Late Modern Philosophy

NATIONAL OPEN UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA
FACULTY OF ARTS
DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
COURSE CODE: PHL 442
COURSE TITLE: LATE MODERN PHILOSOPHY

NATIONAL OPEN UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA
© 2020 by NOUN Press

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COURSE
GUIDE
PHL 442: LATE MODERN PHILOSOPHY
COURSE TEAM
Course /Developer/Writer: Precious Obioha PhD
Department of Philosophy
Akwa Ibom State University,
Uyo
Content Editor: (In-View)
NATIONAL OPEN UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA (NOUN)

2023
Course Guide for PHL442 – Late Modern Philosophy
Introduction
This is PHL442 – Late Modern Philosophy. PHL442 is a two-credit unit course which has
minimum duration of one semester. It is a compulsory course for all undergraduate students in
National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). The course will expose the students to Late modern
thoughts in the history of Philosophy. While this period was characterized by idealism, some
scholars, however, questioned the relevance of the speculative thought to the existence of man.
This period, therefore, laid foundation for existentialism. Hence, the late modern period was also
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a preparatory ground for a humanistic approach to philosophy through the emergence of
existentialism.
Course Objectives
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
• Understand the currents underlying Late Modern philosophical thoughts in the history of
Philosophy.
• Discuss the critical and moral philosophies of Kant.
• Know what accounted for the rise of German Idealism
• Understand the emergence of interest in the Discipline of History
• Appraise the notion of Human Progress
• Assess the thesis of Historicism
Working Through this Course

To successfully complete this course, read the study units, do all the assignments, open the links
and read, participate in discussion forums, read the recommended books and other materials
provided and participate in the online facilitation.
Each study unit has introduction, intended learning outcomes, the main content, conclusion,
summary and references/further readings. The introduction will tell you the expectations in the
study unit. Read and note the intended learning outcomes (ILOs). The intended learning outcomes
tell you what you should be able to do at the completion of each study unit. So, you can evaluate
your learning at the end of each unit to ensure you have achieved the intended learning outcomes.
To meet the intended learning outcomes, knowledge is presented in texts, and links arranged into
modules and units. Click on the links where provided as the case may be to either read or download
texts, pictures etc. the conclusion gives you the theme of the knowledge you are taking away from
the unit. Unit summaries are also presented for proper articulation of the salient points made in
unit.
There are two main forms of assessments – the formative and the summative. The formative
assessments will help you monitor your learning. This is presented as in-text questions, discussion
forums and self-Assessment Exercises. The summative assessments would be used by the
university to evaluate your academic performance. This will be given as computer Based test
(CBT) which serves as continuous assessment and final examinations. A minimum of two or
maximum of three Computer Based Tests will be given with only one final examination.
Study units
There are 3 Modules with a total of 12 units. They are presented as follows:
Module 1
Unit 1: Introduction
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Unit 2: Background to Late Modern Philosophy
Unit 3: Immanuel Kant: The Critical Philosophy
Unit 4: Immanuel Kant: The Moral Philosophy
Module 2
Unit 1 Mary Wollstonecraft

Unit 2: J. G. Fichte
Unit 3: G. W. F. Hegel
Unit 4: Arthur Schopenhauer
Module 3
Unit 1 Soren Kierkegaard

Unit 2 Karl Marx
Unit 3 Fredrich Nietzsche
Unit 4 John Dewey
References and Further Readings
Copleston, Frederick (1993) A History of Philosophy . New York: Image Books.
Lawhead, William (2002) The Voyage of Discovery. Belmont, USA:Wadsworth.
O’Connor, D.J (1985) A Critical History of Western Philosophy. New York: The Free Press.
Omoregbe, Joseph (1997) A Simplified History of Western Philosophy. Lagos: Joja
Educational Research and Publishers Limited.
Russell, Bertrand (1986) The History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon and Schuster
Inc.
Rusk, R. and Scotland, J. (1979). The doctrines of the great educators. Macmillan publishers.
Stumpf, S. E. and Fieser, J. (2003). Socrates to Sartre and beyond: a history of philosophy. 7th ed.
McGraw Hill.
Presentation Schedule
The presentation schedule gives you the important dates for the completion of your computer-
based tests, participation in forum discussions and participation at facilitation. Remember, you are
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to submit all your assignments at the appropriate time. You should guide against delays and
plagiarisms in your work. Plagiarism is a criminal offence in academics and is highly penalized.
Assessment
There are two main forms of assessments in this course that will be scored. The Continuous
Assessments and the final examination. The continuous assessment shall be in three-fold. There
will be two computer Based Assessment. The computer-based assessments will be given in
accordance to university academic calendar. The timing must be strictly adhered to. The Computer
Based Assessments shall be scored a maximum of 10% each, while your participation in discussion
forums and your portfolio presentation shall be scored maximum of 10% if you meet 75%
participation. Therefore, the maximum score for continuous assessment shall be 30% which shall
form part of the final grade.
The final examination for PHL will be maximum of three hours and it takes 70 percent of the total
course grade. The examination will consist of 5 questions out of which you are expected to answer
4.
Note: you will earn 10% score if you meet a minimum of 75% participation in the course forum
discussions and in your portfolios otherwise you will lose 10% in your total score. You will be
required to upload your portfolio using google Doc. What are you expected to do in your portfolio?
Your portfolio should be note or jottings you made on each study unit and activities. This will
include the time you spent on each unit or activity.
How to get the Most from the Course
To get the most in this course, you need to have a personal laptop and internet facility. This will
give you adequate opportunity to learn anywhere you are in the world. Use the Intended Learning
Outcomes (ILOs) to guide your self-study in the course. At the end of every unit, examine yourself
with the ILOs and see if you have achieved what you need to achieve.
Carefully work through each unit and make your notes. Join the online real time facilitation as
scheduled. Where you missed the scheduled online real time facilitation, go through the recorded
facilitation session at your own free time. Each real time facilitation session will be video recorded
and posted on the posted on the platform.
Work through all self-assessment exercises. Finally, obey the rules in the class.
Facilitation
You will receive online facilitation. The facilitation is learner centered. The mode of facilitation
shall be asynchronous and synchronous. For the asynchronous facilitation, your facilitator will:
• Present the theme for the week
• Direct and summarize forum discussions
• Coordinate activities in the platform
• Score and grade activities in the platform
• Score and grade activities when need be
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• Upload scores into the university recommended platform
• Support you to learn. In this regard personal mails may be sent.
• Send you videos and audio lectures; and podcast
For the Synchronous:

There will be a minimum of eight hours and a maximum of twelve online real time contact in the
course. This will be through video conferencing in the Learning Management System. The sessions
are going to be run at an hour per session. At the end of each one- hour video conferencing, the
video will be uploaded for view at your pace.
The facilitator will concentrate on main themes that are must know in the course. The facilitator is
to present the online real time video facilitation time table at the beginning of the course.
The facilitator will take you through the course guide in the first lecture at the start date of
facilitation.
Do not hesitate to contact your facilitator. contact your facilitator if you:
• Do not understand any part of the study unit or the assignment
• Have difficulty with the self-assessment exercises
• Have a question or problem with an assignment or with your tutor’s comments on an
assignment.
Also, use the contact provided for technical support.
Read assignment, participate in the forums and discussions. This gives you opportunity to socialize
with others in the programme. You can raise any problem encountered during your study. To gain
the maximum benefit from course facilitation, prepare a list of questions before the discussion
session. You will learn a lot from participating actively in the discussions.
Module 1
Unit 1: Introduction
Unit 2: Background to Late Modern Philosophy
Unit 3: Immanuel Kant: The Critical Philosophy
Unit 4: Immanuel Kant: The Moral Philosophy
Module 1: Unit 1: Introduction
Contents
1.1. Introduction
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1.2. Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)
1.3. Recap of the Early Modern Period
1.4. Conclusion
1.5. Summary
1.6. References/Further Readings
1.1 Introduction
The people who have engaged seriously in philosophizing have had varying aims. Some have been
religious leaders, like St. Augustine, and have tried to explain and justify certain religious points
of view. Some have been scientists, like René Descartes, and have attempted to interpret the
meaning and importance of various scientific discoveries and theories. Others, like John Locke
and Karl Marx, have philosophized in order to effect certain changes in the political organization
of society. Many have been interested in justifying or promulgating some set of ideas which they
thought might aid mankind. Others have had no such grandiose purpose, but merely wished to
understand certain features of the world in which they lived and certain beliefs that people held.
Regardless of these various conceptions of the role of the philosopher, and regardless of how
remote we may think his/her activities are from our immediate concerns, the philosopher has been
engaged in considering problems that are of importance to all of us, either directly or indirectly.
Through careful critical examination, he/she has tried to evaluate the information and beliefs we
have about the universe at large and the world of human affairs. From this investigation, the
philosopher has attempted to work out some general, systematic, coherent, and consistent picture
of all that we know and think. As we gain more information about the world through the sciences,
new interpretations of accepted pictures need to be considered. This sort of understanding has
provided an outlook or framework in which the ordinary person can place his/her own—possibly
more limited—conception of the world and human affairs (Popkin and Stroll 1). It has provided
as well a focus through which we can see our own roles and activities, and determine if they have
any significance. Through such an examination and evaluation, we may all be better able to assess
our ideals and aspirations, as well as understand better why we accept these, and possibly whether
we ought to.
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From the very beginnings of philosophy in ancient Greece, over two and a half millennia ago, it
has been the conviction of the serious thinkers who have engaged in this pursuit that it is necessary
to scrutinize the views that we accept about our world and ourselves to see if they are rationally
defensible. We have all acquired much information and many opinions about the natural and
human universe. But few of us have ever considered whether these are reliable or important. We
are usually willing to accept without question reported scientific discoveries, certain traditional
beliefs, and various views based upon our personal experiences. The philosopher, however, insists
upon subjecting all this to intensive critical examination in order to discover if these views and
beliefs are based upon adequate evidence and if a reasonable person may be justified in adhering
to them (Popkin and Stroll 1).
Philosophy, in a less dangerous way, also makes a person think—think about the basic foundations
of his/her outlook, his/her knowledge, his/her beliefs. It makes one inquire into the reasons for
what one accepts and does, and into the importance of one’s ideas and ideals, in the hope that one’s
final convictions, whether they remain the same or whether they change as a result of this
examination, will at least be rationally held ones.
1.2 Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)
By the end of this unit, you will be able to have insight as to some of the scholars that will be
treated in this course.
1.3 Recap of the Early Modern Period
In the first part of this course, you studied factors that gave rise the modern period
philosophy To refresh your memory, it was learnt that modern period of Philosophy is marked by
the declining authority of the church and the increasing authority of reason and science. During
this period, philosophy ceased to be a handmaid of theology and started enjoying the freedom of
reason that characterizes the discipline. And because of the new found freedom of reason, the
period witnessed an unprecedented development in scientific discoveries and inventions. Hence,
the modern period is often described as the period of the unfolding world of science.
The following were taught as factors that preluded the modern period:
1.3.1 The Renaissance
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The modern period as opposed to the medieval outlook began in Italy with the movement
called the Renaissance (Russell, 1945: 495). The term Renaissance literarily means "rebirth." The
Renaissance, therefore, was a time of rebirth and renewal; a time of release and discovery. It was
a rebirth of learning in the letters, humanism and philosophy (Essien, 2011: 184). During this
period, men began, once again, to emphasize the natural abilities of the human person to reason
independently of faith. The Renaissance marked the age of humanism-the focus on man.
1.3.2 The Reformation
The Reformation or Protestant Reformation, was another important wave that played a
significant role in the rise of modern philosophy. The Protestant Reformation, spearheaded by a
young Austinian monk, Martin Luther (1483-1546), started in Germany. The reformation started
as a form of rebellion against the authority of the Pope and the Catholic Church which was the seat
of Christianity in Europe. This rebellion arose as a result of the political and spiritual decline of
the church's influence. Political battles in the church brought about the Great Schism (division),
which lasted between 1378 to 1417. This led to the division of the church into two opposing
factions with each having its own Pope and college of Cardinals. As noted by Lawhead (2002:
204), secular rulers seized the opportunity to jump into the battle, supporting whichever side that
would serve their interests, thereby resulting in massive corruption in the church.
1.3.3 The Rise of Modern Science
According to Stumpf and Fieser (2012), there are two distinct components to the rise of
modern scientific revolution. First is the the new scientific discoveries and (2) new methods of
conducting scientific inquiry. As to new discoveries, to enhance the exactness of their
observations, scientists invented various scientific instruments. In 1590 the first compound
microscope was created. In 1608 the telescope was invented. The principle of the barometer was
discovered by Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647). Otto von Guericke (1602-1686) invented the air
pump, which was so important in creating a vacuum for the experiment that proved that all bodies,
regardless of their weight or size, fall at the same rate when there is no air resistance. With the use
of instruments and imaginative hypotheses, fresh knowledge began to unfold. Galileo Galilei
(1564-1642) discovered the moons around Jupiter; and Anton Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723)
discovered spermatozoa, protozoa, and bacteria, and William Harvey (1578-1657) discovered the
circulation of the blood. William Gilbert (1540-1603) wrote a major work on the magnet, and
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Robert Boyle (1627-1691), the father of chemistry, formulated his famous law concerning the
relation of temperature, volume, and pressure of gases.
The second contribution of the scientific revolution involved the development of new
scientific methods. Medieval approaches to science were grounded in Aristotle's system of
deductive logic. Several Renaissance and early modem scientists proposed alternative systems,
often quite different from each other. The scientific methods that we follow today; though, are in
many respects the direct descendants of these early theories, particularly those of Francis Bacon
(1561-1626), which stress the importance of observation and inductive reasoning. Scientific
methodology made further progress as new fields of mathematics were opened. Copernicus had
employed a twofold method: first, the observation of moving bodies, and, second, the
mathematical calculation of the motion of bodies in space.
The conflict between rationalism and empiricism resulted in an attempt by Immanuel Kant,
to synthesize these opposing schools of thought. following from his synthesis, the modern period
experienced a radical change which was ushered in by Kant’s philosophy, thereby paving way for
a new wave of thought in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. While this period was
characterized by idealism, some scholars, however, questioned the relevance of the speculative
though to the existence of man. This period, therefore, laid foundation for existentialism. Hence,
the late modern period was also a preparing ground for a humanistic approach to philosophy
through the emergence of existentialism.
1.3.4. Social and Political Changes
In the political realm, the growing spirit of nationalism was partially fueled by the
Protestant Reformation. Indeed, as kings turned away from Rome it was questionable whether
their motives were theological or political. This destroyed the religious unity of Europe and
inevitably led to outbreaks of religious-political wars. Ultimately, however, this resulted in a spirit
of skepticism and tolerance in reaction to the counterproductive strife and confusion produced by
theological fanaticism. As the essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) declared, “It is rating
one’s conjectures at a very high price to roast a man on the strength of them.” As people grew
weary of theological battles, they turned to secular learning, especially mathematics and science
(Lawhead 219).
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The world of commerce was undergoing a rapid expansion. A money economy replaced
the crude barter and exchange economy of the early Middle Ages. The rise of banking and
emerging capitalism created a need for firm and stable governments. Taking advantage of the
vacuum of authority, the middle-class commercial interests became the dominant political and
social power. All this caused, of course, an increased interest in life on earth. However, it was not
yet time for culture to become fully secularized. Instead, the culture united the life of the flesh and
the spirit, abandoning the medieval dualism of heaven and earth. The forces at work in this era did
not operate in separate compartments (Lawhead 219).
1.3.5 The Copernican Revolution
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) was a Catholic, Polish clergyman, and scientist of

