19th-century philosophy
Encyclopedia
In the 19th century the philosophies of the Enlightenment
began to have a dramatic effect, the landmark works of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
influencing a new generation of thinkers. In the late 18th century a movement known as Romanticism
began, it validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe. Key ideas that sparked this change were evolution
, as postulated by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
, Erasmus Darwin
, and Charles Darwin
and what might now be called emergent
order, such as the free market
of Adam Smith
. Pressures for egalitarianism
, and more rapid change culminated in a period of revolution and turbulence that would see philosophy change as well.
is a name that most would mention as being among the most important of influences, as is Jean-Jacques Rousseau
. While both of these philosophers were products of the 18th century and its assumptions, they pressed at the boundaries. In trying to explain the nature of the state and government, Rousseau would challenge the basis of government with his declaration that "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains". Kant, while attempting to preserve axiomic skepticism, was forced to argue that we do not see true reality, nor do we speak of it. All we know of reality is appearances. Since all we can see of reality is appearances, Kant postulates the idea of an unknowable. Hegel's distinction between the unknowable and the circumstantially unknown can be seen as the beginnings of Hegel's rational system of the universe. A fairly simple refutation in that for Kant to conceive that there is an unknowable operating behind the appearances is to demonstrate some knowledge of its existence. Quite simply, to know that it exists is to know it.
, whose development of Kantian metaphysics became a source of inspiration for the Romantics
. In Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte argues that the self posits itself and is a self-producing and changing process.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
, a student of Fichte, continued to develop many of the same ideas and was also assimilated by the Romantics as something of an official philosopher for their movement. But it was another of Fichte's students, and former roommate of Schelling, who would rise to become the most prominent of the post-Kantian idealists: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
.
Arthur Schopenhauer
, rejecting Hegel, called for a return to Kantian idealism.
, Jeremy Bentham
and John Stuart Mill
promoted the idea that actions are right as they maximize happiness, and happiness alone.
as a philosophical movement is properly a 20th-century
movement, but its major antecedents, Søren Kierkegaard
and Friedrich Nietzsche
wrote long before the rise of existentialism. In the 1840s, academic philosophy in Europe, following Hegel, was almost completely divorced from the concerns of individual human life, in favour of pursuing abstract metaphysical systems. Kierkegaard sought to reintroduce to philosophy, in the spirit of Socrates
: subjectivity, commitment, faith, and passion, all of which are a part of the human condition
.
Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche saw the moral values of 19th-century Europe disintegrating into nihilism
(Kierkegaard called it the levelling process). Nietzsche attempted to undermine traditional moral values by exposing its foundations. To that end, he distinguished between master and slave moralities
, and claimed that man must turn from the meekness and humility of Europe's slave-morality.
Both philosophers are precursors to existentialism, among other ideas, for their importance on the "great man" against the age. Kierkegaard wrote of 19th-century Europe, "Each age has its own characteristic depravity. Ours is perhaps not pleasure or indulgence or sensuality, but rather a dissolute pantheistic contempt for the individual man."
, the self-professed founder of modern sociology
, put forward the view that the rigorous ordering of confirmable observations alone ought to constitute the realm of human knowledge. He had hoped to order the sciences in increasing degrees of complexity from mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and a new discipline called "sociology", which is the study of the "dynamics and statics of society".
Charles Sanders Peirce and William James
developed the pragmatist philosophy in the late 19th century.
saw the rise of British idealism
, a revival of interest in the works of Kant and Hegel.
's transcendence
and German idealism
, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson
and Henry David Thoreau
. The main belief was in an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
began to have a dramatic effect, the landmark works of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
influencing a new generation of thinkers. In the late 18th century a movement known as Romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
began, it validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe. Key ideas that sparked this change were evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
, as postulated by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called the greatest long...
, Erasmus Darwin
Erasmus Darwin
Erasmus Darwin was an English physician who turned down George III's invitation to be a physician to the King. One of the key thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment, he was also a natural philosopher, physiologist, slave trade abolitionist,inventor and poet...
, and Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
and what might now be called emergent
Emergent
It may also mean:* Emergent , Neural Simulation Software* Emergent , a 2003 album by Gordian Knot* emergent plant, a plant which grows in water but which pierces the surface so that it is partially in air...
order, such as the free market
Free market
A free market is a competitive market where prices are determined by supply and demand. However, the term is also commonly used for markets in which economic intervention and regulation by the state is limited to tax collection, and enforcement of private ownership and contracts...
of Adam Smith
Adam Smith
Adam Smith was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations...
. Pressures for egalitarianism
Egalitarianism
Egalitarianism is a trend of thought that favors equality of some sort among moral agents, whether persons or animals. Emphasis is placed upon the fact that equality contains the idea of equity of quality...
, and more rapid change culminated in a period of revolution and turbulence that would see philosophy change as well.
Brief historical outline
With the tumultuous years of 1789-1815, European culture was transformed by revolution, war and disruption. By ending many of the social and cultural props of the previous century, the stage was set for dramatic economic and political change. European philosophy reflected on, participated in, and drove, many of these changes.Influences from the late Enlightenment
The last third of the 18th century produced a host of ideas and works which would both systematize previous philosophy, and present a deep challenge to the basis of how philosophy had been systematized. Immanuel KantImmanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
is a name that most would mention as being among the most important of influences, as is Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
. While both of these philosophers were products of the 18th century and its assumptions, they pressed at the boundaries. In trying to explain the nature of the state and government, Rousseau would challenge the basis of government with his declaration that "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains". Kant, while attempting to preserve axiomic skepticism, was forced to argue that we do not see true reality, nor do we speak of it. All we know of reality is appearances. Since all we can see of reality is appearances, Kant postulates the idea of an unknowable. Hegel's distinction between the unknowable and the circumstantially unknown can be seen as the beginnings of Hegel's rational system of the universe. A fairly simple refutation in that for Kant to conceive that there is an unknowable operating behind the appearances is to demonstrate some knowledge of its existence. Quite simply, to know that it exists is to know it.
