19th Century Philosophy (PHIL 320)

Course Objectives

The real world is a mess; the ideal world less so. Stories of the real world are all, of course, ideal worlds of one kind or other, and as soon as we attempt to capture reality with our words, we are in the story-telling business. Our verbal nets are never quite fine enough to capture it all, and often the very outlines grow distorted as reality pushes and shoves against the narrative forms of our understanding. That is simply our situation on the ground, and there is not much that we can do about it.

The above paragraph is, of course, itself a story. It is a story about story-telling. The reality that constitutes our intercourse with reality is here the subject of our story, more so than the original reality itself. We want to know the world, but we feel we must first get clear on this business of knowing: Does knowing get at the way the world really is? Or does it offer up only some distorted image?

Western philosophy breaks naturally into several distinct periods. In more recent history, the Cartesian emphasis on epistemology found a natural closure with the work of Immanuel Kant. Beginning with Descartes (1594-1650), the self was viewed as a knowing subject confronted by the Other, the object, which is the thing to be known. This approach caused all kinds of difficulties. According to Kant (1724-1804), however, those difficulties could be avoided by understanding our knowledge of the world as essentially two-fold, consisting of a sensible component shaped passively by the self but whose materiality comes from the Other, and a conceptual component that is wholly contributed by the self (although imposed spontaneously and beneath our conscious awareness).

Kant’s account of knowledge involved an important concession: Our knowledge of the world is not knowledge of reality (the way things are in themselves) but of appearance (the way things appear to us). The physical world just is appearance, the world we experience, and ultimately the object of study by the natural sciences.

For Kant, the physical world is not entirely Other, but instead a marriage of Self and Other. The raw data issuing forth from the Other must conform to the requirements of human cognition before it can be cognized at all. This was a great insight, and it is often referred to as Kant’s Copernican Revolution.

We should not be surprised that Kant’s solution did not satisfy everyone. Most of his contemporaries did not understand it, and some of these thought they did, and then set out to correct or supplement Kant. These quasi-followers of Kant, who sought to correct or complete his system, formed the movement known as German Idealism. The greatest of these was Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, and he will be our beginning point for this class; what follows Hegel in the nineteenth century is scarcely understood without first understanding Hegel. Hegel was born in 1770 — the same year as Ludwig Beethoven. The class will end with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), whose writings remained largely unread during his own lifetime, but which formed the seed-bed for a great deal of twentieth-century philosophy.

The texts we will be reading this term — by Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche — are at times quite challenging, but they will reward you with gifts equal to the effort and attention you give to them. Apart from being great philosophers, these authors were also great stylists, and can be read for pure literary enjoyment, as well as philosophical insight. The readings are multi-layered and well worth your best effort.

To say the same thing more briefly: If you do not try to understand these texts, then they will strike you as obscure and pointless. If you do try to understand them, then they will change you and your self-understanding.

By the end of all your ruminations in this course, you should be able to mark improvement in the following areas:

(1) your understanding of the nature and history of Western philosophy, primarily of the 19^th century;

(2) your skills for critically evaluating arguments and beliefs;

(3) your ability to read primary texts;

(4) your sense of the historiography of philosophy; and

(5) your ability to reflect carefully on certain questions that confront us all:

How can I know something to be true?

What is the good life and how is it attained?

What is it to be human?

Some virtues to bring with you into the philosophy classroom:

humility when comparing your beliefs with those of others;

patience for listening closely to views that seem foolish or misguided to you;

courage to advance in the face of adversity what seems to be the correct view;

endurance for following arguments to their conclusion;

humor for those moments when you feel the utter futility of your efforts.

Manchester College // Registrar // Department of Religion and Philosophy // Last updated: 5 Aug 2010