unimpeachable theological orthodoxy. However, his 1543 book The Revolutions of the Heavenly
Bodies, challenged the prevailing orthodoxy in astronomy. Using both observations and
mathematics, he revolutionized astronomy with his heliocentric theory. This theory placed the sun
at the center of things and supposed that the earth, like the other planets, revolves on its own axis
while also revolving around the sun. Copernicus’s theory was not based on any new factual
discovery as much as it was rooted in his Neoplatonism, which dictated that perfect motion is a
uniform circular motion around a center. By placing the sun at the center of the earth’s and planets’
orbits, he radically reduced, by more than one-half, the number of epicycles required to picture the
solar system. In this way, he replaced most of the messy, bumpy orbits with aesthetically and
intellectually pleasing circular motions. Even though his motives were based on Neoplatonic
superstitions about the virtues of circularity, Copernicus was scientifically correct in preferring a
simpler and more elegant explanation to a complicated and awkward one. However, this new
position did not go well with the church, but it is important to understand that the scientific
objections were just as formidable as any theological problems.
This course a continuation of what we did last semester. We shall be concerned with the
wave of thought that arose from the two basic schools and how their thoughts impacted other
scholars. The course is divided into three modules. Each module has four units. Module one, unit
one covers the introduction of the course, outlining the different scholars that shall be considered.
In unit two, we shall focus on the background to late modern philosophy. Units three and four shall
discuss the critical and moral philosophies of Kant, respectively. The course is a three unit course
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and you shall have a continuous assessment at the end of each unit. However, there is no need to
panic as the manual is presented in a simple, down to earth English for your easy assimilation.
Self Assessment Exercise 1
1. Mention at least three factors that gave birth to the rise of the modern period as you
previously learnt.
2. Mention the two opposing schools of thought in the modern period and their positions.
1.4 Conclusion
Late Modern philosophy is a wave of thought that continues from the early modern
philosophy. However, we shall see the dichotomy between the thinkers of this era as we progress
in this study.
1.5 Summary
In this unit, you have been refreshed on the basic features that gave birth to early modern
philosophy.
1.6 References/Further Readings
Lawhead, William. The Voyage of Discovery: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy. 4th ed.
Cengage Advantage Books, 2015
Stumpf, Samuel and James Fieser. Socrates to Sartre and Beyond: A History of Philosophy. 8th
Ed. McGraw hill Education, 2012.
Essien, Ephraim. Summa philosophica: an introduction to philosophy and logic. Lulu press, 2011.
Russell, Bertrand. The history of Western philosophy. Simon and Schuster, 1945.
Popkin, Richard and Avrum Stroll. Philosophy Made Simple. 2nd Ed. Made Simple Books, 1993.
1.6 Possible Answers to SAE

Answers to SAE 1
1. Three factors that gave birth to the modern period were: (a) The renaissance (b) The
reformation and (c) the rise of modern science.
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2. The Two opposing schools of the modern period are rationalism and empiricism. The tenet
of rationalism sees reason as the source of knowledge whereas, empiricism sees experience
as the foundation of human knowledge.
Module 1: Unit 2: Background to Late Modern Philosophy
Contents
2.1 Introduction
2.3 Background to late modern thought
2.4 General Character of the Late Modern Period
2.4.1 The Influence of Immanuel Kant
2.4.2 The Rise of German Idealism
2.4.4 Emergence of Interest in the Discipline of History
2.4.5 The Development in Evolution Theory
2.4.6 The Thesis of Historicism
2.4.7 The Notion of Human Progress
2.5 Questions About Reason and Subjectivity
2.6 Conclusion
2.7 Summary
2.9 Possible Answers to SAEs
2.1 Introduction
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In this unit, we shall look at factors that gave impetus to the rise of late modern philosphy. This is
necessary as it will help us to properly understand the various stages of progress in the late modern
era.
At the end of this unit, you will learn:
1. The influence of Kant in ushering in the late modern period

2. The unique character of the late modern period.
2.3 Background to late modern thought
The late modern period of western philosophy came into effect in the nineteenth century.
It has been argued among contemporary researchers, what characterized the central tenet of the
age. This is because it is difficult to classify the thought of the scholars of this era into any single,
unified theme. According to Lawhead (378), the philosophies of this period could be viewed as a
number of streams moving in diverging directions. However, if we trace these streams back to
their point of origin, we will find that, with two exceptions, they all flow out from the system of
Immanuel Kant. After Kant, philosophy could never be the same again. His impact was so great
that it is common to label philosophical outlooks as “pre-Kantian” or “post-Kantian.”
Because Kant’s system was so comprehensive and complex as well as riddled with
numerous conflicting tendencies, it was difficult to embrace it as a whole. Thus, later philosophers
were content to make complete philosophies out of selected parts of the Kantian system, while
discarding those parts they found incoherent. Even those who most fully inherited Kant’s ideas
carried them in directions he never anticipated and would not have approved. The primary
nineteenth-century movements and thinkers that followed after Kant were German idealism,
romanticism, the positivism of Auguste Comte, the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the
historical materialism of Karl Marx, and the existentialism of Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich
Nietzsche.
1. Why do scholars argue about the general character of the late modern period?
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2. Kant influence was so great that it brings about philosophical outlooks called _____ or
_________
3.4 General Character of the Late Modern Period
2.4.1 The Influence of Immanuel Kant
The major influence of the late modern thinkers was the shadow of Kant’s philosophy. On
the one hand, Kant limited rational knowledge to the world of spatial-temporal experience called
the phenomena. The phenomenal world gives us reality, not naked and unadorned, but as it appears
after being structured by the categories of the mind. Nevertheless, it is the only world we know
and it is the world science studies. The major problem that all these thinkers had with Kant’s
system was its objectionable dualism. On the one hand, Kant limited rational knowledge to the
world of spatial-temporal experience called the phenomena. The phenomenal world gives us
reality, not naked and unadorned, but as it appears after being structured by the categories of the
mind. Nevertheless, it is the only world we know and it is the world science studies. On the other
hand, Kant could not free himself from the conviction that beyond the phenomenal world, beyond
the world as it appears to us, is reality as it is in itself—the noumenal realm. Kant’s critics were
quick to point out that it makes no sense for Kant to say we can know only what appears in
experience at the same time he claims to know there is a reality that transcends experience.
Furthermore, although Kant’s suggestion that the real world “causes” the world of phenomena has
a certain commonsense appeal, it is not consistent with his claim that causality is a category that
the mind imposes on experience and cannot be applied outside of what is empirically given.
The post-Kantian movements sought to resolve this problem in a number of ways. The
German idealists and the romantics denied that we were cut off from ultimate reality, as Kant had
claimed. Although they agreed the world of the empirical sciences is merely a system of
appearances, they did not draw the Kantian conclusion that reality-in-itself is a mysterious,
unapproachable region. Instead, they claimed, reality is exactly what we encounter in experience
when we approach it in the proper way. However, they described the world of experience as being
broader and richer than Kant ever imagined, for they included moral, aesthetic, and religious
experience within its scope. Both the idealists and the romantics believed the mind has intuitive
powers that transcend the limitations of science and reveal the heart of reality to us. Others, such
as the positivists and the utilitarians, claimed the world described by science (Kant’s phenomenal
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realm) was the only world worth talking about. Thus, they avoided the sort of problematic dualism
found in Kant by dismissing the meaningfulness of talking about a transcendent reality altogether.
Since the only reality we experience is sense data, they claimed, science can describe only the
regularities that occur within experience, but it cannot speculate about ultimate causes or any other
metaphysical entities.
The immediate heirs of Kantian philosophy were the German idealists. Idealism is the
theory that everything must be understood as intrinsically dependent on some sort of mental or
spiritual reality. Although they were influenced by Kant, the idealists who followed after him were
impatient with Kant’s narrow definition of knowledge and his obsession with the limitations of the
mind. According to their outlook, Kant’s unnecessarily cautious approach condemned human
knowledge to dwell in a sterile, minuscule, and trivial domain with nothing to give it spiritual
nourishment.
The idealists had a yearning for infinity (which provoked their critics to label them
“fanatics for totality”). Accordingly, the idealists sought to burst through the epistemological walls
Kant had so painstakingly built. In doing so, they hoped to show that reality itself, not just the
world of appearances, could be encompassed by the mind. The word “encompassed” may be
misleading, for it suggests an independently existing reality to which the mind may or may not be
related. However, this is exactly what idealism denied. The idealists charged that Kant had limited
the range of experience too severely. According to the idealists, the real world is not apprehended
through a scientific analysis of bits of sense data but by some sort of intellectual intuition provoked
by moral or aesthetic experience. Since ultimate reality is spiritual and not material, it can support
the highest aspirations of the human spirit as manifested in morals, art, and religion.
2.4.3 Romanticism Movement
The philosophical vision of the German idealists had much in common with the broader
movement of romanticism. Romanticism was a quasi-philosophical literary and artistic movement
that reacted against the Enlightenment picture of the universe as a machine that could best be
studied by the analytical techniques of the sciences. For the romantics, the scientific vision of the
world was too alienating, for it threatened to turn our moral, aesthetic, and religious longings into
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isolated aberrations within an otherwise mathematically ordered cosmos. As the romantics looked
out on nature, they did not see atomistic particles in motion. Instead, they felt they were in the
mystical presence of an organic unity that resonated with the human spirit. Furthermore, they were
convinced that logic and telescopes missed what was most important about reality.
Rather than reason and science revealing the secrets of this world to us, they fragmented
nature and turned it into a catalogue of abstractions. In place of the banquet table of life, full of
rich colors, tastes, and textures, science offered us only a cookbook of recipes. To be sure, every
savory dish present at the banquet of nature was represented in the scientists’ recipes. But to
mistake the scientists’ calculations for the fullness of reality would lead to spiritual starvation. The
physicist could summarize the sunset and rainbow in optical equations, and the physiologist could
describe the body of one’s lover as a machine made up of organic pumps, tubing, levers, and
pulleys. However, in each case the scientific account missed the beauty and the mystery of these
realities. Because its adherents were disdainful of logic and doctrines, romanticism was not a
sharply defined movement. It is better understood as a mood or temperament, giving rise to many
“romanticisms,” rather than a single set of commonly held doctrines. Nevertheless, some themes
were common to the romantics, such as intuition as a source of truth, distrust of logic and the
sciences, the value of the emotions, love of nature, the view of nature as spiritual, the quest for
new experience, and an adoration of classical antiquity.
Because of their suspicion of reason, the romantics had a more direct impact on art and
literature than on philosophy. Nevertheless, the movement inspired philosophers to expand their
vision of the world, and in turn philosophers did influence the romantics. Although romanticism
was not a direct offshoot of German idealism, the romantics were influenced by these
philosophers’ description of nature as spiritual and dynamic. Furthermore, the two movements
agreed that through the emotions, intuition, and aesthetic experience we could penetrate to the core
of reality and experience a spiritual oneness with the world.
2.4.4 Emergence of Interest in the Discipline of History
With the exception of Augustine, it is significant that very little has been said so far about
the role of history in our understanding of human experience. From the very beginning, most
philosophers, particularly the rationalists, were concerned with the search for eternal, timeless
truths. Even though Augustine thought historical change was important, its significance to him lay
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in the way it mirrored eternal principles. Likewise, even though the British empiricists emphasized
the changing world of the senses as the primary source of our knowledge, they found within the
mind and nature alike, an established pattern impervious to historical changes. Furthermore, the
empiricists and the rationalists alike assumed human nature could be defined in terms of a singular,
unchanging essence. Kant exploited these assumptions when he declared that the ground of
universal and necessary knowledge lies in the universal and static structure of the human mind.
This outlook changed dramatically in the nineteenth century.
To the philosophers of this time, history was all-important to philosophy. Hence, a unique
feature of this century was that history was regarded from a philosophical viewpoint, and even
more importantly, philosophy was regarded from a historical point of view. That this was a time
of enormous historical change helped fuel this outlook. Living in the aftermath of the American
and French Revolutions, facing social ferment, feeling the pressures for social reform and more
revolutions, watching the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and marveling at the rapid development
of the sciences, the thinkers of this century were persuaded that every tradition and idea eventually
runs its course and is replaced by new ways of thinking and living. However, the observation that
ideas and cultures change and are replaced by new ones was certainly not original to this century
The newly-found historical era came with three unique characteristic themes. These are evolution,
historicism and the theme of human progress.
2.4.5 The Development in Evolution Theory
The idea of evolutionary development was, of course, employed by Charles Darwin in his
groundbreaking On the Origin of Species (1859) to explain how totally new species emerged from
previous biological forms. His theory showed that even the categories of nature were not fixed for
all time but were in continual flux. Although Darwin himself had little interest in the philosophical
applications of his theory of evolution, it served as a powerful metaphor for philosophers who
wanted to understand humanity as moving toward progressively higher stages of intellectual,
moral, and social development. Before Darwin comes up with his scientific research, the idea of
evolutionary or dialectical development had been applied in Germany by the Hegelians and the
Marxists to explain all reality, including the course history had taken in the past and would take in
the future. For these philosophers, the new approach to biology seemed to provide scientific
confirmation of the dynamic view of reality they had already arrived at in their studies.
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2.4.6 The Thesis of Historicism
The thesis of historicism was built on this view of historical change. Historicism claims
that everything human is affected by the processes of history, such that any truth claim only has
validity in terms of its place and role in this historical development. As Hegel expressed it,
“Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy is its own time
apprehended in thoughts.” No idea has a single, fixed meaning, and no form of understanding has
an eternal, unchanging relationship to the truth. This outlook was based on the Kantian insight that
the mind is not passive in its encounter with the world, but is active and creative in structuring
how the world appears to us. Consequently, Kant claimed, the world we experience reflects not
the structure of reality in itself but rather the form of human understanding. Although apparently
introducing human subjectivity into cognition, Kant could still preserve the notion of universal
and objective knowledge because he insisted that the categories of the mind are the same for all.
However, once we abandon this thesis, we end up with the possibility that the world can be
structured and experienced in many ways.
Hegel and Marx illustrate this move to a multiplicity of perspectives. According to them,
different historical eras have different conceptual structures and different rational ideals. This is
because reason itself undergoes historical evolution as it is continually affected by the changing
conditions of individual and social life. Nevertheless, for both of them, the historical emergence
of new social and conceptual structures was not accidental but conformed to an identifiable rational
pattern.
2.4.7 The Notion of Human Progress
The nineteenth century’s understanding of history was permeated with the notion of progress. A
pessimist could look at the restless changes of human history and conclude that the world is a
dismal and endless parade of failed cultural experiments. However, the majority opinion among
nineteenth-century philosophers reflected an unrestrained optimism. To them, it was easy for the
discerning philosopher to find within the apparent chaos of history a clear linear development that
pointed toward some sort of fulfillment. This idea came out most clearly in Hegel’s and Marx’s
philosophies of history. Even though they both thought reason took different forms in different
historical periods, they resisted a total relativism that would rob reason of any significance. As
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each era gives way to its successor, they claimed, it follows a logical pattern that gives
intelligibility to the process and moves history closer to its culmination.
2.5 Questions About Reason and Subjectivity
This issue came to the fore in the eighteenth century when Hume argued that reason had very little
relevance to our knowledge of the world and to how we live our lives. In all our practical
engagements, he claimed,“Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions (Lawhead 388).
Although Kant agreed that reason has its limitations, he thought it had an a priori structure that
provided a basis for our scientific and ethical endeavors. The German idealists were not happy
with the boundaries of reason marked out by Kant and thought that the route to escape these limits
could be found in the self’s inner experience. Building on their ideas, but taking a turn back toward
rationalism, Hegel argued there was no separation between reason, the self, and reality because
our concepts, self-consciousness, and reality were manifestations of one, all-encompassing Spirit
that was developing in history.
1. Who argued against the relevance of our knowledge of the world?

