The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Sartre, Jean-Paul, Saint Genet, comédien et martyr. Paris: Gallimard, 1952.

  Sartre, Jean-Paul, J.P. Sartre commente l’enfer c’est les autres en introduction à Huis Clos. Audio-CD 2004. Paris: Gallimard-Emen (this is a recording of the ‘preface parlé’ to a recorded version of the play in 1965).

  Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, System des transzendentalen Idealismus. In: Sämtliche Werke III, 327–634. K.F.A. Schelling (ed.). Stuttgart/Augsburg, 1856–61.

  Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006.

  Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, Die Weltalter. Fragmente. M. Schröter (ed.). Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1966.

  Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, Über die Natur der Philosophie als Wissenschaft. In Sämtliche Werke IX, 209–53. K. F. A. Schelling (ed.). Stuttgart/Augsburg, 1856–61.

  Secondary Texts

  Blackham, Harold John (1952), Six Existentialist Thinkers. Kierkegaard. Nietzsche. Jaspers. Marcel. Heidegger. Sartre. New York: Routledge, 2002.

  Dupré, Louis, ‘The Sickness unto Death: Critique of Modern Age’. In Charles Guignon (ed.), The Existentialists: Critical Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004, 33–52. [First published in: R. Perkins (ed.), The Sickness unto Death. International Kierkegaard Commentary (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987), 85–106.]

  Earnshaw, Steven, Existentialism: a Guide for the Perplexed. London and New York: Continuum, 2006.

  Franke, William, ‘The Deaths of God in Hegel and Nietzsche and the Crisis of Values in Secular Modernity and Post-Secular Postmodernity’, Religion and the Arts, 11(2), 2007, 214–41.

  Friedman, Maurice, ‘Friedrich Nietzsche: Father of Atheist Existentialism’, Journal of Existentialism, VI(23), 1966, 269–78.

  Grøn, Arne, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, trans. Jeanette Knox. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2008. [First published 1994.]

  Joannis, David Guy, Sartre et le problème de la connaissance. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1996.

  Kaufmann, Walter, Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian Books, 1956.

  Leiter, Brian, ‘The Paradox of Fatalism and Self-Creation in Nietzsche’. In Brian Leiter and John Richardson (eds.), Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 281–321.

  McBride, William L., ‘Existentialism’. In Constantin V. Boundas, The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007, 415–27.

  Miles, Thomas, ‘Nietzsche. Rival Visions of the Best Way of Life’. In Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and Existentialism. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011, 263–99.

  Nehamas, Alexander, ‘How One Becomes What One Is’. In Charles Guignon (ed.). The Existentialists: Critical Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004, 73–102. [Originally appeared in The Philosophical Review 92, no. 3 (July 1983).]

  Schacht, Richard, ‘Nietzsche: after the Death of God’. In Steven Crowell, The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

  Shestov, Lev, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, trans. Elinor Hewitt. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1969. [First published 1934.]

  Solomon, Robert C., ‘A More Severe Morality: Nietzsche’s Affirmative Ethics’. In Charles Guignon (ed.), The Existentialists: Critical Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004, 53–72 [Originally appeared in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 16, no. 3 (October 1985).]

  Solomon, Robert C., ‘Nietzsche as Existentialist and as Fatalist: the Practical Paradoxes of Self-Making’, International Studies in Philosophy, XXXIV/3, 2002, 41–54.

  Wienand, Isabelle, Significations de la Mort de Dieu chez Nietzsche d’Humain, trop Humain à Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006.

  * * *

  1 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Methuen, 1948), 25. Further references to this text will be abbreviated EH, followed by page number.

  2 Maurice Friedman, ‘Friedrich Nietzsche: Father of Atheist Existentialism’ (Journal of Existentialism, VI-23, 1966), 269.

  3 See for instance: Harold John Blackham, Six Existentialist Thinkers: Kierkegaard. Nietzsche. Jaspers. Marcel. Heidegger. Sartre (New York: Routledge, 1952), 12. Also see Robert Solomon, ‘Nietzsche as Existentialist and as Fatalist: The Practical Paradoxes of Self-Making’ (International Studies in Philosophy, XXXIV/3, 2002), 42.

