“The 10 years after Hegel’s death were the apogee of Hegelianism. His students, who had lived under the master’s spell during his lifetime, went out and popularised his teachings and translated them into the language of politics – or much more correctly, translated politics into the language of Hegelianism.
In 1841, the establishment deliberatively moved to ‘expunge the dragon’s seed of Hegelian pantheism’ from the minds of Prussian youth. A newly-appointed Minister for Culture mobilised Friedrich Schelling to come to Berlin and do the job. Friedrich Schelling was the second, and in 1841, the only living representative of Classical German Philosophy. The former Professor of Philosopher at Jena after Fichte’s dismissal for heresy, who as a youth had been a close friend of Hegel, had both encouraged Hegel and enlisted his support in his struggle against Fichte.”
“Two old friends of younger days, room mates at the Tübingen theological seminary, are after 40 years meeting each other again face to face as opponents; one of them 10 years dead but more alive than ever in his pupils; the other, as the latter say, intellectually dead for 3 decades, but now suddenly claiming for himself the full power and authority of life. Anybody who is sufficiently ‘impartial’ to profess himself equally alien to both, that is, to be no Hegelian, for surely nobody can as yet declare himself on the side of Schelling after the few words he has said – anybody then, who possesses this vaunted advantage of ‘impartiality’ will see in the declaration of Hegel’s death pronounced by Schelling’s appearance in Berlin, the vengeance of the gods for the declaration of Schelling’s death which Hegel himself pronounced in his time” Engels, Schelling on Hegel, December 1841
“Old doctors and ecclesiastics, the jubilee of whose matriculation can soon be celebrated feel the long-forgotten student haunting their minds again and are back in college. Judaism and Islam want to see what Christian revelation is all about: German, French, English, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, modern Greek and Turkish, one can hear them all spoken together – then the signal for silence sounds and Schelling mounts the rostrum. [púlpito]”
“The audience also included the Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, and Søren Kierkegaard, who was to be the founder of Existentialism. Schelling’s proposition was that Hegel had confused ‘essence’ and ‘existence’, and what was required was a return to a philosophy of existence. Kierkegaard ridiculed Hegel for ‘reconstructing’ history in retrospect, ‘but history has to be lived forwards, not backwards’. For his part, Engels insisted that the youth and all enemies of the autocracy must rally to the defence of Hegel. He characterised Schelling’s proposition as a ‘philosophy of revelation’, or ‘positivism’ (as opposed to the ‘negative’ standpoint of Reason).
Schelling did not, as it turned out, win much support for his position, but the young Danish theologian Kierkegaard, declaring the bankruptcy of Reason, can be seen as the founder of Existentialism, which is continued through Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and through Heidegger is a significant component of today’s philosophical cloudscape.” Um tanto simplificador, mas ok.
“Arthur Schopenhauer, who had taught at the University of Berlin for 24 semesters, and had spoken regularly to an empty lecture hall, next door and at the same hour when Hegel lectured to a large and ever-growing audience, renounced, in May 1825, his career to live as a recluse. In 1844, an obscure Berlin bookseller accepted the manuscript of Schopenhauer’s oft-rejected The World as Will and Idea without remuneration; and this book (…) gained Schopenhauer worldwide recognition”
“The emergence of labour as a conscious social force puts a final end to the classical period of bourgeois epistemology. The explosion of 1841 anticipates this explosion and the irreversible sea-change which follows. ‘Nature’ has spoken. For bourgeois philosophy prior to this time, the labouring masses (or what the post-moderns call the ‘sub-altern’ – the ‘congregation’ who get spoken of and to, but have themselves no right to speak) were like Nature, something ‘beyond sensation’, the unconscious.”
“The figures who launch the initial attack on Hegel, Feuerbach and Schelling, did not gather around them a substantial and lasting following. John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte were already well-known by the end of the 1830s, and as it turns out, the principal figures of the first period immediately following 1841 are Mill, Comte and later Herbert Spencer (Positivists), Søren Kierkegaard and Arthur Schopenhauer (the precursors to Existentialism), the Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and Communists Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.” “Despite the mutual hostility which is a professional prerequisite and despite the political diversity within each camp, we have on the one hand, the ‘sociologists’ Comte, Mill and Spencer, and on the other hand, the ‘psychologists’ Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer.”
“The problem is that Comte’s solution (which was probably the dominant one) led to a further shattering of the unity of human labour, with 1,001 ‘specialists’ beavering away in their own little area. Thus, the great synthesis which Hegel achieved, albeit idealistically, was lost on the very people who most needed it.”