2. The questions about reason and subjectivity first came up in which century?
2.6 Conclusion
In this unit, you have learnt some of the major factors that led to the emergence of the late
modern period. This unit discussed eight major factors to include; the impact of Kant’s synthesis,
the predominance of German thought, the evolutionary theory of Darwin, development of interest
in philosophy of history, among others. Taking these factors into consideration, it is very certain
that the late modern period was bound to enrich the intellectual world with various ideas. We shall
study some of these ideas as the work progresses.
2.7 Summary
In this unit you have learnt that the late modern period of western philosophy came into effect
in the nineteenth century and that the dominant scholars of this era were the German idealists. You
also learnt that this period witnessed a growing interest in historicism and laid the foundation for
existential philosophy.
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Answers to SAE 1
1. It has been argued among contemporary researchers, what characterized the central tenet
of the age because it is difficult to classify the thought of the scholars of this era into any
single, unified theme.
2. Pre-Kantian or Post-Kantian
Answers to SAE 2
1. David Hume
2. Eighteenth century
Module 1: Unit 3: Immanuel Kant: The Critical Philosophy
Contents
3.1. Introduction
3.3 A Brief Biography of Immanuel Kant
3.3 The Critical Philosophy: The Nature of Knowledge
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3.4 The Varieties of Judgments: Analytic and Synthetic Judgments vis a vis Apriori and Synthetic
Apriori Knowledge
3.5 Kant’s Copernican Revolution
3.6 Noumena and Phenomena
3.7 Kant on Space and Time
3.8 Transcendental Idealism
3.9 Conclusion
3.10 Summary
3.1 Introduction
In our introduction, we mentioned that Immanuel Kant’s philoosphy greatly iinfluenced

the line of thought in the late modern period. In fact, it will not be out of context to posit that Kant
changed the face of philosophy. Recall how we had earlier learnt that the argument between
empiricism and rationalism was fierce and their thought dominated the modern world. It was
Immanuel Kant who made a concerted effort to unite their views. In this unit, we shall discuss
Kant’s critical philosophy and how it actually addresed the ratio-empirico argiument
At the end of this unit, you will learn the foloowing:
1. The varieties of judgment in Kant’s philosophy

2. Kant’s Copernican revolution
3. The difference between noumenal and phenomenal reality
4. His concept of space and time
5. The transcendental idealism of Kant
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3.3 A Brief Biography of Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, on April 22, 1724. His parents were
Pietists, a sect of Protestants who lived severe, puritanical lives and emphasized faith and religious
feelings over reason and theological doctrines. Although Kant’s later religious thought was hardly
orthodox, he was always sensitive to the longings of the heart that cannot be met by the cold
dictates of theoretical reason. He went to school at the University of Königsberg and later ended
up becoming a professor there himself. Virtually no area of knowledge remained untouched by
Kant, for he lectured on metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, and philosophical theology, as well
as mathematics, physics, geography, and anthropology. In addition to his groundbreaking work in
philosophy, he also made significant contributions in some of the sciences. Despite the fact that
Kant was very rigid and strict in his personal lifestyle, his contemporaries describe his lectures as
humorous, entertaining, and even playful. Although his intellectual stature was imposing, his
physical size was diminutive. By most people’s standards, Kant lived a very limited existence. He
was well acquainted with geography and current events, yet he never traveled more than sixty
miles from the place of his birth. Although he helped out his family members financially, he never
felt very close to his sisters and brother. He did have a close circle of friends, but Kant gradually
became more of a recluse as he grew older. In 1797 he retired from public lecturing and, after a
period of illness, died on February 12, 1804.
1. Kant was on _____ and died on _____

2. How did his contemporaries describe his lectures?
3.4 The Critical Philosophy: The Nature of Knowledge
Kant referred to his own thought as “critical philosophy.” Accordingly, his major work
took the form of three critiques. His most important work, dealing with epistemology and
metaphysics, was the Critique of Pure Reason. By calling his approach a “critical philosophy,”
Kant was not calling for a mean-spirited, negative attitude in philosophy that rejects everything.
On the contrary, the word critique comes from a Greek word that means “to sort” or “to sift out.”
Thus, Kant’s goal was to set out the legitimate claims of reason and filter out all groundless claims
(Lawhead 357-8).
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Kant’s early philosophical inspiration had been the system of Leibniz, as expounded by
Wolff. But despite this influence—which is everywhere apparent in the Critique of Pure Reason—
Kant’s philosophy is unique, both in its methods and in its aims. In order to understand those aims
we must again consider the impact, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of the rise of
science. Science presented itself as a universal discipline, the premises of which were certain, and
the methods of which were disputable only by the adoption of a stance of philosophical skepticism.
No one could engage in science without accepting both the established results of his predecessors,
and also the empirical methods that led to their discovery. Science presented a picture of unanimity
and objectivity which no system of metaphysics could rival. Forced by this fact into unnatural self-
consciousness, philosophy found itself with no results that it could offer as its own peculiar
contribution to the fund of human knowledge. The very possibility of metaphysics was thrown in
doubt, and this doubt was only exacerbated by Hume’s radical skepticism—a skepticism which,
according to Kant, aroused him from his ‘dogmatic (by which he meant Leibnizian) slumbers’. All
philosophy, then, for Kant, must begin from the question ‘How is metaphysics possible?’
In answer to that question, Kant attempted a systematic critique of human thought and
reason. He tried to explore not just scientific beliefs, but all beliefs, in order to establish exactly
what is presupposed in the act of belief as such. He wished to describe the nature and limits of
knowledge, not just in respect of scientific discovery, but absolutely: his metaphysics was
designed, not as a postscript to physics, but as the very foundation of discursive thought. He hoped
to show three things:
1 That there is a legitimate employment of the understanding, the rules of which can be laid bare,
and that limits can be set to this legitimate employment. (It is a striking conclusion of Kant’s
thought that rational theology is not just unbelievable, but unthinkable.)
2 That Humean skepticism is impossible, since the rules of the understanding are already sufficient
to establish the existence of an objective world obedient to a law of causal connection.
3 That certain fundamental principles of science—such as the principle of the conservation of

substance, the principle that every event has a cause, the principle that objects exist in space and
time, can be established a priori.
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Kant’s proof of these contentions begins from the theory of ‘synthetic a priori’ knowledge.
According to Kant, scientific knowledge is a posteriori: it arises from, and is based in, actual
experience. Science, therefore, deals not with necessary truths but with matters of contingent fact.
However, it rests upon certain universal axioms and principles, which, because their truth is
presupposed at the start of any empirical enquiry, cannot themselves be empirically proved. These
axioms are, therefore, a priori, and while some of them are ‘analytic’ (true by virtue of the
meanings of the words used to formulate them), others are ‘synthetic’, saying something
substantial about the empirical world.
Moreover, these synthetic a priori truths, since they cannot be established empirically, are
justifiable, if at all, through reflection, and reflection will confer on them the only kind of truth
that is within its gift: necessary truth. They must be true in any conceivable world. (Kant’s idea of
necessity is here weaker than that of Leibniz, for whom necessity meant truth in every possible
world; see pp. 69–70.) These truths, then, form the proper subject matter of metaphysics; the
original question of metaphysics has become: ‘How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?’
Kant believed that neither the empiricists nor the rationalists could provide a coherent
theory of knowledge. The first, who elevate experience over understanding, deprive themselves of
the concepts with which experience might be described (for no concept can be derived as a mere
‘abstraction’ from experience); while the second, who emphasize understanding at the expense of
experience, deprive themselves of the very subject matter of knowledge. Knowledge is achieved
through a synthesis of concept and experience, and Kant called this synthesis ‘transcendental’,
meaning that it could never be observed as a process, but must always be presupposed as a result.
Synthetic a priori knowledge is possible because we can establish that experience, if it is to be
subject to this synthesis, must conform to the ‘categories’ of the understanding.
These categories are the basic forms of thought, or a priori concepts, under which all merely
empirical concepts are subsumed. (For example, the concept ‘table’ is subsumed under ‘artifact’,
which in turn is subsumed under ‘object’ and hence under ‘substance’; the concept of ‘killing’ is
subsumed under ‘action’, which falls under ‘cause’. The categories are the end-points of these
chains of subsumption, points beyond which one cannot proceed, since they represent the most
basic operations of human thought.) Thus we can know a priori that our world (if it is to be our
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world) must obey certain principles, principles implicit in such concepts as substance, object and
cause, and that it must fall under the general order of space and time.
Kant's critical philosophy, therefore, consists of an analysis of the components of human

reason, by which he meant "a critical inquiry into the faculty of reason with reference to all the
knowledge which it may strive to attain independently of all experience" (Stumpf and Fieser 274).
The way of critical philosophy is to ask the question "What and how much can understanding and
reason know, apart from all experience?" Earlier metaphysicians engaged in disputes about the
nature of the Supreme Being and other subjects that took them beyond the realm of immediate
experience. Kant, though, asked the principal question whether human reason possessed the
powers to undertake such inquiries. From this point of view he thought it foolish for
metaphysicians to construct systems of knowledge even before they had determined whether, by
pure reason alone, we can apprehend what is not given to us in experience. Critical philosophy for
Kant was, therefore, not the negation of metaphysics but rather a preparation for it. For Kant, if
metaphysics has to do with knowledge as developed by reason alone, that is, prior to experience,
or apriori, then how such apriori knowledge is possible? Kant therefore, began a new task in
philosophy similar to what Copernicus did in astronomy. But for us to properly understand this
project, there is need to investigate the nature of knowledge in Kant’s philosophy.
1. What is the way of critical philosophy?

2. According to Kant, knowledge is achieved through a _____ and _____
3. According to Kant, is critical philosophy a negation of metaphysics?
3.5 The Varieties of Judgments: Analytic and Synthetic Judgments vis a vis Apriori and
Synthetic Apriori Knowledge
Kant maintains that knowledge appears in the form of judgment where we come to either
affirm or deny something. Because of this, therefore, to lay claim to knowledge requires that we
clearly examine our kinds of judgments that we make. Accordingly, Kant identifies two kinds of
judgments – analytic and synthetic.
3.5.1 Analytic Judgment
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Analytic judgments are based on the principle of contradiction. For example, “all bachelors
are unmarried” is a true analytic judgment because the contradiction of this statement is necessarily
false. We can confirm the truth of this judgment not by going out and gathering facts but merely
by analyzing the meaning of the terms. The predicate “unmarried” is already contained within the
subject “bachelors.” Furthermore, because the truth of this judgment is independent of any
particular facts, it does not give any new knowledge about the world.
3.5.2 Synthetic Judgment
A synthetic judgment differs from the analytic in that its predicate is not contained in the
subject. Thus, in a synthetic judgment the predicate adds something new to our concept of the
subject. To say that "the apple is red" joins two independent concepts, for the concept apple does
not contain the idea of redness. Similarly, for Kant, "all bodies are heavy" is an example of a
synthetic judgment, for the idea of heaviness is not contained in the concept of body; that is, the
predicate is not contained in the subject. Corresponding to these two kinds of judgments are two
kinds of knowledge – apriori knowledge and aposteriori knowledge. A priori knowledge is
knowledge that can be obtained independently of experience. Clearly, all analytic judgments are
cases of a priori knowledge. To know “all bachelors are unmarried” I do not need any empirical
data. A posteriori knowledge, in contrast, is knowledge obtained from experience. “All the
bachelors in this class are six feet tall” cannot be known to be true apart from experience. Hence,
it is an example of a posteriori knowledge. Thus, while all analytic judgments are a priori, most
synthetic judgments are a posteriori (Stumpf and Fieser 276).
3.5.3 The Synthetic Apriori Judgments
Having identified two kinds of judgments and their corresponding knowledge, Kant
directed his epistemological quest to establishing a kind of knowledge that is synthetic apriori
(Esssien 239). He was able to locate synthetic or aposteriori propositions in the empiricists
programme, and apriori propositions in the rationalist programme. Hence, Kant maintains that
there is another form of judgment besides the analytic apriori and the synthetic aposteriori, and
this is the synthetic a priori. This is the kind of judgment Kant was most concerned about because
he was certain that we make these judgments, yet there was the persistent question of how such
judgments are possible. The question arises because by definition synthetic judgments are based
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on experience, but if that is the case, how can they be called apriori, since this implies
independence of experience?
Kant showed that in mathematics, physics, ethics, and metaphysics we do make judgments
that are not only a priori but also synthetic. For example, the judgment 7 plus 5 equal 12 is certainly
a priori because it contains the marks of necessity and universality; that is, 7 plus 5 has to equal
12, and it always has to do so. At the same time, this judgment is synthetic and not analytic because
12 cannot be derived by a mere analysis of the numbers 7 and 5. The act of intuition is necessary
in order to achieve a synthesis of the concepts 7, 5, and plus. Kant shows that in propositions of
geometry also the predicate is not contained in the subject even though there is a necessary and
universal connection between subject and predicate. Thus, propositions of geometry are at once a
priori and synthetic. But how are synthetic apriori knowledge possible? This became the central
concern of Kant that later revolutionizes epistemology and settles the dispute between rationalism
and empiricism.
1. Analytic judgments are based on the principle of _____