  4 Blackham., op. cit., V.

  5 Albert Camus, L’homme révolté (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 133 edition, 1951), 88. Further references to this text will be abbreviated HR.

  6 Camus, HR, 52 (my translation).

  7 See Isabelle Wienand, Significations de la Mort de Dieu chez Nietzsche d’Humain, trop Humain à Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006), 147.

  8 Friedman, op. cit., 272. See also Martin Heidegger, ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God is dead”’, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 160.

  9 Louis Dupré, ‘The Sickness unto Death: Critique of Modern Age’. In: Charles Guignon (ed.), The Existentialists: Critical Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004), 34 and 42. See also Thomas Miles, ‘Nietzsche. Rival Visions of the Best Way of Life’. In: Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and Existentialism (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011), 264: ‘Kierkegaard’s concept of despair and Nietzsche’s concept of nihilism both describe not some particular problem or lack, but the internal collapse of an entire way of life’.

  10 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: a Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening by Anti-Climacus, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin Books, ed. 2004), 52. Further references will be abbreviated SD, followed by page number.

  11 ‘[…] despair is the hopelessness of not even being able to die’ (Kierkegaard, SD, 48).

  12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra: a Book for Everyone and Nobody, trans. G. Parkes (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2005), 128. Further references will be abbreviated Z, followed by page number. KSA references will also be given in brackets, in this case: [KSA 4.189].

  13 Kierkegaard, SD, 43.

  14 Dupré, op. cit., 38.

  15 Kierkegaard, SD, 60.

  16 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhyme and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 120. Further references will be abbreviated GS, followed by page number. (KSA references will also be given in brackets: [KSA 3.481]).

  17 Nietzsche, Z, 229 [KSA 4.326] (my italics).

  18 Kierkegaard, SD, 60.

  19 GS, 199 [KSA 3.573].

  20 Wienand, op. cit., stresses the way in which the metaphorical form of Nietzsche’s sentence informs its meaning/s.

  21 Nietzsche, GS, 120 [KSA 3.481].

  22 Nietzsche, GS, 120 [KSA 3.481].

  23 Heidegger, op. cit., 195.

  24 ‘Metaphysics, which for Nietzsche is Western philosophy understood as Platonism, is at an end’ (Heidegger, op. cit., 162).

  25 Heidegger, op. cit., 164.

  26 Heidegger, op. cit., 163.

  27 Heidegger, op. cit., 169.

  28 ‘…beware of God’s shadow.—Also known as metaphysics […hütet euch vor dem Schatten Gottes.—Man nennt ihn auch Metaphysik]’ (Nachlass, KSA 14.253, my translation).

  29 Heidegger, op. cit., 162.

  30 ‘ […] we need a critique of moral values, the values of these values should itself, for once, be examined’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7. Further references will be
abbreviated GM, followed by page number. (KSA references will also be given in brackets: [KSA 5.253])).

  31 Nietzsche, GS, 201 [KSA 3.577].

  32 ‘We have killed him—you and I’! (Nietzsche, GS, 120 [KSA 3.481]).

  33 Nietzsche, GM, 113 [KSA 5.402].

  34 Nietzsche, GS, 199 [KSA 3.574] (translation revised).

  35 In relation to his quite shattering analysis of despair, Kierkegaard writes: ‘[This observation] is not gloomy; on the contrary it tries to shed light on what one generally banishes to a certain obscurity. It is not discouraging; on the contrary it is uplifting, since it views every man with regard to the highest demand that can be made of him’ (SD, 52).

  36 Nietzsche, GS, 239 [KSA 3.626].

  37 See Nietzsche, GS, §335: ‘Long live physics!’.

  38 Camus, HR, 96 (my translation).

  39 As he will write in his Genealogy, all those ‘numb’ scientists ‘fear only one thing: coming to consciousness’ (GM, 110 [KSA 5.398]).

