Nineteenth-Century German Thought as One Arc
The seventh volume makes a choice of scope that its preface states plainly. Volume VI had ended with Kant, so the natural next step was post-Kantian German idealism; Copleston might then have turned to France and Britain in the same period. On reflection he decided instead to treat nineteenth-century German philosophy on its own, judging that this would confer a greater unity on the book than a survey spread across nations could. The decision holds almost without exception: the only non-German-speaking philosopher discussed is Kierkegaard, and he wrote in Danish. The volume is entitled Fichte to Nietzsche because Nietzsche is the last world-famous philosopher considered at any length, though Copleston notes that it might, with some risk of misleading readers, have been called Fichte to Heidegger — for the final chapter does glance beyond Nietzsche into the twentieth century. What results is not a catalogue of a century but the story of a single trajectory: the rise of idealist metaphysics out of Kant, the many-sided reaction against it, and the currents into which that reaction flowed.
Part I — The Post-Kantian Idealist Systems
The first and longest part treats idealism as a system-building ambition. Its introductory chapter — placed inside the part rather than before the book, since it concerns only this movement — sets the terms: idealism’s insistence on system, its confidence in the power and scope of philosophy, its relation to theology and to the Romantic movement, and the difficulty of actually fulfilling the idealist programme. From there Copleston works through the major figures at length. Fichte is given three chapters, moving from the search for a single first principle of philosophy and the pure ego known in intellectual intuition, through the science of ethics and the deduction of the State, to the later philosophy of Being and the charge of atheism. Schelling likewise receives three, from the philosophy of Nature and the system of transcendental idealism to the idea of a cosmic Fall and the distinction between negative and positive philosophy. A chapter on Schleiermacher turns on the basic religious experience and its interpretation. Hegel then closes the part across three chapters — the phenomenology of consciousness, the logic and the ontological status of the Idea, the philosophy of Nature and of objective Spirit in right, morality and the State, and finally the sphere of absolute Spirit in art, religion and philosophy, ending with the split between right-wing and left-wing Hegelians that the next part will need.
Part II — The Reaction Against Metaphysical Idealism
The second part gathers the thinkers who turned against the idealist system, and it is here that the volume’s drama sharpens. Copleston opens with earlier critics — Fries, Herbart’s realism, Beneke, Bolzano’s logic — before giving two chapters to Schopenhauer, whose world as Idea and world as manifestation of the Will to live issue in a metaphysical pessimism and, in the second chapter, in aesthetic contemplation and renunciation as the way of salvation. The transformation of idealism follows: Feuerbach turning theology into anthropology, Ruge criticizing the Hegelian attitude to history, and Stirner’s philosophy of the ego, and then Marx and Engels, whose materialism, dialectical materialism and materialist conception of history are expounded and weighed. The part ends with Kierkegaard, treated alone and on his own terms — the individual against the crowd, the dialectic of the stages, truth as subjectivity, the idea of existence and the concept of dread. Read together, these chapters trace how the idealist confidence that reason comprehends the whole was met from several directions at once: by the primacy of a blind Will, by the reduction of the divine to human projection, by the claim of material and economic life, and by the irreducible standpoint of the existing individual.
Part III — Later Currents and the Prospect of a New Century
The third part follows the century toward its close and beyond. Copleston surveys non-dialectical materialism and its critics, Lange and Haeckel and the attempt of empirio-criticism to overcome the opposition of materialism and idealism; the neo-Kantian movement in its Marburg and Baden schools, with Cassirer and a note on Dilthey; and the revival of metaphysics in Fechner, Lotze’s teleological idealism, Wundt, Driesch’s vitalism and Eucken, together with the recovery of the past in the revival of Thomism. Two chapters then give Nietzsche his full measure: the phases of his thought read as masks, the critique of contemporary culture and of morals, atheism and its consequences, and then the hypothesis of the Will to Power extended through knowledge, Nature and man, the doctrine of Superman and the order of rank, and the theory of the eternal recurrence. The volume closes not with a Concluding Review but with a chapter named Retrospect and Prospect, which raises the questions left by nineteenth-century German philosophy and then looks ahead — to positivism, the philosophy of existence, the rise of phenomenology in Brentano, Meinong and Husserl, the return to ontology in Nicolai Hartmann, and the metaphysics of Being in Heidegger and the Thomists.
For this library the volume earns its place as the record of a hinge. It shows idealism at its most confident, claiming that reason can think the Absolute whole, and then shows that claim breaking apart into the several nineteenth-century voices — Schopenhauer’s Will, Feuerbach’s projection, Marx’s material history, Kierkegaard’s existing self, Nietzsche’s revaluation — from which the psychology of the inner life would later have to learn its own vocabulary.