2. How does synthetic judgments differ from analytic judgments?
3. Propositions of geometry are both ____ and ____
3.6 Kant’s Copernican Revolution
To explain the nature of knowledge, Kant did something in epistemology similar to what
Copernicus did in astronomy. Before Copernicus, it was generally believed that the earth was at
the centre of the universe, and the sun and all other planets revolves around the earth. However,
Copernicus reversed this view by showing that it was the opposite, that it was the sun that was at
the centre of the universe and that the earth and other planets revolves round the sun (Omoregbe
93). In a similar way, Kant proposes a “Copernican revolution” in epistemology.
Kant solved the problem of the synthetic a priori judgment by substituting a new hypothesis
concerning the relation between the mind and its objects. Before Kant, the general believe was that
in the process of acquiring knowledge, the human mind was passive while objects of perception
imposed themselves on the mind. Hence, we can only have knowledge of things as the mind
impresses them on us. But Kant reversed this position and argued that it was the opposite. It is not
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things that impose themselves on the mind, instead, it is the mind that imposes itself on things,
forcing the things we perceive to conform to its own structure. In other words, Kant argues that it
is the mind that imposes its own categories on objects of sense perception, forcing them to conform
to these categories. The outcome is that things appear to us not as they are but as the mind makes
them appear to us (Essien 240).
Kant did not mean that the mind creates objects, nor did he mean that the mind possesses
innate ideas. His Copernican revolution consisted rather in his saying that the mind brings
something to the objects it experiences. Kant agreed with Hume that our knowledge begins with
experience, but unlike Hume, Kant saw the mind as an active agent doing something with the
objects it experi ences. The mind, Kant says, is structured in such a way that it imposes its way of
knowing on its objects. By its very nature the mind actively organizes our experiences. That is,
thinking involves not only receiving impressions through our senses but also making judgments
about what we experience. Just as a person who wears colored glasses sees everything in that color,
so every human being, having the faculty of thought, inevitably thinks about things in accordance
with the natural structure of the mind (Stumpf and Fieser 278).
1. How did Kant solve the problem of synthetic-apriori judgment?

2. What was the general believe of knowledge acquisition before Kant and how did he change
that?
3.7 Noumena and Phenomena
A major aspect of Kant's critical philosophy was his insistence that human knowledge is
forever limited in its scope. This limitation takes two forms. First, knowledge is limited to the
world of experience. Second, our knowledge is limited by the manner in which our faculties of
perception and thinking organize the raw data of experience. Kant did not doubt that the world as
it appears to us is not the ultimate reality (Stumpf and Fieser 280). At this point, Kant makes a
distinction between the noumena and the phenomena. According to Omoregbe, Kant’s skepticism
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is derived from his Copernican Revolution and his distinction between things as they are in
themselves and things as they appear to us (Omoregbe 13). The noumena are things as they are in
themselves and the phenomena are things as they appear to us.
According to Kant, the noumenal reality is beyond the scope of human knowledge. The
implication of this is that we cannot know things as they are, but we can only have knowledge of
things as they appear to us. However, the way they appear is different from the way they are. For
Kant, therefore, we can only know appearances of things and not realities themselves. The problem
there, is that Kant’s philosophy leads to skepticism.
1. A major aspect of Kant’s critical philosophy was his insistence that _______
2. What do you understand by noumena?
3. What do you understand by phenomena?
4. Which of the two realities, according to Kant, is beyond the scope of human
knowledge and what is its implication to knowledge?
3.8 Kant on Space and Time
Immanuel Kant believes that for us to be able to know the world it is important to
understand how we are able to experience things spatially and temporally. For Kant, therefore,
space and time are not mysterious sorts of “things” within experience but are fundamental frames
of reference in terms of which objects appear to us (Lawhead 261). Kant calls them the “ apriori
forms of intuition.” The first point Kant raises about space and time is that it is not an empirical
concept derived from our experience of things outside us. This means that space, then, is nothing
but form of all appearance of outer sense. Kant sees it as the necessary condition of all outer objects
as they appear to us, but does not necessarily underlie things as they are in themselves (Essien
241).
Kant argues that we cannot could not have form the concept of time from our observation
or experience of events happening successively or simultaneously, because the notions of
succession and simultaneity themselves presuppose time (Kemp 18). According to him, succession
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and simultaneity are temporal concepts and we must therefore already have the concept of time
before we can grasp the existence of successive or simultaneous events.
Like space, Kant also maintains that time is not a general concept, for even though we can
talk about different times, they are not different instances of one concept, but different parts of one
and the same time. Time, then, like space, is an apriori form of intuition. However, it differs from
space in that time is a form of our intuition or perception of ourselves and our inner state, and not
our intuition of objects around us. Time, then, is a necessary formal conditions of all appearances.
All objects outside us appear to us as extended in space, but all representations, whatsoever,
whether of inner states or of outer objects, appear to us as succeeding or simultaneous with one
another in time. Therefore, according to Kant, we cannot say that things as they are in themselves
exist in time, anymore than we can say that they are spatially extended. But all things as they
appear to us in our human condition are in time-relation (Kemp 18).
1. How does Kant conceives space and time?

2. What is Kant’s definition of time?
3. What is Kant’s idea of succession and simultaneity?
3.9 Transcendental Idealism
Kant describes his thought as formal, critical or transcendental Idealism. Transcendental

idealism, therefore, describes Kant’s view that space and time and the categories are conditions of
the possibility of experience rather than features of things as they are in themselves (Essien 238).
For Kant, we do not know whether things-in-themselves are in space and time or whether they
form a causally interacting system, but unless we were so constituted as to place everything in
spatiotemporal context and to synthesize our sensations according to the categories of the
understanding, we cannot claim knowledge of objective world.
Kant doubts the possibility of empiricism to perform this synthesis of ourselves and others.
Instead, he believes that a transcendental self should be postulated as doing this, however, nothing
could be known of this transcendental self since is a condition of knowledge and not an objective
knowledge. Kant maintains that the natural world or the world of appearances, somehow depends
on transcendental self of which we can know nothing except that it is (Essien 238). Whereas at the
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empirical level selves and material things are equally real, the knowledge we have at this level
presupposes the synthesizing activities of a transcendental self of which we can know nothing.
1. What do you understand by Kantian transcendental idealism?

2. What is the role of transcendental idealism in knowledge acquisition, according to Kant?
3.10 Conclusion
In this unit, you have learnt how Kant, in his critical philosophy, made an attempt to
reconcile rationalism and empiricism. In his analysis of forms of judgment, Kant came up with the
possibility of the synthetic apriori judgment. Again, Kant limit our understanding to the
phenomena and emphasizes theworking human mind in knowledge acquisition. Through his
transcendental idealism, Kant successfully trasformed philosophy, thereby arousing a diffeent
system of thought among his contemporaries.
3.11Summary
In this unit, you have learnt that the human mind plays an active role in knowledge acquisition.
There are two basic kinds of reality, the noumena and the phenomenain Kant’s philosophy.
According to him, we can only know appearnaces and not things as they are. We also learnt that
space and time and the categories, according to Kant, are conditions of the possibility of experience
rather than features of things as they are in themselves. Kant was able to locate synthetic or
aposteriori propositions in the empiricists programme, and apriori propositions in the rationalist
programme.

Essien Ephraim. Summa Philosophica: An Introduction to Philosophy and Logic. Lulu Press,
2011.
Answers to SAE 1
167
1. Kant was born on April 22, 1724 and died on February 12, 1804
2. His contemporaries describe his lectures as humorous, entertaining, and even playful.
Answers to SAE 2
1. The way of critical philosophy is to ask the question "What and how much can
understanding and reason know, apart from all experience?"
2. Knowledge is achieved through a synthesis of concept and experience.
3. No
Answers to SAE 3
1. Contradiction
2. A synthetic judgment differs from the analytic in that its predicate is not contained in the
subject. Thus, in a synthetic judgment the predicate adds something new to our concept of
the subject.
3. Apriori and synthetic
Answers to SAE 4
1. Kant did not mean that the mind creates objects, nor did he mean that the mind possesses
innate ideas.
2. Before Kant, the general believe was that in the process of acquiring knowledge, the human
mind was passive while objects of perception imposed themselves on the mind. Hence, we
can only have knowledge of things as the mind impresses them on us. But Kant reversed
this position and argued that it was the opposite. It is not things that impose themselves on
the mind, instead, it is the mind that imposes itself on things, forcing the things we perceive
to conform to its own structure.
Answers to SAE 5
1. A major aspect of Kant's critical philosophy was his insistence that human knowledge is
forever limited in its scope.
2. The noumena are things as they are in themselves
3. The phenomena are things as they appear to us.
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4. Noumena is beyond the scope of human knowledge. The implication of this is that we
cannot know things as they are, but we can only have knowledge of things as they appear
to us.
Answers to SAE 6
1. Kant conceives space and time as fundamental frames of reference in terms of which
objects appear to us.
2. Time, according to him, is an apriori form of intuition.
3. For Kant, succession and simultaneity are temporal concepts and we must therefore already
have the concept of time before we can grasp the existence of successive or simultaneous
events.
Answers to SAE 7
1. Transcendental idealism, describes Kant’s view that space and time and the categories are
conditions of the possibility of experience rather than features of things as they are in
themselves.
2. At the level of transcendental idealism, according to Kant, the knowledge we have at this
level presupposes the synthesizing activities of a transcendental self.
Module 1: Unit 4: Immanuel Kant: The Moral Philosophy

Contents
4.1 Introduction
4.3 The Basis of Kant’s Moral Philosophy
4.4 The Good Will
4.5 The Categorical Imperative
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4.6 Conclusion
4.7 Summary
4.1 Introduction
In the last unit, you were introduced into the metaphysics and epistemology of Kant. But
how does critical philosophy answer the question of morality? In this unit, we shall assess how
Kant addresses the question of morality with reference to his critical philosophy.
The following are what you will learn at the end of this unit:
1. The basis of Kant’s moral philosophy.

2. The concept of Good and Good Will.
3. The categorical imperative.
4.3 The Basis of Kant’s Moral Philosophy
Reason constitutes the basis of Kant’s Moral philosophy. For Kant, reason is concerned
with theory about things and with practical behaviour, that is, moral behavior. The task of moral
philosophy, according to Kant, is to discover how we are able to arrive at principles of behavior
that are binding upon all people. He was sure that we cannot discover these principles simply by
studying the actual behaviuor of people, for although such a study would give us interesting
anthropological information about how people do behave, it would not tell us how they ought to
behave. Still, we do make moral judgments when we say, for example, that we ought to tell the
truth, and the question is how we arrive at such a rule of behavior. For Kant the moral judgment
that "we ought to tell the truth" is in principle the same as the scientific judgment that "every
change must have a cause." What makes them similar is that both of these judgments come from
our reason and not from the objects we experience. Just as our theoretical reason brings the
category of causality to visible objects, and thereby explains the process of change, so also the
practical reason brings to any given moral situation the concept of duty, or "ought." Both in science
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and in moral philosophy; we use concepts that go beyond particular facts we experience at any one
time.
Experience in both cases is the occasion for triggering the mind to think in universal terms.
When we experience a given example of change, our minds bring to this event the category of
causality. This makes it possible to explain the relation of cause and effect not only in this case but
in all cases of change. Similarly, in the context of human relations, the practical reason is able to
determine not only how we should behave at this moment but also what should be the principle of
our behavior at all times. Like scientific knowledge, moral knowledge is based on a prior
judgments. Kant discovered earlier that scientific knowledge is possible because of the a priori
categories that the mind brings to experience.
Morality for Kant is, therefore, an aspect of rationality and has to do with our consciousness
of rules or "laws" of behavior, which we consider both universal and necessary. The qualities of
universality and necessity are the marks of a priori judgments, and this further confirms Kant's
view that the principles of behavior are derived by the practical reason a priori. Instead of searching
for the quality of "goodness" in the effects of our actions, Kant focuses on the rational aspect of
our behavior (Stumpf and Fieser 286). For Kant, moral philosophy, then, is the quest for those
principles that apply to all rational beings and which will eventually lead to actions that are good.
1. What is the goal of moral philosophy, according to Kant?

2. What is Kant’s conception of morality?
3. Justify Kant’s idea of reason as the basis of morality.
4.5 The Good Will
In the Groundwork of Metaphysics of Morals, Kant says that nothing can possibly be
conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good, without qualification, except
the goodwill (Kant 12). Kant identifies other qualities we can also called good; intelligence, wit,
judgment and other talents of the mind etc., as undoubtedly good and desirable in many respects,
but these gifts if nature, according to him, may also become extremely bad and mischievous if the
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will which is to make use of them, and which, therefore, constitutes what is called character, is not
good. Kant argues that a good will is good not because of what it performs or effects, not by its
aptness for the attainment of some proposed end, but simply by virtue of the volition; that is, it is
good in itself, and considered by itself to be esteemed much higher than all that can be brought
about by it in favour of any inclination (Kant 13).
For Kant, the seat of moral worth is in the will, and the good will is one that acts out of a
sense of duty. According to him, an action done from duty must wholly exclude the influence of
inclination, and with it every object of the will, so that nothing remains which can determine the
will except objectively the law and subjective pure respect for this practical law. Duty, then,
implies that we are under some kind of obligation, a moral law. And Kant says that as rational
beings we are aware of this obligation as it comes to us in the form of an imperative. With his
focus in duty, the ethics of Immanuel Kant is deontological.
1. What is Kant’s argument for the good will?