  40 Nietzsche, GS, 125 [KSA 3.480]. See also §23 of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.

  41 ‘He, who does not even leave the harbor and whose whole effort consists not in sailing, but in avoiding philosophy ever becoming philosophy through an eternal philosophizing over philosophy, he has no dangers to fear’ (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Über die Natur der Philosophie als Wissenschaft. In: Sämtliche Werke IX, 209–53. K. F. A. Schelling (ed.). (Stuttgart/Augsburg 1856–61), 211. My translation). Further references will be given as SW IX, followed by page number.

  42 Schelling, SW IX, 217.

  43 Its goal being namely to be true to itself; this idea will be discussed in the next section.

  44 Schelling, SW IX, 219.

  45 Schelling, SW IX, 209.

  46 Schelling, SW IX, 213: ‘die Aufgabe ist eben, daß sie wirklich zusammenbestehen’.

  47 As Zarathustra will say: ‘let will to truth mean this to you: that everything be transformed into what is humanly thinkable, humanly visible, humanly feelable (Menschen-Fühlbares)!’ (Nietzsche, Z, 73 [KSA 4.109–410]). As Camus observes, ‘the decisive step that Nietzsche enables the rebel spirit to take, is to jump from the negation to the secularization of the ideal’ (HR, 103).

  48 See Richard Schacht, ‘Nietzsche: After the Death of God’. In Steven Crowell, The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 115.

  49 See David G. Joannis, Sartre et le problème de la connaissance (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1996), 131.

  50 Camus, HR, especially chapter IV.

  51 Nietzsche, Z, 75 [KSA 4.111].

  52 Schelling, SW III, 603 (my translation).

  53 ‘Le “problème” moral naît de ce que la Morale est pour nous tout en même temps inévitable et impossible’ (Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 212. My translation).

  54 Nietzsche, Z, 230 [KSA 4.327].

  55 Nietzsche, Z, 230 [KSA 4.328].

  56 Nietzsche, Z, 233 [KSA 4.332].

  57 Sartre, EH, 34.

  58 Sartre, J.-P. Sartre commente l’enfer c’est les autres en introduction à Huis Clos. Audio-CD 2004. Paris: Gallimard-Emen. This is a recording of the ‘preface parlé’ to a recorded version of the play in 1965 (my translation).

  59 Sartre, J.-P. Sartre commente l’enfer c’est les autres en introduction à Huis Clos.

  60 Nietzsche, Z, 233 [KSA 4.332].

  61 Kierkegaard, SD, 82 (translation revised, my italics).

  62 Kierkegaard, SD, 83. Note the similarity with Nietzsche’s description of Serpent’s Death Valley, where the ugliest man lives.

  63 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, and other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage International, 1991), 122. Further references will be abbreviated MS, followed by page number.

  64 Schelling, Die Weltalter. Fragmente, ed. M. Schröter (Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1966), 11.

  65 See for instance Camus’ approach to philosophy in the introduction to the Myth of Sisyphus: ‘Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy’ (MS, 3).

  66 Kierkegaard, SD, 103 (my italics).

  67 Sartre, EH, 55.

  68 Kierkegaard, SD, 60.

  69 Sartre, EH, 34.

  70 Kierkegaard, SD, 59.

  71 Kierkegaard, SD, 57.

  72 Grøn (1994), The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, trans. Jeanette B. L. Knox (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2008), 110.

  73 Kierkegaard, SD, 59.

  74 Kierkegaard, SD, 44.

  75 Kierkegaard, SD, 57.

  76 ‘Il s’agit de savoir si l’innocence, à partir du moment où elle agit, ne peut s’empêcher de tuer’ (Camus, HR, 14).

  77 Lev Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, trans. Elinor Hewitt (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1969), 25ff.

  78 Camus, HR, 96 (my translation).

  79 See for instance, Solomon, ‘Nietzsche as Existentialist and as Fatalist: The Practical Paradoxes of Self-Making’ (International Studies in Philosophy, XXXIV/3, 2002), 41–54. See also Brian Leiter, ‘The Paradox of Fatalism and Self-Creation in Nietzsche’. In: Brian Leiter and John Richardson (eds.), Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

  80 Nietzsche, GS, 157 [KSA 3.521].

  81 Nietzsche, GS, 194–5 [KSA 3.570].

  82 Nietzsche, Z, 135 [KSA 4.199].

  83 Camus, MS, 121. A surprisingly similar relation between the figure of the highwayman and the idea of freedom as the affirmation of repetition may also be found in the lyrics of Johnny Cash’s The Highwayman.