“[Kierkegaard’s] whole thing about moods is a knife aimed at the whole basis of Logic, [and] ‘Rationalism’” “Kierkegaard goes on to say that Ethics is also not the correct science to deal with sin as ‘Ethics is after all an ideal science, … Ethics bring ideality into reality; on the other hand its movement is not designed to raise reality up into ideality.’ So it is only ‘dogmatics’, i.e. Christian dogma, which is capable of dealing with sin: ‘While psychology is fathoming the real possibility of sin, dogmatics explains original sin, which is the ideal possibility of sin’.”
“Schopenhauer’s philosophy is (…) given the name of Voluntarism, seeking to resolve the scepticism of Kant by identifying the thing-in-itself with Will (rather than Ego as with Fichte or Nature as in the earlier Schelling).” “However, within of the secular religious mentality of classical epistemology, this subjective idealism is invariably reactionary in its political implications because it belittles the creative function of labour and promotes the unrestricted action of the rulers.”
“Both these tendencies have inspired and attracted the political right, and there is certainly nothing progressive or optimistic about them. Both were religious but non-conformist, Kierkegaard a devout Lutheran at war with the established Church, Schopenhauer a respectable German bourgeois, with a somewhat ‘New Age’ interest in Hinduism.”
“The name of Irrationalism which we can attach to Existentialism and Voluntarism and to a certain extent also Pragmatism, should not be taken as a term of abuse.”
“The period following the expurgation of Hegelianism in Germany has John Stuart Mill the leading figure of philosophy in Britain and Auguste Comte in France. Both were great synthesisers and reflected the scientific optimism of the bourgeoisie of their time, taking their inspiration from Kant and Hume, seemingly unmoved by either Hegelianism or its condemnation in Germany. Each, however, respond to the changed social conditions of Europe by the promotion of Ethics.” “Jeremy Bentham, renowned for his theories of prison reform, should properly be given credit as originator of Utilitarianism, but it was Mills that systematically elaborated the theory and did so in conjunction with political economy and his theoretical work on the foundations of the British political system.”
“Comte was no democrat however. His notion of social organisation imitated the hierarchy and discipline of the Catholic church. From various Enlightenment philosophers he adopted the notion of historical progress, and from Saint-Simon he drew the need for a basic and unifying ‘sociology’ to explain existing social organisations and guide social planning for a better future.” “Both men [Comte & Mill] assisted in promoting women’s suffrage in the wake of the tragic death of the love of their life, and both were advocates of reform of various kinds within their own country.” “In these two ‘progressive’ bourgeois gentlemen, we see in classic form the national characteristics of British and French philosophy: Mill, an ethic based on the laws of the political economy of laissez faire capitalism, Comte, an ethic of the benign dictatorship of Reason based on laws of socio-historical formation of knowledge and belief.”
“Human society was long, long ago shattered by the social division of labour, and the transcendence of this rupture is a long drawn out historical struggle. The mystical character of the process follows from the limitations imposed on professional thinkers under conditions where the real contact with Nature, real production and the real satisfaction of natural human needs is unspoken and unconscious because the producing class itself is silent.”
“The period of transformation of bourgeois ideology we are looking at is the period, in Britain, from the publication of the People’s Charter in 1838 which continued up to the final Chartist demonstrations in 1848, the same year which saw the popular uprising in Paris in February, bringing down the July Monarchy, the rioting in Vienna which led to the fall of Metternich and the emancipation of the peasantry, the nationalist uprisings in Hungary, the movement for representative government in Germany and the publication of the Communist Manifesto, and leads up to the founding of the First International and The American Civil War in 1863 and the Paris Commune in 1871. The uprisings and revolutions of 1848 are all defeated but all in one way or another see many of their objectives achieved during the period of relative stability and prosperity which followed.”
“The Origin of Species is not to be published until 1859, while the science of psychology is still embroiled in mysticism. Helmholtz formulates the law of conservation of energy in 1847 and his work on nerve signals and body heat during the 1850s cut the ground away from vitalism. The sciences of anthropology and sociology begin from this period.”
“In a sense, one must give Comte his due: in declaring the end of the period of metaphysical speculation and the beginning of the period of natural scientific investigation with sociology at the centre, he stated with fair accuracy exactly what was taking place.”
“British political economy and French social theory have the elements of the puzzle, but they cannot put it all together. The German bourgeoisie has suffered humiliating defeat at the hands of the Junkers, and German Idealism has been debunked.”
“Revolutionary socialist ideology also developed in a struggle. Both theoretical anarchism and modern socialism sprung from the dissolution of the Young Hegelians and drew upon the whole of bourgeois culture. The struggle between Anarchism (Bakunin, Proudhon, and others) and Communism (Marx and Engels) was the principal axis of development of the workers’ movement throughout the next two generations including the First International, the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution.”
Seclusão Anagógica 