2. What is the place of duty in Kant’s moral theory?
4.6 The Categorical Imperative
For Kant, a moral law is a rule for guiding behavior. Hence, it is a kind of command or
imperative. Kant makes a distinction between two kinds of imperatives. The first sort is a
hypothetical imperative. It says, “If you want X then do Y.” This rule tells me what I “ought” to
do, but the ought is contingent on my desiring the goal following the “if.” For example, I may be
told, If you want a nice lawn, then you must fertilize your grass.” Kant calls this type of
hypothetical statement a technical imperative. It tells me what means I must use to achieve an end
I may desire. Kant, therefore, argues that most hypothetical imperative fall under the heading of
pragmatic imperatives or counsels of prudence and offer advice on how to enhance one’s own
welfare and happiness.
Kant says that a genuinely moral command is not a hypothetical imperative. According to
him, the moral law is presented to us as a categorical imperative. It tells you what you ought,
should, or must do, but it does not depend on any prior conditions, or subjective wants and wishes,
and it contains no qualifications. It takes the form “Do X” (Lawhead 372). It is not preceded by an
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if clause for it tells you what you are morally commanded to do under all conditions and at all
times. However, if such a moral law does not come from some external lawgiver such as God, who
issues such commands to you? The lawgiver for Kant is reason itself (Lawhead 372). A rational
rule is one that is universal and consistent. It is universal in that it is a rule that applies to all people,
at all times, and in all circumstances. It is consistent in that it does not lead to any contradictions
(Lawhead 372). Kant says that categorical imperative has three postulate.
The first imperative states that as moral agents, we should “Act on the maxim which we
can wish it becomes universal law.” A maxim is a general rule that tells us what we should and
should not do. However, notice that Kant has not given us any specific maxims. Instead, he has
given us the principle that we use to decide which maxims establish our actual moral obligations
and which ones do not. This law, therefore, entails universality of human moral actions. The
second imperative states that we should “Act not to treat another as a means to an end, but always
as an end in themselves.” The individual human being as possessing absolute worth becomes the
basis for the supreme principle of morality. According to him, the foundation of this imperative is
that:
Rational nature exists as an end in itself. All men everywhere want to be

considered persons instead of things for the same reason that I do, and this
affirmation of the absolute worth of the individual leads to a second
formulation of the categorical imperative which says: So act as to treat
humanity, whether in your own person or in that of any other, in every case
as an end withal, never as a means only (Kant in Stumpf and Fieser 288).
This means that each person has intrinsic worth and dignity and that we should not use
people or treat them like things. Kant’s argument for this principle could be paraphrased in the
following manner. Mere things such as cars, jewels, works of art, or tools have value only if
persons endow them with value.
An important feature of this formulation of the moral imperative is that Kant explicitly
claims that we should treat ourselves with respect and not merely as a means to some end. Many
ethical theorists (the utilitarians, for example) believe that ethics only governs our relations with
others. However, one implication that follows from Kantian ethics is that we have moral duties to
ourselves and not just to others. For this reason, Kant condemns suicide. If I decide to terminate
my life in order to escape my pains and disappointments, I am treating myself as though I were a
thing that is determined by external circumstances. Instead, I should respect the dignity and worth
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of my own personhood and treat it as having a value that transcends every other consideration
(Lawhead 374).
Kant’s claim that the three principles given are simply separate versions of a single
principle is difficult to understand: the principles do not seem the same, and indeed involve
different terms in their formulation. However, Kant clearly thought that any philosophical
justification of the one would be adequate to ground the others too, perhaps because they each
involve some fundamental aspect of a single cluster of concepts: rational agency, autonomy, will,
end. These concepts could plausibly be considered to provide the basic ideas of practical reason.
It is clear that the three principles (and the various modifications of them which Kant from time to
time gave) contain the seeds of a powerful and also common-sensical moral point of view. They
enjoin respect for others; they forbid slavery, fraud, theft, violence and sexual misuse; they provide
a systematic and plausible test against which the pretensions of any particular morality could be
measured. Kant’s claim, therefore, to have discovered the fundamental presuppositions of morality
may not be entirely unfounded.
1. Another name for imperative is ______?

2. Mention the two types of imperatives according to Kant.
3. The moral law is presented to us as what kind of imperative?
4. State the first categorical imperative of Kant.
5. What is a maxim?
4.7 The Objective Necessity of the Categorical Imperative
The objectivity of the categorical imperative consists in three separate properties. First, it
makes no reference to individual desires or needs, indeed to nothing except the concept of
rationality as such. Hence it makes no distinctions among rational agents, but applies, if at all,
universally, to all who can understand reasons for action (It therefore governs reasoning about
ends and not about means.) Secondly, the rational agent is constrained by reason to accept the
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categorical imperative: this imperative is as much a fundamental law of practical reason as the law
of non-contradiction is a law of thought. Not to accept it is not to reason practically. Like the law
of non-contradiction, therefore, it cannot be rationally rejected. Thirdly, to accept such a principle
is to acquire a motive to act—it is to be persuaded to obedience. Since the imperative makes no
reference to any desire, but only to the faculty of reasoning as such, it follows that, if all those
three claims can be upheld, practical reason alone can provide a motive for action. Hence the
ground of Hume’s scepticism—which is that reason is inert, and that all practical reasoning is
subservient to desire—is cut away. The moral law becomes not just universal, but necessary, for
there is no way of thinking practically that will not involve its explicit or implicit affirmation. The
categorical imperative has ‘objective necessity’, and achieves this by abstracting from all needs
and desires, all ‘empirical determinations’. It represents the agent as bound by his rational nature
alone.
How can this claim to objectivity be upheld? It is here that Kant’s moral philosophy
becomes difficult and obscure. While he affirms that we know the validity of the categorical
imperative a priori, he recognizes that it is no more sufficient in the case of practical reasoning
than it is in the case of scientific understanding to make such a claim. It also stands in need of
proof—the kind of proof that the Transcendental Deduction was supposed to provide in the case
of the presuppositions of scientific thinking. But Kant did not provide this Transcendental
Deduction; instead, he devoted the second Critique to an examination of metaphysical questions
which, while enormously influential, left the gap between his metaphysics and his morals
unclosed. This examination, perhaps intended as a kind of substitute for a Transcendental
Deduction, concerns the concepts of freedom, reason and autonomy.
4.7.1 Freedom and reason
Kant argued that no moral law, and indeed no practical reasoning, is intelligible without
the postulate of freedom; he also argued that only a rational being could be free in the sense that
morality requires. In what then does freedom consist? Not, as Spinoza, Hume and many others had
adequately proved, in mere randomness, nor in freedom from those laws that govern the universe.
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The free agent, as soon as we examine the question, we see to be distinguished, not by his lack of
constraint, but by the peculiar nature of the constraint which governs him. He is constrained by
reason, in its reception of the moral law. Freedom is subjection to the moral law, and is never more
vivid than in the recognition of the necessity of that law and its absolute authority over the actions
of the moral agent.
To clarify this thought we must distinguish action in accordance with the law from action
from the law. A person might act in accordance with the law out of terror or coercion, or in the
hope of reward. In these cases the law is not his motive, and the maxim governing his action, while
it may seem to be categorical, is in fact hypothetical. To act from the law is to act out of an
acceptance of the categorical imperative itself, and to be motivated by that acceptance. Since this
motivation is itself intrinsic to the categorical imperative, it arises from the exercise of reason
alone; in acting from the law, therefore, a rational agent at the same time expresses what Kant
called ‘the autonomy of the will’. His action stems from his own rational reflection, which suffices
to generate the motive of his act. His act is, in a deep sense, his own, and the decision from which
it springs reflects his whole existence as a rational being, and not the arbitrary (empirical)
determination of this or that desire.
Opposed to this autonomy is the ‘heteronomy’ of the agent who acts not in obedience to
the commands of reason, but, for example, out of passion, fear, or the hope of reward. The
‘heteronomous’ agent is the one who has withdrawn from the exactions of pure morality and taken
refuge in slavery. He acts in subjection, either to nature or to some superior force. He may disguise
his a-morality by religious scruples, which lead him to act in accordance with the moral law out
of hope or fear. But in himself, having failed to achieve the autonomy which alone commands the
respect of rational beings, he stands outside the moral order, unfree, subservient, diminished in his
very personhood, and in his respect for himself.
4.7.2 The Antinomy of Freedom
Having established a connection between freedom, reason and autonomy, Kant approaches
the problem of free will. In the course of doing so he, begins the partial retraction of his strictures
against speculative metaphysics. In the ‘Antinomy of Pure Reason’, contained in the Dialectic of
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the first Critique, Kant had purported to show the various ways in which pure reason tries to reach
beyond the limited, ‘conditioned’, time-dominated world of empirical observation, so as to
embrace the unconditioned, eternal world of ‘noumena’. Kant sought to demonstrate that each of
these ways of pursuing the ‘unconditioned’, ‘intelligible’ order generates a contradiction.
One of the ‘cosmological’ contradictions seemed to him, however, to demand a resolution.

This was the contradiction between free will and determinism. The category of cause, and its
attendant principle that every event has a cause, orders the empirical world in such a way as to
leave no room for the unconditioned event. And yet human freedom seems to require us to think
of ourselves as in some sense the ‘originators’ of our actions, standing outside the course of nature.
This freedom is something of which we have an indubitable intuition. The antinomy troubled Kant.
He could not accept Hume’s view, that there is, here, no genuine contradiction. Nor could he accept
his own official theory, that such antinomies are the inevitable result of human reason’s attempt to
think beyond nature, to aspire towards the absolute and unconditioned, instead of confining itself
to the phenomenal world. He therefore sought to develop, both here, and in the second Critique, a
solution to the problem of free will. The solution took the following form: The intuitive knowledge
of our freedom is primitive and original. It is the presupposition of any practical problem and of
any practical reasoning that might be brought to solve it. It stands to practical reason much as the
Transcendental Unity of Apperception stands to the theoretical understanding: it is the
unquestionable premise without which there would be neither problem nor solution. But practical
knowledge is not like theoretical knowledge. It aims not to understand nature, not to explain and
predict, but to find reasons for action, and to lay down laws of rational conduct. In thinking of
myself as free I am thinking of myself, so to speak, ‘under the aspect of agency’. That entails
seeing myself, not as an object in a world of objects, obedient to causal laws, but as a subject,
creator of my world, whose stance is active, and whose laws are the laws of freedom, knowable to
reason alone. (To some extent, this distinction can be understood through another that we all
intuitively grasp, that between predicting and deciding. It is one thing to predict that I will get
drunk tonight, another to decide to do it. In the first case I look on myself from outside, in the
context of the laws of nature to which I am subject, and I observe myself as I would another, trying
to arrive at a prediction of my likely behaviour. In the second case I respond as determining agent,
and make it my responsibility to bring a future event into being. In one case I give myself reasons
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for believing something about my future behaviour (theoretical reasons), in the other I give myself
reasons for acting (practical reasons).)
According to Kant, it seems then that I know myself in two ways, theoretically, as part of
nature, and practically, as agent. And bound up with these two forms of knowledge are two forms
of law which I discover through them: the laws of nature and the laws of freedom, the latter being,
not surprisingly, the versions of the categorical imperatives. Kant then took the step which was
both to undo the conclusions of the first Critique and also to inspire succeeding generations of
German philosophers to undo likewise. He asserted that in the first form of knowledge I know
myself as phenomenon, in the second, practical knowledge, I know myself as noumenon. Despite
Kant’s seemingly established theory that noumena are in essence unknowable to the
understanding, he has, through invoking the ancient idea of ‘practical’ knowledge, presented a
picture of how they might nevertheless be known: the will of a rational being, as belonging to the
sensuous world, recognizes itself to be, like all other efficient causes, necessarily subjectto laws
of causality, while in practical matters, in its other aspects as a being-in-itself, it is conscious of its
experience as determinable in an intelligible order of things.
In other words, the world of noumena is made open to reason after all, but reason not in its
theoretical employment, but in its legitimate form, the form of practical reason. Kant goes on to
argue that, even in this form, it provides us with knowledge. Whether or not the postulation of the
self as noumenon resolves the problem of free will I leave for the reader to judge. The question we
must now consider is the status and content of this knowledge which practical reason yields.
1. Discuss any objectivity necessity of the categorical imperative.

2. Distinguish between acting in accordance with the law and acting from the law.
3. In his discussion on the antinomy of freedom, Kant says we know ourselves in two ways.
Name these two ways according to Kant.
4.8 The Three Postulates of Morality
Kant gave three postulates of morality to include freedom, immortality and the existence of
God.
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4.8.1 Freedom
Freedom is an idea that it is necessary to assume because of our experience of moral

obligation—that is, "because I must, I can" (Stumpf and Fieser 289). Though we cannot
demonstrate that our wills are free, we are intellectually compelled to assume such freedom, for
freedom and morality are so inseparably united that one might define practical freedom as
independence of the will of anything but the moral law alone. How could people be responsible or
have a duty if they were not able or free to fulfill their duty or respond to the moral command?
Freedom, according to Kant, must be assumed, and as such it is the first postulate of morality.
4.8.2 Immortality
A second moral postulate for Kant is immortality. The line of reasoning by which Kant
was led to postulate immortality begins with his conception of the highest good, or the summum
bonum. Although virtue is the highest conceivable good, we as rational beings are fully satisfied
only when there is a union between virtue and happiness. Though it does not always happen so,
we all assume that virtue ought to produce happiness. Kant had rigorously maintained that the
moral law commands us to act not so that we be happy, but so that our actions will be right. Still,
the full realization of a rational being requires that we think of the supreme good as including both
virtue and happiness. But our experience shows that there is no necessary connection between
virtue and happiness. If we were to limit human experience to this world, it would then appear
impossible to achieve the supreme good in its fullness. Still, the moral law does command us to
strive for perfect good, and this implies an indefinite progress toward this ideal, but this endless
progress is possible only on the supposition of the unending duration of the existence and
personality of the same rational being, which is called the immortality of the soul.
4.8.3 The Existence of God
According to Kant, moral universe also compels us to postulate the existence of God as
the grounds for the necessary connection between virtue and happiness. If we mean by happiness
the state of a rational being in the world with whom in the totality of his experience everything
goes according to his wish and will, then happiness implies a harmony between a person's will and
physical nature. But a person is not the author of the world, nor is he or she capable of ordering
nature so as to effect a necessary connection between virtue and happiness. But we do conclude
from our conception of the supreme good that virtue and happiness must go together.
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Consequently, we must postulate the existence of a cause of the whole of nature which is distinct
from nature and which contains the ground of this connection, namely; of the exact harmony of
happiness with morality. And thus, it is morally necessary to assume the existence of God (Stumpf
and Fieser 290).
1. Mention the three postulates of morality.

