5 Great Minds Around German Idealism Who Anticipated the Challenges of Our Time
A review of the book: Nietzsche’s Idea by Fernando Savater
In this article, I will follow the thread from Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche to offer Savater’s view of their thoughts during the 19th century and why they still resonate in our time.
German idealism is a philosophical movement that developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the late eighteenth century, linked with Romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason deals with the limits and scope of metaphysics, or in plain words, our reality and existence.
Fernando Savater Martín (born 21 June 1947) is a Spanish philosopher, essayist, and prolific author. In the prologue of his book, he recognizes his fascination with Nietzsche since his early twenties. From the second chapter, under the title The Heirs of the Enlightenment, we have extracted the following content:
How Kant and Hegel came to play an important role in Nietzsche’s thought
Nietzsche’s direct intellectual antecedents — the indirect ones go back to pre-Socratic Greece — must be sought in the revolution produced by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Most of the later talents were fascinated or repulsed by the cultural tone it provided. Nietzsche lucidly and deeply understood the meaning of the historical reform it brought.
Kant’s “Not everything can be theoretically accessible” translates into We only manage to know the phenomenon of each thing. The essence of the thing, the thing-in-itself can only be the subject of rational conjecture.
Hegel definitively dissolves the contrast between the interior and the exterior, between the phenomenon he perceives and the thing-in-itself forbidden to me. Nietzsche became Hegel’s fundamental adversary, but this does not mean that he also owes a lot to him, as he explicitly recognizes:
“The importance of German philosophy, Hegel, thinking about a pantheism in which evil, error, and pain are not meaning as arguments against divinity.”
And when Hegel affirms “the game is in its maximum indifference and despair, at the same time the most sublime seriousness and the only true one”, we see the future voice of Zarathustra and the most mysterious and profound agreement of the two greatest rival intellects of his century.
The last two paragraphs synthesize a differentiated contribution to modern philosophy by admitting a thought outside the traditional metaphysical and religious models.
The contributions of Goethe and Schopenhauer
Savater recognizes the two most direct influences on Niezsche’s thought coming from Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner. However, he also wrote:
Nietzsche raised the Olympian and majestic figure of Goethe, the first who placed the understanding of the world more in artistic expression, and who sank the roots of his ethics in aesthetics. Goethe had, above all, the authentic, old sense of the earth, the pagan admiration for nature that the Christians’ taste for invisible transcendence had almost erased from culture. He was a great contemplator of the world.Behind reason, something irrational, deeper, and more powerful forces us to reason. The most lasting and stable, the totality of what exists, not as a beneficial and ordered plenitude, lovable by its inevitability, but as a blind amalgam of desires and pains, in which each conscious part pays for all transitory satisfaction with sufferings and, finally, with its definitive annihilation.
Schopenhauer shares the Eastern view that existence is primarily desire and pain; The only way to escape is to try to suspend our desires as much as possible and mitigate the will.
Another contribution to Nietzschean thought is the confirmation that intelligence is nothing more than a tool managed by instincts, and its disinterested management is a “non-objective” service provided to a single will, to which individual subjects are subject to simple fiction.
Also important is the predominant role given to art, especially music, as a momentary appeaser of the will. In art, the will is contemplated almost naked, proposing itself as a spectacle and suspending, we would say, for a moment the exhausting struggle of all against all. Ultimately, the most direct source of pain is the illusion of individuality, suspended and diluted in the moment of artistic enjoyment, as when we exercise our compassion with that other whose suffering identifies with us.
Besides what I have already mentioned, Savater covers an ample scope of Nietzsche’s ideas that I would dare to list, according to the index and content of the book, as the death of God, the will to power, the eternal return, the superman and his values: great politics, and the profile of Nietzsche’s followers. I recommend anyone interested in Savater’s view to read them.
I will end by summarizing how Savater views Nietzsche’s contribution to our modern model of thought and action, as follows:
Savater covers an ample scope of Nietzsche’s ideas that I would dare to list, according to the index and content of the book, as the death of God, the will to power, the eternal return, the superman and his values: great politics, and the profile of Nietzsche’s followers. I recommend anyone interested in Savater’s view to read them.
I will end by summarizing how Savater views Nietzsche’s contribution to our modern model of thought, as follows:
What has died according to Nietzsche’s thought is not God, and there is no talk of deifying Man, the species, or society, but of converting each one of us, that is, each of the individuals who acquire full consciousness of the death of God, in gods. The death of God does not imply in any way, except very superficially, the obligation of atheism. The attack of the Enlightenment is fundamentally directed against the theological dogmas of the Church, its obscurantism, and its temporal power, but it respects all the essentials of Christian dualism.
In his defense of art, Nietzsche defends the free-spirited philosophers who thus prepare to set out at all risks across the endless sea: the philosopher-creators, the philosopher-artists. Its instrument is art, “the great stimulant of life,” which knows how to convert appearance into essence, form into substance (“One is an artist when what non-artists designate as form is felt as content, as the thing-in-itself.” “To see science from the perspective of the artist and art from the perspective of life”)
Power is what it wants! Power is not a goal, an objective, an ideal, or a representation that the weak make for themselves and long for power is precisely what explodes joyfully, grows, conquers, creates, and above all, values. The greater the power, the greater the will to power, because, in the end, “what I have designated as the will to power is an insatiable desire to show and realize power.” “Every will to power implies a valuation.”
For Nietzsche, the image of time is compatible with the simulacrum of the will to power and with immanence assumed to its ultimate consequences. But this is also the most paradoxical image, the literal destruction of time; Indeed, what sense does it make to insist on notions such as the past and future, if the cycle of repetitions of the identical is eternal, has no first or last time or anything that differentiates one round from another? Savater quotes Eugen Fink to summarize it: “The character of repeatability is not formed over time, by repetitions of a primordial process; It is, rather, the hidden and concealed essence of the course of time itself. Or put another way: repetition does not arise in time, but is time itself.”
The Superman will be the hero plus conscience, the hero-thinker, the coming philosopher. What is great politics? The preparation of the world for the advent of the superman: the creation of values and a way of living that make the superman possible. Much will have to be created and much will also have to be destroyed. Superman will not be an inevitable consequence of historical progress or biological evolution but rather a great work of political art by polytheistic philosopher-artists. Superman is the meaning of the earth: “a being that man supposes, that does not yet exist, but that indicates the goal of his existence.” The motto of the superman is not the “thou must” of Kant and the Christians, nor even the “I will” of the hero, but the jubilant and terrible “I am” of the Greek gods. In truth, he is the ultimate goal of man, because from him there will no longer be goals but pure acceptance of the chaos of forces and the eternal return, “finality without end” such as that which Kant found in the most sublime of art.
Note: I read Savater’s book in Spanish. I have used Google to translate into English, and, as always, Grammarly to edit quotes and content.
