The Aufklärung (German Enlightenment)

German Intellectuals of the Enlightenment

    Despite John Locke's influence on empiricism, early 18th century German philosophers maintained that the mind did have innate ideas.  These include Gottfried Leibniz (1646 - 1716) and later, Christian Wolff (1679 - 1754).  They both were rationalists who trusted human reason and were promoters of optimism; Leibniz believing that this "is the best of all possible worlds God could have created" and Wolff claiming that humans were capable of perfection in morality.  


Immanual Kant  (1724 - 1804)  Prussian

    In 1781,  Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason, the first of three works that explore the limits and conditions of knowledge. The first Critique synthesized rationalism and empiricism. Kant proposed a active, rational human mind that creates a subjective reality.  This would give rise to the German Idealism movement.  A later German philosopher would coin the popular phrase "the world is my idea."  Kant's first Critique is considered one of the most important works in the history of philosophy.

    In 1788, Kant published the Critique of Practical Reason.  Kant's moral philosophy is a strike against utilitarianism, which holds that the right thing to do is that what benefits the most people.  Kant's deontological approach maintains that a person can never be sacrificed for the greater good.  One must take the right moral action regardless of consequences.

    In 1790 Kant published the Critique of Judgment, his philosophy of aesthetics (what is beauty? what is sublime?).   Aesthetics attempts to explain not only why things are, or are not beautiful but also the concept of beauty and how the perception of beauty arises in us.  Kant’s account of beauty as based in subjective feeling is an important precursor to German Idealism (Fichte and Hegel) and Romanticism.

    Kant is the only German philosopher who argued for democratic-republican government and human rights. 

Wiemar Classicism  (1772 - 1805):  Combined Romanticism & Classicism

Johann Gottfried Herder: (an early important figure in German Nationalism)

    Herder stressed influence by physical and historical circumstance upon human development, saying that "one must go into the age, into the region, into the whole history, and feel one's way into everything".

"A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world."


Friedrich Schiller  (1759 - 1805)  Historian, philosopher, and poet.

    Schiller's definition of beauty, although it failed to remove Kant's difficulty that beauty was essentially a subjective conception, marked the beginning of a new stage in the history of German aesthetic theory.

From “What Difference Can a Good Theatrical Stage Actually Make?” (1784):

"[Art] should remain play, but also be poetic play. All art is dedicated to joy, and there is no higher and more serious task than of making people happy. The highest enjoyment, however, is the freedom of the inner life of feeling in the living play of all of its powers."


Schiller found the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution abhorrent.  He believed that universal brotherhood could only be arrived at by educating the people in aesthetics;  the embodiment in arts of "the Good, the True, and the Beautiful."   

"Art is the daughter of freedom.  It is the only through Beauty that man makes his way to freedom... "The way to the head must be opened through the heart."  


Johann Wolfgang von Goethe  (1749 - 1832)

    Perhaps the most important novelist in German literature, Goethe was a close friend and collaborator of Friedrich Schiller in the Sturm and Drang and Weimar Classicism movements.  Goethe learned to look at language and literature in a new, almost anthropological way: as the expression of a national culture, part of the historically specific genius of a particular people, concentrated from time to time in the genius of individuals, such as Shakespeare or the anonymous authors of the Scottish border ballads or, in 16th-century German Martin Luther.

    Goethe drew heavily on classical forms but much of his subject matter deals with issues like adultery, suicide, and in Faust (1808), selling one's soul to the Devil.  So Goethe, similar to Beethoven, straddles both movements and debate ensues over the distinctions.

   Goethe was greatly admired by Beethoven.  The two met for several days in July of 1812.  Overall, the polished German cultural hero found Beethoven to be crude. 


Jena Romanticism  (1798 - 1804)   (The town of Jena, Germany)

The group of Jena Romantics was led by the versatile writer Ludwig Tieck. Two members of the group, brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich von Schlegel, who laid down the theoretical basis for Romanticism in the circle’s organ, the Athenaeum, maintained that the first duty of criticism was to understand and appreciate the right of genius to follow its natural bent

The greatest imaginative achievement of this circle is to be found in the lyrics and fragmentary novels of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (better known by the pseudonym "Novalis"). 

The works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling expounded the Romantic doctrine in philosophy, whereas the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher demonstrated the necessity of individualism in religious thought.


Other German philosophers 

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762 - 1814)

    Highly influenced by Immanuel Kant, Fichte is a leader in the Romantic movement of German Idealism (very simply put, the world is made up of ideas).  Fichte is an important philosopher due to his original insights into the nature of subjectivity, consciousness and self-consciousness or self-awareness.  Fichte argued that self-consciousness was a social phenomenon — an important step and perhaps the first clear step taken in this direction by modern philosophy. A necessary condition of every subject's self-awareness, for Fichte, is the existence of other rational subjects. These others call or summon (fordern auf) the subject or self out of its unconsciousness and into an awareness of itself as a free individual. 

    Like Herder, Fichte was an important influence on rising German nationalism.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel  (1770 - 1831):

The Phenomenology of Spirit  (1808)


Other German romantic poets, writers:

Jean Paul  (1763 - 1825)
Friedrich Hölderlin  (1770 - 1843)
E. T. A. Hoffmann  (1776 - 1822)  (also a music critic who championed Beethoven's 5th Symphony)
Clemens Brentano  (1778 - 1842)
Achim von Arnim  (1781 - 1831)
Joseph von Eichendorff  (1788 - 1857)
Heinrich Heine  (1797 - 1856)