2. What role of explanation does the existence of God plays in Kant’s postulates of morality?
4.9 Conclusion
In this unit, you have learnt Kant’s moral philosophy. Kant sees practical reason as the
foundation of morality. accordingly, reason is conceived as duty. Hence, his moral theory is
deontological. A truly ethical duty, then, is categorical and not hpothetical. Believing in the
universality of reason, Kant moral philosophy appeals for universalization of moral values.
4.10 Summary
In this unit, you have learnt the following:
1. The basis of Kant’s moral philosophy is reason.
2. The seat of moral worth in the moral philosophy of Kant, is the will.
3. A true moral law is presented to us as a categorical imperative.
4. Kant is an ethical deontologist because his theory appeals to duty.
Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Moral. Thomas Kingsmill Abbot. (trans). A
and D Publishing, 2008.
Scruton, Roger. A Short History of Modern Philosophy From Descartes to Wittgenstein. 2nd ed.
Routledge, 1995.
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Answers to SAE 1
1. The task of moral philosophy, according to Kant, is to discover how we are able to arrive
at principles of behavior that are binding upon all people.
2. For Kant, moral philosophy, then, is the quest for those principles that apply to all rational
beings and which will eventually lead to actions that are good.
3. For Kant, reason is concerned with theory about things and with practical behaviour, that
is, moral behavior. Just as our theoretical reason brings the category of causality to visible
objects, and thereby explains the process of change, so also the practical reason brings to
any given moral situation the concept of duty, or "ought."
Answers to SAE 2
1. Kant argues that a good will is good not because of what it performs or effects, not by its
aptness for the attainment of some proposed end, but simply by virtue of the volition; that
is, it is good in itself, and considered by itself to be esteemed much higher than all that can
be brought about by it in favour of any inclination.
2. Duty, in Kant’s moral theory implies that we are under some kind of obligation, a moral
law.
Answers to SAE 3
1. Command
2. Hypothetical and categorical
3. Categorical imperative
4. The first imperative states that as moral agents, we should “Act on the maxim which we
can wish it becomes universal law.”
5. A maxim is a general rule that tells us what we should and should not do.
Answers to SAE 4
1. The rational agent is constrained by reason to accept the categorical imperative: this
imperative is as much a fundamental law of practical reason as the law of non-contradiction
is a law of thought. Not to accept it is not to reason practically. Like the law of non-
contradiction, therefore, it cannot be rationally rejected.
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2. A person might act in accordance with the law out of terror or coercion, or in the hope of
reward. In these cases the law is not his motive, and the maxim governing his action, while
it may seem to be categorical, is in fact hypothetical. To act from the law is to act out of an
acceptance of the categorical imperative itself, and to be motivated by that acceptance.
3. According to Kant, we know ourselves as part of nature, and practically, as agent.
Answers to SAE 5
1. The three postulates of morality are freedom, immortality and the existence of God.
2. The role of explanation played by the existence is that of cause. According to Kant, we
must postulate the existence of a cause of the whole of nature which is distinct from nature
and which contains the ground of this connection, namely; of the exact harmony of
happiness with morality.
Module 2
Unit 1 Mary Wollstonecraft

Unit 2: J. G. Fichte
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Unit 3: G. W. F. Hegel
Unit 1: Mary Wollstonecraft

Contents
1.1 Introduction
1.3 A Brief Biography of Mary Wollstonecraft
1.4 The Defense of Women Right
1.5 Her Thought on Female Education
1.6 Philosophy of Education
1.7 Ethics
1.8 Social and Political Philosophy

1.9 Conclusion
1.10 Summary
1.1 Introduction
Mary Wollstonecraft conceived her philosophy out of her own experience. She joined the
results of her own history and observations of society of her time with ideas gained from
conversation and the critical reading necessary to a professional book reviewer. Although she
believed in the importance and power of reason, she subjected every idea to the test of everyday
experience. Having felt the force of paternal oppression, the might of the established Church, the
monarchy and the non-productive upper classes, she writes with a passion and a logic typical of
reformers and revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic. Some might find her advocacy of
motherhood as the norm for women or her statement that, from the constitution of their bodies,
men seem to be designated by Providence to attain a greater degree of virtue (Wardle 473), too
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conservative for contemporary times, but for the eighteenth century she offered a vision of an
egalitarian, democratic, productive society.
At the end of the this unit, you will learn the following:
1. Mary Wollstonecraft defense of women right.

2. Her philosophy of education
3. Her ethical theory
4. Wollstonecraft’s contribution to socio-political philosophy
1.3 A Brief Biography of Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft was born April 27, 1759, the second child but eldest daughter in a
family fraught with difficulties. Her mother, Elizabeth Dickson Wollstonecraft, bore seven
children. She was submissive to her husband but over-demanding of these children (Flexner 23).
In 1770 the family moved to Beverly and Mary met Jane Arden, whose friendship provided
"another family" full of warmth as well as the intellectual influence of Jane's father, John Arden,
a teacher and philosopher. In 1774 the family moved to Huxton, and Mary again sought mentors
outside her home (Flexner 27). As she matured, Wollstonecraft decided to make her own way in
the world and progressed through a series of positions as companion, governess and founder of a
day school. At the same time she continued to "rescue" brothers and sisters, nursed her dying
mother and suffered the loss of her closest friend, Fanny Blood, in childbirth.9 In 1785 she took
the suggestion of John Hewett and began to write. She composed Thought on the Education of
Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life.
In April of 1786 Hewett's publisher, Joseph Johnson, accepted the work with payment of
ten guineas. Within a year she joined Johnson's publishing house as a writer and reviewer. In
Joseph Johnson she found a caring 'father figure' who offered sound and careful criticism of her
writing. Wollstonecraft blossomed and soon produced a sizable corpus of translations and original
works (Suntein 114). In 1797 while she was pregnant with their second child she worked on a book
of reading lessons. She planned another on pregnancy and the care of infants but never wrote it.
Mary Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever ten days after giving birth (Ravetz 436). Some of
works are: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Historical and Moral View of the Origin and
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Progress of the French Revolution, Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations,
Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness, among others.
1. When was Mary Wollstonecraft born?

2. Mention any work of Mary Wollstonecraft.
1.4 The Defense of Women Right
Mary Wollstonecraft is considered the founder of an influential current of feminist thought.

Her difference from other early authors in defense of women's rights is that she demanded to use
political means (legislation) to change the subordinate position of women. Unlike the rebellious
women of aristocratic descent, Wollstonecraft acted on behalf of the vast majority with a whole
programmatic demand for women's rights. Wollstonecraft argued that institutions could not be
created out of nothing: they must grow through gradual evolution. To destroy existing institutions
because they do not conform to a preconceived scheme is to be guilty of "fatal presumption" which
the writer witnessed when she was in France. Wollstonecraft was offended by the way that the
Jacobins refused to grant Frenchwomen equal rights, denounced "amazons", and made it clear the
role of women was to conform to Rousseau's ideal of as a helper to men. Jean-Jack Rousseau's
political philosophy heavily influenced the French Revolution and much of his work was agreed
by Wollstonecraft. However, she asks why French philosopher's theories about education of the
whole person can not be also expanded for women. She questions Rousseau's writings on the place
of women and why their natural potential is not allowed to unfold. Arguing against this position,
Wollstonecraft holds that the woman, who has only been taught to please, will soon find that her
charms are oblique sun- beams and that they cannot have much effect on her husband's heart when
they are seen every day. If pleasing is all that a woman is meant to do in society then this society
is not at the level it could be.
Wollstonecraft argues that the home, family life narrows women's horizons, constricts their
affections and restricts their sense of public responsibility. This woman cannot be virtuous,
vigorous citizen. In A Vindication, she denotes that a housewife becomes a mere like a blind horse
in a mill which bored husband drifts away every evening to search out more piquant society. The
writer adds a real life example. According to her, poorer women, who must earn money to help
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support their families, are spared this fate since gainful employment always bestows self-respect
and dignity; but a middle-class woman, wholly supported by her husband is in a truly deplorable
state, becoming either a frivolous parasite. Wollstonecraft feels that Rousseau's theories attack the
female sex, claiming that women are weak and artificial and not capable of reasoning.
1. What was her contribution to the liberation of women?

2. According to Wollstonecraft arguments, what limits women?
3. What was her attack on Rousseau’s philosophy of education?
1.5 Her Thought on Women Education
The focus of Mary Wollstonecraft in Rights of Woman is the reformation of women without
a precedent demands for both sexes to be educated together, at the same level. She makes the
argument that women are rational beings and not as delicate as society believed them to be.
Previously, Condorcet, an influential French philosopher, argued the same point. However,
Wollstonecraft believes that some women will resist being given more rights, which can be traced
to social conditioning during childhood to become wives and mothers (Berges 2013: 56).
Wollstonecraft compares women to flowers to convey that the strength women possess has been
sacrificed for their beauty. She believes women are disregarded before they mature and explains
that “One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from
the books written on this subject by men, who, considering females rather as women than human
creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than rational wives”
(Wollstonecraft 20).
This claim is a blatant challenge of conventional societal expectations of women.

Wollstonecraft enjoys playing on the word ‘barren’ throughout Rights of Woman. She uses
‘barren’ to indicate an absence, instead of the word’s tradition meaning, the inability to have
children. She draws attention to the fact that education is structured by only men, including
explanations of women’s minds. Hence, she places great importance on education and calls for
reform of education, especially regarding women. She claims the rationality of some women is not
obvious, due to their lack of education, which prevents them from them from realizing their rights
to an education (Berges 2013: 56). Wollstonecraft lays out her philosophy in the introduction of
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Rights of Woman. However, she does not elaborate on some of her claims later in her four-
hundred-page text, possibly because she was not used to academic writing or she was swept up in
her impassioned defense of women. Some of Wollstonecraft’s arguments do not fully embrace
modern feminist values because she either knew her philosophy would be dismissed outright if she
claimed women should be given other life options than to be wives and mothers or could not open
her mind to such possibilities.
She implores women to think for themselves and to develop a sense of curiosity. She
believes most women are unable to do so without an education. In the last chapter of Rights of
Woman, she clarifies the statement by saying that the little early education offered to some girls,
in the 18th century, only trains them to become malleable and diminutive, thereby crushing
whatever innate ‘animal spirit’ they may have originally possessed (Wollstonecraft 39). She
addresses the issue that women are provided a different set of societal standards than men, most
of which demean them. While boys are encouraged to go to school and develop into an intelligent
man, women are sent instead to dress fittings and etiquette classes so that they may find a husband
to support and bear children for.
In Rights of Woman, she outlines two key demands: one, for girls to be educated alongside
boys and two, for the education curriculum to be changed. She states, “only that education deserves
emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to
think” (Wollstonecraft 217). Wollstonecraft aims for education to be wholesome and
comprehensive. She wants both genders and all social classes to be educated together in order to
diminish inequalities. She proposes children live at home and go to the school during the day only.
Therefore, instead of having boarding schools for the rich, the timings for school would be similar
to country day school (Wollstonecraft, 1792: 132-134). She believes that day schools would also
be beneficial as there should be a balance between home and school; a good home life equates to
success in school (Berges 122-123).
Wollstonecraft links the success of a child’s education to the success their parents’
relationship. This concept directly correlates to her claim that girls should receive the same
education as their male counterparts in order to be the ideal spouse. She claims “by cementing the
matrimonial tie, secures to the pledges of a warmer passion the necessary parental attention; for
children will never be properly educated till friendship subsists between parents” (WoIlstonecraft
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256). Thus, a healthy relationship between parents is vital. Wollstonecraft emphasizing that
children look to their parents as examples. Hence, Wollstonecraft’s logic is a father treating a
mother as an equal will theoretically perpetuate with the son, his wife and their children. In
addition, she places a high value on the bond between mother and child, which was disregarded in
the upper echelons. Reiterating that a stronger bond between a mother and child equates to mother
who provides a better example for her child to look up to. Thus, Wollstonecraft subtly implies that
knowledge and behavior is cyclic. She uses patriotism as another example by posing a rhetorical
question, “If children are to be educated to understand the true principle of patriotism, their mother
must be a patriot” (Wollstonecraft 9). She aims to convince men that education for women is vital
by claiming it will further two important topics: patriotism and successful marriages.
In her perception, women are not true patriots because they have not received a
comprehensive education that teaches them about patriotism. She also asserts that girls being
educated alongside boys during their formative years will allow them to “learn to interact with
each other, therefore, it is more likely that, as adults, they will be able to sustain relationships of
mutual respect and friendship” (Berges 165). In Rights of Woman, she insists that it is beneficial
to educate all children together, regardless of socio-economic status or gender. To bridge the
gender gap, Wollstonecraft demands that the government should establish co-education day
schools. To bridge the economic gap, Wollstonecraft demands that schooling should be is
compulsory and free for all children between the ages of five to nine. She proposes the use of
identical clothing, uniforms, to prevent differentiation between both gender and class. She places
emphasis on the comfort of children, theorizing that children cannot absorb information if they are
not comfortable. As a result, the children’s uniforms should be comfortable and allow them to play
outside. Wollstonecraft believes that fresh air and exercise, being able to run freely is detrimental
to a child’s wellbeing. She associates women’s fragility and dependence on men to their
confinement since childhood (Berges 164).
Wollstonecraft agrees that naturally female are the weaker sex but the socially accepted
role of a woman is not because it is the tried and true method but through oppression and the lack
of aspiration to change. Well educated women will be good wives, mothers, friends and not the
humble dependent of her husband and they will ultimately contribute positively to society; "Let
women share the rights and she will emulate the virtues". Wollstonecraft maintained that if girls
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were encouraged from an early age to develop their minds, it would be seen that they were rational
creatures and there was no reason for them not to be given the same opportunities as boys with
regard to education and training. Women could obtain the professions and have careers just the
same as men.
In proposing the same type of education for girls as for boys, she also presumed that they
may be educated together. Her idea on women education was considered more radical than
anything proposed before. The idea of co-educational schooling was simply regarded as nonsense
by many educational thinkers of that time. It was fashionable to contend that if women were
educated, they would lose any power they had over their husband. Wollstonecraft was furious
about it and maintained that she did not wish women to have power over men but over themselves.
She had a picture of an ideal family where the babies were nourished by an intelligent mother and
not sent away to nurses. And fathers were friends to their children rather than tyrants. Essentially
family members were all regarded as rational beings and children should be able to judge their
parents like anyone else. Family relationships therefore, became educational ones.
1. According to Wollstonecraft, why are women not true patriots?