  84 Nietzsche, Z, 121 [KSA 4.179].

  85 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 50. Further references will be abbreviated FE (i.e. Freedom Essay), followed by page number. SW references will also be given in brackets, in this case: [SW VII, 386].

  86 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 51 [SW VII, 386].

  87 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 51 [SW VII, 386].

  88 ‘[…] necessity and freedom are in one another as one being [Ein Wesen] that appears as one or the other only when considered from different sides’ (Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 50 [SW VII, 385]).

  89 Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 50 [SW VII, 385].

  90 Nietzsche, GS, 120 [KSA 3.481].

  91 Kierkegaard, SD, 59.

  92 Sartre, EH, 56.

  93 Jean-Paul Sartre (1943), Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Routledge, 2003), 439.

  94 Sartre, EH, 56.

  AREAS OF PHILOSOPHY

  CHAPTER 16

  PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE

  ALISON STONE

  16.1 INTRODUCTION: THE RISE OF PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE

  PHILOSOPHY of nature (Naturphilosophie) was a distinctive approach to the study of the natural world which flourished amongst numerous philosophers, scientists, and writers—especially, but not only, German speakers—in the first half of the nineteenth century, before losing popularity later in the century. The general idea of philosophy of nature began to emerge in the later 1790s amongst various post-Kantian and early Romantic thinkers.1 But it was above all the German Idealist philosopher F. W. J. von Schelling who gave this idea its first and most influential articulation in a series of his works from this time.

  Schelling’s central ideas in these works are that nature is a unified, self-organizing, and organic whole, and that particular natural objects and processes are situated within this whole and must be understood in terms of their place within it. For Schelling, far from organic life being reducible to underlying mechanical interactions amongst units of matter, mechanical processes actually belong within the large-scale organism of the whole o
f nature. He believed, too, that empirical inquiry should be conducted, and empirical findings interpreted, in light of the a priori insight that nature is a self-organizing whole—so that the study of nature should never be exclusively empirical.

  On this basis, we can identify the approach distinctive of Naturphilosophie by two fundamental elements. First, in metaphysics, philosophers of nature emphasize that nature is not reducible to the sum-total of the interactions amongst bits of matter in motion. Rather, nature is at a more fundamental level self-organizing, dynamic, creative, vital, organic, and/or a living whole. (Different thinkers highlight different qualities from this list, and interpret these qualities in varying ways.) Second, in epistemology, philosophers of nature take it that insofar as nature has this vital, self-organizing or holistic dimension, it must be understood using tools proper to philosophy as well as those of empirical science. For instance, for Schelling, to comprehend nature as a large-scale organism we must “ascend to philosophical axioms” that we know a priori.2 To comprehend nature we must study it not only empirically but also philosophically—because, whatever exactly philosophy’s methods are taken to be, they are taken to differ from those of empirical science in ways that make them appropriate for comprehending nature as more than merely a mechanical aggregate.3

  Schelling’s articulation of this new philosophical approach to nature (which I discuss in section 16.2) helped the approach to take rapid hold in the first decades of the nineteenth century amongst many thinkers, writers, and practicing researchers into nature (Naturforscher). The approach’s supporters included Schelling’s one-time collaborator, G. W. F. Hegel, who developed Naturphilosophie in his own direction, stressing that nature is rational (see section 16.3). Even the arch-opponent of German Idealism, Arthur Schopenhauer, elaborated a philosophy of nature, reinterpreting various natural phenomena as manifestations of the ultimate reality of one single purposeless, non-rational, and unsatisfiable cosmic will. Schelling regarded nature as both organizing itself in a rational way and embodying a pure upsurge of creative energy. That combined emphasis upon reason and creative energy fell apart in his successors: Hegel stresses reason against creative energy, whereas Schopenhauer stresses creative energy against reason.