Philosophical schools and tendencies
This is by no means an exhaustive list of all 19th-century philosophy.German idealism
One of the first philosophers to attempt to grapple with Kant's philosophy was Johann Gottlieb FichteJohann Gottlieb Fichte
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German philosopher. He was one of the founding figures of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, a movement that developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant...
, whose development of Kantian metaphysics became a source of inspiration for the Romantics
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
. In Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte argues that the self posits itself and is a self-producing and changing process.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling , later von Schelling, was a German philosopher. Standard histories of philosophy make him the midpoint in the development of German idealism, situating him between Fichte, his mentor prior to 1800, and Hegel, his former university roommate and erstwhile friend...
, a student of Fichte, continued to develop many of the same ideas and was also assimilated by the Romantics as something of an official philosopher for their movement. But it was another of Fichte's students, and former roommate of Schelling, who would rise to become the most prominent of the post-Kantian idealists: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...
.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
, rejecting Hegel, called for a return to Kantian idealism.
Utilitarianism
In early 19th century BritainUnited Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was the formal name of the United Kingdom during the period when what is now the Republic of Ireland formed a part of it....
, Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham was an English jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism...
and John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, economist and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of...
promoted the idea that actions are right as they maximize happiness, and happiness alone.
Existentialism
ExistentialismExistentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
as a philosophical movement is properly a 20th-century
20th-century philosophy
20th-century philosophy saw the development of a number of new philosophical schools including logical positivism, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, existentialism and poststructuralism...
movement, but its major antecedents, Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish Christian philosopher, theologian and religious author. He was a critic of idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel...
and Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
wrote long before the rise of existentialism. In the 1840s, academic philosophy in Europe, following Hegel, was almost completely divorced from the concerns of individual human life, in favour of pursuing abstract metaphysical systems. Kierkegaard sought to reintroduce to philosophy, in the spirit of Socrates
Socrates
Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...
: subjectivity, commitment, faith, and passion, all of which are a part of the human condition
Human condition
The human condition encompasses the experiences of being human in a social, cultural, and personal context. It can be described as the irreducible part of humanity that is inherent and not connected to gender, race, class, etc. — a search for purpose, sense of curiosity, the inevitability of...
.
Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche saw the moral values of 19th-century Europe disintegrating into nihilism
Nihilism
Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value...
(Kierkegaard called it the levelling process). Nietzsche attempted to undermine traditional moral values by exposing its foundations. To that end, he distinguished between master and slave moralities
Master-slave morality
Master-slave morality is a central theme of Friedrich Nietzsche's works, in particular the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality. Nietzsche argued that there were two fundamental types of morality: 'Master morality' and 'slave morality'...
, and claimed that man must turn from the meekness and humility of Europe's slave-morality.
Both philosophers are precursors to existentialism, among other ideas, for their importance on the "great man" against the age. Kierkegaard wrote of 19th-century Europe, "Each age has its own characteristic depravity. Ours is perhaps not pleasure or indulgence or sensuality, but rather a dissolute pantheistic contempt for the individual man."
Positivism
Auguste ComteAuguste Comte
Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte , better known as Auguste Comte , was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism...
, the self-professed founder of modern sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
, put forward the view that the rigorous ordering of confirmable observations alone ought to constitute the realm of human knowledge. He had hoped to order the sciences in increasing degrees of complexity from mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and a new discipline called "sociology", which is the study of the "dynamics and statics of society".
Pragmatism (Pragmaticism)
The American philosophersAmerican philosophy
American philosophy is the philosophical activity or output of Americans, both within the United States and abroad. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that while American philosophy lacks a "core of defining features, American Philosophy can nevertheless be seen as both reflecting and...
Charles Sanders Peirce and William James
William James
William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...
developed the pragmatist philosophy in the late 19th century.
British idealism
The twilight years of the 19th century in BritainUnited Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was the formal name of the United Kingdom during the period when what is now the Republic of Ireland formed a part of it....
saw the rise of British idealism
British idealism
A species of absolute idealism, British idealism was a philosophical movement that was influential in Britain from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. The leading figures in the movement were T.H. Green , F. H. Bradley , and Bernard Bosanquet . They were succeeded by the...
, a revival of interest in the works of Kant and Hegel.
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism was rooted in Immanuel KantImmanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
's transcendence
Transcendence (philosophy)
In philosophy, the adjective transcendental and the noun transcendence convey the basic ground concept from the word's literal meaning , of climbing or going beyond, albeit with varying connotations in its different historical and cultural stages...
and German idealism
German idealism
German idealism was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment...
, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...
and Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...
. The main belief was in an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.
Further reading
- Baird, Forrest E. Philosophic Classics: 19th Century Philosophy. ISBN 0-13-048550-0
- Gardiner, Patrick. {ed.} 19th-century Philosophy. ISBN 978-0-02-911220-5
- Shand, John. Central Works of Philosophy. Vol. 3. The Nineteenth Century. ISBN 978-0-7735-3053-9