2. How was her idea on education of women considered in her time?
3. What is the focus of Mary Wollstonecraft’s thought on women’s right?
4. Why is it important to educate women, according to her?
1.6 Philosophy of Education
While some thinkers portray Wollstonecraft as only a reformer for women's education, it
is apparent that her proposals for educational reform are far wider in scope. Like much of Western
educational theory, Wollstonecraft's proposals for reform are grounded in a clear philosophical
psychology, ethics and social philosophy. In addition they benefit from Wollstonecraft's
experience as founder and teacher of a children's day school and from her first-hand acquaintance
with the tasks and daily preoccupations of the varied classes in eighteenth-century England. Her
criticism of both British and European schools is direct and sharp (Lindemann, 1991: 161). She
attacks both public and private schools for their subversion of children's inquisitive minds and the
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corruption of moral character. She critiques dogmatism and the classism endemic to the system
(Lindemann 161).
Wollstonecraft argues for national, co-educational schools . According to her, Teachers

should be chosen by a committee and held accountable for the performance of their duties.
Children should "dress alike" and be subject to the same discipline so as to root out unnatural
distinctions by class (Wollstonecraft, 1960: 168). The school should be surrounded by open
property and children be granted "gymnastic play" after each hour of sedentary occupation. They
should be encouraged in every form of peer inquiry, and nature should be the occasion for
theoretical learnings. Above all, the curriculum should emphasize thinking and the formation of
character so that graduates will be good citizens (Wollstonecraft 168).
In her thought, she refuses to eliminate all remnants of class or gender distinctions,
however, since after the age of nine, separate curricula are proposed. Vocational students should
be separated from those destined for the liberal arts. All vocational students should continue to
share co-education in the morning but separate training in "women's trades" and "men's trades" in
the afternoon (Wollstonecraft 168). As for those who by superior ability or family wealth are
destined for the liberal arts, they should study the dead and living languages, the elements of
science, history and politics polite literature in co-educational settings.
1. What sets Wollstonecraft’s philosophy of educational reforms apart from others?

2. What kind of school does she advocates for?
1.7 Ethics
Given that both sexes are equal in everything but physical strength; given that human
nature is distinguished by reason and that the daily struggle with passion results in truly human
knowledge, both men and women ought to strive for the same human virtues . And what are those
virtues? They can be summarized: To act reasonably, to use one's own freedom and respect the
freedom of others, to do productive work and to parent wisely. To fail in these virtues is to fail
one's duty as a human being (Lindemann 159). She critiques both groups and individuals for their
failure to meet these human duties. She criticizes men as a group and specific thinkers individually
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for employing "their reason to justify prejudices" and for avoiding "close investigation" of their
vices or the partiality of European civilization (Lindemann, 1990: 159).
She also criticizes all rulers who set themselves above and limit the freedom of common
citizen. She criticizes the upper classes, ladies and gentlemen, as unproductive parasites and she
criticizes parent(s) who fail "to form the heart and enlarge the understanding of his child" or who
fail(s) to raise children as independent, productive citizens. In this last case she argues that the
duty of adult children to care for their aging parents is abrogated in those cases where parents
failed to meet their duties when the children were young (Wollstonecraft 153).
1. According to Wollstonecraft, what are the virtues that both men and women ought to
strive for?
2. Why did she criticize the upper class of the society?
1.8 Social and Political Philosophy
The basis of Wollstonecraft's social and political thought is that the society is formed in
the wisest manner, whose constitution is founded on the nature of man (Lindemann 1990: 160).
Thus, it is not surprising that she favours an egalitarian society and is critical of every
institutionalization of privilege. Elissa Guralnick notes that it is a social/political theory that drives
much of Wollstonecraft’s, s work (Guralnick 308).
The social critique in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is wide-ranging.

Wollstonecraft critiques the monarchy. She maintains that regal power, in a few generations
introduces idiotism into the noble stem. She criticizes the army. According to her, standing army,
for instance, is incompatible with freedom, because subordination and rigour are the very sinews
of military discipline. Again, she says that despotism is necessary to give vigour to enterprises that
one will directs. She criticizes upper classes, ladies and gentlemen as parasitical. In fact,, she
criticizes every non-egalitarian social form. Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman, is a work of feminism, but it is also a cogent exposition of radical social philosophy, and
as such it belongs in all presentations of the British radical tradition (Lindemann 162).
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1. What is the basis of Wollstonecraft’s social and political philosophy?
2. According to her, why is army not compatible with freedom?
3. What is her perception of regal power?
1.9 Conclusion
Mary Wollstonecraft’s advanced thoughts superseded her time. Although Wollstonecraft

poses radical theories, such women are slaves to men, her ideas were well received during the
Enlightenment. Unfortunately, her death prevented further promotion and implementation of her
philosophy on women and education. No one made significant reforms based on her philosophy
because her theories were rejected after Godwin revealed her salacious lifestyle. In Rights of
Woman, she does not presume that women will gain rights and equal education in the near future,
citing that the behavior prevalent in the 18th century has been ingrained in men and women for
centuries. This presumption has proved to be true, the journey to equality of women has been a
slow process. Rights of Woman remains relevant today as equal rights for women has not yet been
achieved. In developing countries, even education for women remains to be an issue (Field and
Ambrus 886). Wollstonecraft’s egalitarian philosophies on education, similar to the ideals for 21st
century educational philosophy, should be compulsory and free for both gender and all social
classes. Wollstonecraft’s work establishes a strong foundation for women’s rights and education.
Her most universal theory, women will be emancipated through education, will continue to inspire
and appeal to people.
1.10 Summary
In this unit, you have learnt that Mary Wollstonecraft advocated for education of women. In her
political thought, she appeals for human based constitutional government. For Mary
Wollstonecraft, virtue is a necessity for living a good life.
Alison Ravetz, "The Trivialization of Mary Wollstonecraft: a Personal and Professional Career
Re-vindicated," Women's Studies International Forum 6 (1983), pp. 491-499.
Berges, Sandrine. The Routledge Guidebook to Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of

Woman. Routledge, 2013.
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Eleanor Flexner, Mary Wollstonecraft, A Biography (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan,
Inc., 1972),
Emily W. Sunstein, A Different Fact, The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Harper and
Row, 1975)
Field, Erica and Attila Ambrus. “Early Marriage, Age of Menarche, and Female Schooling
Attainment in Bangladesh.” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 116, no. 5, 2008, pp. 881– 930.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Introduction by Eleanor Louise

Nicholes (Gainesville: Scholars Facsimilies and Reprints, 1960
Ralph M. Wardle, The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1979)
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women: With Strictures on political and
moral subjects. London: J. Johnson, 1792.
Answers to SAE 1
1. She was born on April 27, 1759

2. Thought of the education of daughters; A vindication of women.
Answers to SAE 2
1. Wollstonecraft is considered the founder of an influential current of feminist thought.

2. Wollstonecraft argues that the home, family life, narrows women’s horizons, constricts
their affection and restricts their sense of public responsibility.
3. She questions Rousseau's writings on the place of women and why their natural potential
is not allowed to unfold.
Answers to SAE 3
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1. In her perception, women are not true patriots because they have not received a
comprehensive education that teaches them about patriotism.
2. Her idea on women education was considered more radical than anything proposed before.
3. The focus of Mary Wollstonecraft in Rights of Woman is the reformation of women without
a precedent demands for both sexes to be educated together, at the same level.
4. It is important to educate women because well educated women will be good wives,
mothers, friends and not the humble dependent of her husband and they will ultimately
contribute positively to society.
Answers to SAE 4
1. Wollstonecraft's proposals for reform are grounded in a clear philosophical psychology,

ethics and social philosophy.
2. She advocates for national, co-educational schools where teachers are chosen by a
committee and held accountable for the performance of their duties.
Answers to SAE 5
1. To act reasonably, to use one's own freedom and respect the freedom of others, to do
productive work and to parent wisely.
2. She criticizes the upper classes, ladies and gentlemen, as unproductive parasites and she
criticizes parent(s) who fail to form the heart and enlarge the understanding of his child or
who fail(s) to raise children as independent, productive citizens.
Answers to SAE 6
1. The basis of Wollstonecraft's social and political thought is that the society is formed in
the wisest manner, whose constitution is founded on the nature of man.
2. Army is incompatible with freedom, because subordination and rigour are the very sinews
of military discipline.
3. She maintains that regal power, in a few generations introduces idiotism into the noble
stem.
Unit 2: Johann Gottlieb Fichte
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Contents
2.1 Introduction
2.3 A Brief Biography of Johann Gottlieb Fichte
2.4 The Denial of Kantian Noumena
2.5 The Ego and the Infinite (Pure) Ego
2.6 Conclusion
2.7 Summary
2.1 Introduction
Fichte was an ardent follower of Kant. However, he disagreed with Kant's theory of noumena
and phenomena. From there, he creates his own system based on the theory of the Ego. In this unit,
you will learn about how he criticized Kant and his attempt at escaping the Kantian problem.
In this unit, you will learn the following:
1. Fichte's denial of Kant's idealism.
2. His idea of the Ego and Pure Ego.
2.3 A Brief Biography of Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Fichte was born on May 19, 1762 in the village of Rammenau in the Oberlausitz area of
Saxony. He was the eldest son in a family of poor and pious ribbon weavers. His extraordinary
intellectual talent soon brought him to the attention of a local baron, who sponsored his education,
first in the home of a local pastor, then at the famous Pforta boarding school, and finally at the
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universities of Jena and Leipzig. With the death of his patron, Fichte was forced to discontinue his
studies and seek his livelihood as a private tutor, a profession he quickly came to detest (Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Following a lengthy sojourn in Zurich, were he met his future wife, Johanna Rahn, Fichte
returned to Leipzig with the intention of pursuing a literary career. When his projects failed, he
was again forced to survive as a tutor. It was in this capacity that he began giving lessons on the
Kantian philosophy in the summer of 1790. This first encounter with Kant’s writings produced
what Fichte himself described as a “revolution” in his manner of thinking. In Feburary and March
of 1794 he gave a series of private lectures on his conception of philosophy before a small circle
of influential clerics and intellectuals in Zurich. It was at this moment that he received an invitation
to assume the recently vacated chair of Critical Philosophy at the University of Jena, which was
rapidly emerging as the capital of the new German philosophy. Fichte arrived in Jena in May of
1794, and enjoyed tremendous popular success there for the next six years, during which time he
laid the foundations and developed the first systematic articulations of his new system.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was appointed to the chair of philosophy in Jena at the age of 32.
His lectures were immensely popular, and he published them in 1794. Known as the
Wissenschaftslehre (Science of Knowledge), they were reworked in later editions, and were
prefaced by Fichte with the claim that ‘my system is nothing other than the Kantian.’ In 1813
Fichte canceled his lectures so that his students could enlist in the “War of Liberation” against
Napoleon, of which Fichte himself proved to be an indirect casualty. From his wife, who was
serving as a volunteer nurse in a Berlin military hospital, he contracted a fatal infection of which
he died on January 29, 1814 (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Some of his works are: Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (1792), Reclamation of the
Freedom of Thought from the Princes of Europe, who have hitherto Suppressed it (1793), Some
Lectures concerning the Scholar’s Vocation (1794), Concerning the Concept of the
Wissenschaftslehre (1794), Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre (1794/95), Outline of the
Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with Respect to the Theoretical Faculty (1795),
among others.
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1. When was Fichte born?

2. At what age was Fichte appointed to the chair of philosophy at Jena?
2.4 The Denial of Kantian Noumena
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was one of the first to overhaul Kantian philosophy. In a 1793 letter,
Fichte stated his assessment of Kant:
My conviction is that Kant has only indicated the truth but neither unfolded
nor proved it. This singular man has a power of divining truth, without being
himself conscious of the grounds on which he rests (Fichte qtd in Jaki 128).
Although Fichte saw himself as carrying out Kant’s ideas, it angered Kant that Fichte
considered Kantian philosophy to be incomplete. Accordingly, Kant denied that there was any
similarity between his ideas and Fichte’s.
But how did Fichte propose to “unfold” the insights of Kant? He did it by beginning with
the notion of freedom. Whereas Kant had made freedom a postulate of morality, Fichte moved it
to the center stage of his philosophy. In his view, freedom is a presupposition not only of action
but of human cognition as well. Kant had said that there is only one universal set of categories that
structure experience and thus we have no choice as to how we shall view the world. For Fichte
there are many different ways to understand the world. The effect of this modification is to
personalize Kant’s Copernican revolution. The world is my world. The categories I employ are
those necessary to make my world meaningful. Thus philosophy begins with the choice between
ultimate principles, and this commitment is made on the basis of temperament and not objective
evidence (Lawhead 380).
In section 4 of the First Introduction (1797), he takes the position that the thing in itself is
a mere dogmatic concept, produced by thought alone, a pure invention without any reality, but that
every philosophy necessarily refers to objects outside experience. Fichte rejects this concept on
the basis of the distinction between objects of experience and objects in themselves, where
experience is defined as thinking accompanied by the feeling of necessity. In other words, Fichte
is distinguishing between what is given to us and by which we are constrained and what we freely
think up. In locating the thing in itself in the latter category, he in effect accuses Kant of uncritically
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going beyond the limits of experience he himself fixed for the critical philosophy. Any attempt,
including Kant’s, to ground philosophy in an indemonstrable object goes beyond the limits of
critical thinking in falling into dogmatism. The moral of this view is that the thing in itself is no
more than a dogmatic concept invoked to ground philosophy that cannot be grounded.
Fichte develops this idea in the Second Introduction, where he contrasts Kant’s denial of
intellectual intuition as forbidding any claim to immediate consciousness of the thing in itself with
his own claim that since all existence is given in experience, there is no need to appeal to a thing
in itself (Fichte 45). The Second Introduction innovates with respect to the First Introduction in
taking a position on the ongoing debate about the thing in itself. Fichte here claims that Kant does
not base his position on the thing in itself. Fichte suggests that interpretations that base the critical
philosophy on the thing in itself erroneously take passages out of context because of a failure to
master the wider position. A direct consequence of this interpretation is to commit Kant
simultaneously to dogmatism and to idealism (Rockmore 17).
According to Fichte, Kant had shown that there are but two possible philosophies: idealism
and dogmatism. The idealist looks for the explanation of experience in intelligence, the dogmatist
in the ‘thing-in-itself’. Kant had shown that idealism can explain everything that dogmatism
explains, while making no assumptions beyond the reach of observation. The dispute between the
two concerns whether ‘the independence of the thing should be sacrificed to that of the self, or,
conversely, the independence of the self to that of the thing’. The starting-point of idealist
philosophy is therefore the “self.” Dogmatism, on the other hand, is the view that thing in itself–
or things in themselves if this term takes a plural–affect(s) us, and idealism is the contrary view
that all existence is explained solely through the thinking of the intellect (Fichte 56). For an idealist,
we do not need to invoke an unknown world as the source of phenomena, which, since they do not
refer beyond themselves, are not appearances.
Fichte argues for his reading of Kant’s position by maintaining that Kant cannot himself
base the critical philosophy on a thing in itself standing outside experience unless he expressly
claims to do so (Fichte 58). For Kant, as Fichte interprets him, our »knowledge all proceeds from
an affection, but not affection by an object (Fichte 60). In conceding there is an input in knowledge
but denying any effort to accord it an ontological status, Fichte reads Kant as not invoking an
unknown and unknowable world, hence as avoiding Platonism. According to Fichte, Kant is
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already a post-Kantian, the author of the theory that explains the general possibility of knowledge
without any appeal to the thing in itself (Rockmore 18).
1. How did Fichte propose to unfold the insights of Kant?

