and “bestialism.” Although he recognized the affinity of the Christian message of "compassion", he liked the Buddhist message of submissive self-denial. In it, “compassion” was followed by “chastity”, “poverty” and readiness to suffer, after which - quietism, asceticism and “mysticism”. The ultimate goal is “nirvana” as the abolition of the entire universe of Will, i.e., universal death: if at least one subject remains alive, in his ideas the world of objects will continue to exist, so the task of abolition of being will remain unsolved.

Eduard Hartman. Hegel's dialectics, represented by the system of the “prince of pessimists” Schopenhauer, received a kind of anti-dialectical double. From Schopenhauer, traditions of philosophical decadence begin, which go to the theorist of the “unconscious” E. Hartmann, then to the neo-Kantian G. Vaihinger, the young F. Nietzsche and the entire “philosophy of life”, to Z. Freud and A. Camus.

The immediate impact of Schopenhauer's philosophy was its pessimism. Eduard Hartmann (1842 - 1906) began to improve this theory, who added borrowings from Schelling, Darwin's evolutionary theory, and most of all - from Hegel's dialectics and rationalism to Schopenhauer's eclectic structure. In Hartmann’s main works “Philosophy of the Unconscious” (1869) and “The Doctrine of Categories” (1896) the following theoretical concept is outlined: the unconscious principle as the unity of Will and Idea develops through teleological splitting, like Schelling’s absolute, and then through the war of will and reason, i.e. i.e. through the war of opposites, like Hegel’s world spirit. The categories are a priori, like Kant's, but they are unconscious structures of the action of the impersonal mind in human individuals. “Man is completely dependent on the unconscious,” and receives from it only sorrow and suffering. The pursuit of happiness is a foolish illusion. But our world is the best of worlds, because it is capable of self-destruction. People must commit themselves to self-destruction and thereby achieve the “redemption” (Erlösung) of the world.

In the time of Bismarck, the doctrine of self-negation of the will was replaced by Nietzsche’s “will to power,” which was accompanied by an increasingly progressive denigration of reason. These concepts were of a cosmic nature. S. Kierkegaard followed a different path, alien to generalization.

Soren Kierkegaard

Like Schopenhauer, he attacked scientific knowledge and Hegel’s dialectics. He rejects the Hegelian identity of being and thinking, because under no circumstances does he recognize the rationality of reality. He separates thinking and being, logic and dialectics, objectivity and subjectivity from each other, discards the first and retains only the second. The subject of his reflections is dialectical subjectivity, the subjective dialectics of a unique individual.

The individual and the dialectics of its “existence.” Kierkegaard is an opponent of all philosophical systems, but he also developed a semblance of a system of thoughts. Its central idea is the principle of human individuality. The spiritual individual, the “Single,” forms the rules of his behavior contrary to the social environment and any of its laws, and the more he succeeds in this, the more lonely he is. “After all, one person for another cannot be anything other than an obstacle on his path,” a threat to his existence. The surrounding “mass” of people are “animals or bees,” and therefore “be afraid of friendship.” The people are something faceless, anonymous and “untrue”. Social associations, ideas of collectivism and social progress are a “pagan” illusion.

The mature Kierkegaard proclaimed the rebellion of the individual against the race, social class, state, and society. Everything universal, the universal, is false, only the Individual is “true” and only it has meaning. Only the One has “existence.”

By “existence,” Kierkegaard understands a specifically human category that expresses the existence of a unique individuality through the chain of its internal and also unique experiences, “moments.” “Existence” is, as it were, the apogee of life’s “shudder,” suffering and passionate attempts to get out of its power. “To exist” means to realize one’s being through the free choice of one of the alternatives and thereby assert oneself precisely as an individual, and not as a mass phenomenon from the “crowd”.

The category of “existence” is the focus of Kierkegaard’s dialectic, the dialectic of the psychological struggles of the subject in the cage of the opposites “finite” and “infinite,” “fear” as a state of uncertainty and “choice” as a decision that interrupts fluctuations between alternatives. But the dialectical collision of opposites is resolved by the philosopher not through a mediating synthesis, but with the help of a “leap-choice”: the impulse of determination allows one to jump, as if in one fell swoop, into the bosom of one of the alternatives, discarding the other.

Kierkegaard's dialectic is completely alien to the movement of general categories, is purely individualized and covered by an unsteady network of a kind of concepts-experiences. The main ones of these mental-emotional hybrids are: single, existence, moment, paradox, fear, guilt, sin, choice, leap, despair.

Using a complex system of pseudonyms, the philosopher began a series of Socratic dialogues with himself, also resorting to the tried and tested means of the Jena romantics - irony. For Kierkegaard, irony is doubt, which always elevates the doubter above the one “who teaches,” duality and mistrust, which, being convinced, itself turns into faith. However, before us is rather not a “Danish Socrates”, but a “Danish Tertullian”.

The concept of the experience of “choice” plays an important role, which is quite consistent with the history of his life and manifested in his character. Kierkegaard himself sought to emphasize the universal significance of his individual experiences, considering himself man-problem.

Three lifestyles. "Paradox". The three stages of the earthly development of the Individual, the three images (styles) of his life concretize three different moral attitudes in relation to the surrounding world.

1) Aesthetic stage: a sensual way of life, characterized by eroticism and cynicism, chaos and chance.

2) Ethical stage: the individual chooses the position of a strict and universal distinction between good and evil and takes the side of the former, guided in his life by solid principles of morality and the obligations of duty (Kant!). When it becomes clear that a person is never morally self-sufficient and perfect because he is sinful and initially guilty, an ethically thinking individual will find a way out of his contradictions, moving on to the third stage of “existence.”

3) Religious stage. One of the personifications of this stage is the long-suffering Job, the other is Abraham, who, to please to his, who personally addressed him in a state individual contact with him, to God, and for the sake of faith in his God showed a willingness to bear the burden of moral responsibility and guilt for violating His own commandments.

Here another very important concept appears - the experience of Kierkegaard’s dialectic - “paradox”, i.e. the suffering of “existence” resulting from the conflict in his mental experiences. Kierkegaard's "paradoxes" are the highest passion of thinking, which is destroyed in this passion, ceasing to be thinking. All stages of the existence, truth and affirmation of the Christian faith are paradoxical. Kierkegaard was the first to notice that paradox is an ineradicable form all sorts of things theological thinking. Therefore, “Tertullian of the 20th Century” calls to believe precisely that faith is a matter of choice, a decision of the will, a leap, a risk, a miracle, an absurdity. Credo, quia absurdum est.

Subjectivity of truth, “fear” and “sickness leading to death.” Kierkegaard understands truth and faith as “subjectivity.” They do not know the truth, in it exist.

At the stage of religious faith-experience, the Individual strives for a synthesis of the finite with the infinite, but it is unattainable, and any attempt to approach it entails new paradoxes, and therefore new yearnings of the spirit. The person here is especially overwhelmed by the languor of “fear,” that is, acute anxiety, which Kierkegaard, in the “concept of fear” (1844), connected in its origins with the ideas of sexuality and sinfulness in general.

“Fear” is a tremulous state of burning fear of the unknown, mysterious, mystical. Whoever is engulfed by it is already guilty; faith at the third stage is called upon to save the Individual from the “fear”.

But at this stage, something opposite happens: fear and trepidation increase and bring the individual to extreme exhaustion of spirit: this is cruel languor, permanent despair, a “sickness towards death”, in which the attraction to the promised afterlife is combined with disgust from the expected transcendence.

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