2. Fichte classified Kant’s philosophy into two possible philosophies, namely, ________and
_______
3. What was his central argument of the critical philosophy?
2.5 The Ego and the Infinite (Pure) Ego
One important question that strikes many philosophers is how should we think of ourselves and
our world? For Fichte, this is not a theoretical question, but an intensely practical one. Like the
twentieth century pragmatists (who were influenced by Fichte), he thought that our beliefs cannot
be proven by means of metaphysical arguments. Instead, what makes a belief viable is the way it
affects our lives and serves our interests. For example, the scientific method is not written in the
sky and the “facts” do not shout their own interpretation. If we choose to approach nature
scientifically, it is because we believe this method serves our interests and makes our world
meaningful. In the final analysis, even science is based on subjective commitments and acts of
practical faith. Thus, idealism, for Fichte, reigns supreme, for the world I live in is always a world
structured by the way I approach it. Hence, Fichte makes the self (herein also refers to as “I” or
“Ego”), the foundation of experience.
Fichte provides further motives for making the self the foundation of experience. First, we know
the inner world better than the outer one, so this is where philosophy should begin. Second, if we
start with a plurality of matter in motion, we will never be able to derive a unified mind and
consciousness from this. But if we begin with our inner experience of being a unified, creative
self, we will have the basis for giving meaning to everything else. Thus, the items within your
world come and go, but behind all its reality is the constant activity of the self. To illustrate the
fact that the self stands behind all manifestations of the world, Fichte once said to his students,
“Gentlemen, think the wall.” He then said, “Gentlemen, think him who thought the wall.” In other
words, behind everything that appears is the self that grounds those appearances. Look about you.
The world you experience is not a collection of meaningless bits of sense data at which you, like
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a camera lens, passively glare. Instead, the world of your experience is structured by your interests
and values and is an arena in which you make choices and realize your moral ideals
The task of idealism in philosophy is to discover the ‘absolutely unconditioned first principle of
human knowledge’. Logicians offer an instance of necessary and indisputable truth in the law of
identity: A = A. But even in that law something is presupposed that we have yet to justify, namely
the existence of A. I can advance to the truth of A = A, once A has been ‘posited’ as an object of
thought. But what justifies me in positing A? There is no answer. Only if we can find something
that is posited in the act of thinking itself will we arrive at a self-justifying basis for our claims to
knowledge. This thing that is posited absolutely is the I; for when the self is the object of thought,
that which is ‘posited’ is identical with that which ‘posits’. In the statement that I = I we have
therefore reached bedrock. Here is a necessary truth that presupposes nothing. The self-positing of
the self is the true ground of the law of identity, and hence of logic itself.
To this first principle of knowledge, which he calls the principle of identity, Fichte adds a second.
The positing of the self is also a positing of the not-self. For what I posit is always an object of
knowledge, and an object is not a subject. That which comes before my intuition in the act of self-
knowledge is intuited as not-self. This is the principle of counter-positing (or opposition). From
which, in conjunction with the first principle, a third can be derived, namely, that the not-self is
divisible in thought and opposed to a ‘divisible self. This third principle (the ‘grounding principle’)
is supposedly derived by a ‘synthesis’ of the other two. It is the ground of transcendental
philosophy, which explores the ‘division’ of the self by concepts, whereby the world is constituted
as an object of knowledge.
The self is ‘determined’ or ‘limited’ by the not-self, which in turn is limited by the self. It is as
though self-consciousness were traversed by a movable barrier: whatever lies in the not-self has
been transferred there from the self. But since the origin of both self and not-self is the act of self-
positing, nothing on either side of the barrier is anything, in the last analysis, but self. In the not-
self, however, the self is passive. There is no contradiction in bringing this passive object under
such concepts as space, time and causality, so situating it in the natural order. As subject, on the
other hand, the self is active, spontaneously positing the objects of knowledge. The self is therefore
free, since the concepts of the natural world (including causality) apply only to that which is
posited as object, and not to the positing subject.
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All activity in the not-self (including that which we should describe as causation) is transferred
there from the self. But transference of activity is also an ‘alienation’ of the self in the not-self,
and a determination of the self by the not-self. This self-determination is the realisation of freedom,
since the not-self that determines me is only the self made objective in the act of self-awareness.
Fichte is not only concerned with the phenomenology of consciousness, that is, with a descriptive
analysis of consciousness. He is concerned also, with developing a system of idealist metaphysics.
And this point has an important bearing on· his theory of the transcendental ego (Coplestone 43).
Following Kant, Fichte maintains that the phenomenal world, that is, the physical world of sense
perception, is the product of the human mind. Fichte called the human mind “Ego” (Essien 247).
He rejected Kant’s position that the noumena is unknowable. According to him, the ego can
penetrate or can know the thing-in-itself. By ego, Fichte refers to the human mind. However, this
human mind, according to him, is only but a representation or the manifestation of a higher mind,
the Infinite Ego, which is God. For Fichte, therefore, the entire universe is simply an expression
of the Infinite (Absolute ) Ego or God. But in Fichte’s account this Infinite lacks the
anthropomorphic qualities of the traditional Western concept of deity. Instead, it is more like an
impersonal but rational moral order that is in the process of evolving. Like our own consciousness,
it strives to realize itself in perfect self-awareness. In fact, the human will or consciousness is an
expression of the Absolute Spirit. The real world is not a world of dead things, arranged in a spatial-
temporal order, but is a dynamic, spiritual process in which we participate. In our moral experience
the innermost center of this reality is opened up to us.
Fichte argues that the spontaneous activity of the pure ego in grounding consciousness is
not itself conscious. As spontaneous activity, the pure ego does not exist 'for itself'. It comes to
exist for itself, as an ego, only in the intellectual intuition by which the philosopher in
transcendental reflection apprehends the ego's spontaneous activity. It is through the act of the
philosopher, 'through an activity directed towards an activity that the ego first comes to be
originally for itself” (Fichte 305).
In intellectual intuition, therefore, the pure ego is said to posit itself (sich setzen). And the
fundamental proposition of philosophy is that 'the ego simply posits in an original way its own
being' (Fichte 92). In transcendental reflection the philosopher goes back, as it were, to the ultimate
ground of consciousness. And in his intellectual intuition the pure ego affirms itself. But though
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by means of what Fichte calls an activity directed towards an activity, the pure ego is made to
affirm itself, however, the ego's original spontaneous activity is not in itself conscious. Rather it is
the ultimate ground of consciousness, that is, of ordinary consciousness; one's natural awareness
of oneself in a world. But this consciousness cannot arise unless the non-ego is opposed to the ego.
Hence the second basic proposition of philosophy is that 'a non-ego is simply opposite to the ego'
(Fichte 98). This opposition, according to Fichte, must, be done by the ego itself. Otherwise pure
idealism would have to be abandoned. Hegel was opposed to Fichte’s idea as being insufficiently
speculative, that is, philosophical. In Hegel's opinion it was unworthy of a philosopher to offer a
deduction which was admittedly no strict theoretical deductional and to introduce, like a deus ex
machina, undeduced activities of the ego to make possible the transition from one proposition to
another.
According to Coplestone, it can hardly be denied, that Fichte's actual procedure does not
square very well with his initial account of the nature of philosophy as a deductive science
(Coplestone 48). For Fichte, the philosopher is engaged in consciously reconstructing, as it were,
an active process, namely the grounding of consciousness, which in itself takes place
unconsciously. In doing so the philosopher has his point of departure, the self-positing of the
absolute ego, and his point of arrival, human consciousness as we know it. And if it is impossible
to proceed from one step to another in the reconstruction of the productive activity of the ego
without attributing to the ego a certain function or mode of activity, then this must be done. Thus,
even if the concept of limitation is not obtained through strict logical analysis of the first two basic
propositions, it is none the less required, from Fichte's point of view, to clarify their meaning
(Coplestone 48).
1. According to Fichte, what is the task of idealism?

2. Fichte based his theory of consciousness on what he calls the ____
3. What determines or limits the “self?”
4. How does the pure ego comes to exists for itself?
2.6 Conclusion
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In this unit, you have learnt Fichte's attempt to demolish the Kantian bifurcation of reality. Through
his own dialectics, Fichte moves on to propose the ego and the pure ego as the seat of
consciousness. Accordingly, you have learnt that in Fichte's philosophy, the ego posits itself.
2.7 Summary
In this unit, you have learnt that Fichte committed Kant to dogmatism and skepticism. For him,
the spontaneous activity of the pure ego in grounding consciousness is not itself conscious.The
entire universe, in Fichte’s philosophy is simply an expression of the Pure Ego.

Rockmore, Tom. Fichte, German Idealism and the Thing in Itself. In Daniel Breazeale and Tom
Rockmore. (Eds.). Fichte, German Idealism, and Early Romanticism. Rodopi, 2010.
Fichte, Johann. Science of Knowledge, with First and Second Introductions. Peter Heath and John
Lachs (trans.). Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Essien Ephraim. Summa Philosophica: An Introduction to Philosophy and Logic. Lulu Press,
2011.
Coplestone, Frederick. A History of Philosophy: Modern Philosophy: From the Post-Kantian
Idealists to Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Image Books, 1962.
Routledge, 1995.
Answers to SAE 1
1. Fichte was born on May 19, 1762

2. Fichte was appointed to the chair of philosophy in Jena at the age of 32.
Answers to SAE 2
1. He did it by beginning with the notion of freedom. Whereas Kant had made freedom a
postulate of morality, Fichte moved it to the center stage of his philosophy.
2. Dogmatism and idealism.
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3. Fichte argues that Kant cannot himself base the critical philosophy on a thing in itself
standing outside experience unless he expressly claims to do so.
Answers to SAE 3
1. The task of idealism in philosophy, according to Fichte, is to discover the ‘absolutely

unconditioned first principle of human knowledge.’
2. The Ego or I or Self
3. The “not self” also called the non-ego.
4. The pure ego comes to exist for itself, as an ego, only in the intellectual intuition by which
the philosopher in transcendental reflection apprehends the ego's spontaneous activity.
Unit 3: Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel

Contents
3.1 Introduction
3.3 A Brief Biography of Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel
3.4 The Absolute Spirit
3.5 Hegelian Dialectics
3.6 Philosophy of History
3.7 Social/Political Philosophy
3.8 Conclusion
3.9 Summary
3.1 Introduction
Hegel built on the foundation laid by Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, to
developed his own speculative system practically unrivaled in the scope of its ambition. Hegel’s
highly systematic philosophy has been characterized as a form of panlogism. Panlogism is system
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which portrays rational thought as the ultimate reality as well as the instrument to explain all
reality. In the Hegelian system, the Absolute, considered by Schelling to be beyond the grasp of
reason, is described in its development as Spirit through a dialectical process.
Hegel described his method as speculative, in the sense that it unveiled the hidden dimensions of
reality through an analysis of the thought process of the dialectic. Being and non-being, for
instance, are usually considered opposites that destroy each other. For Hegel, their mutual negation
leads to the third element of a triad, in which both earlier elements are sublated, absent as such,
yet included in a higher form. This formula was applied by Hegel to all aspects of thought and
nature, leading to a comprehensive system where the Absolute’s development is explained through
its own internal mechanism. In this unit, therefore, we shall learn about Hegel's philosophy of the
Absolute Spirit.
1. The concept of the Absolute Spirit.
2. The dialectics of Hegel.
3. Hegel's theory of the state
4. The development of historical idea in Hegel's philosophy.
3.3 A Brief Biography of Hegel
G. F. W. Hegel was born in Stuttgart in southern Germany in 1770. In the same year,
Beethoven was born and Kant was made a professor at Königsberg. Napoleon had been born one
year earlier. Hegel’s father was a minor civil servant, and his mother was a well-educated and
intelligent woman who taught her young son Latin. Taking advantage of the opportunity for a
state-sponsored education, he entered the Protestant theological seminary at the University of
Tübingen in 1788 where he made friends with the poet Holderlin and with a young, brilliant
philosophy student named Friedrich Schelling. After graduation, Hegel spent several years as a
tutor to a succession of wealthy families. During this period, his interest in philosophy blossomed
and he began to read and write extensively. In 1801 he became an instructor at the University of
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Jena, where his friend Schelling had succeeded Fichte as professor of philosophy and was
becoming quite well known.
Because Hegel did not yet have any reputation, he could only lecture privately to a small
handful of students, who paid him modest fees. At Jena, Hegel began to write his first major work,
The Phenomenology of Spirit. When Napoleon’s forces invaded Jena on October 13, 1806, Hegel
quickly sent off the only copy of his manuscript, while the battle raged, to meet his publisher’s
deadline. Fortunately, it survived the confusion intact and was published in 1807. As a result of
the French occupation, the university was closed down. Hegel went on to work for a year as a
newspaper editor and then from 1808 to 1816 he was headmaster of a Gymnasium (high school)
in Nuremberg. In 1811 he married the daughter of an old Nuremberg family, and she gave him
two sons, one of whom became a well-known historian. While still at Nuremberg, he published
his three-volume Science of Logic. Having begun to achieve a reputation in philosophy, he was
invited to become professor of philosophy at Heidelberg, where he served from 1816 to 1818 and
published his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Finally, at the high point of his career,
he was appointed to a prestigious chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, where his lectures
and writings made him a legend in his own time. A devoted following of students kept careful
copies of his notes and published his philosophical lectures on history, art, religion, and the history
of philosophy after his death. In 1831, Georg W. F. Hegel died in a cholera epidemic.
1. What special events happened during Hegel’s year of birth?

2. Hegel’s marriage was blessed with how many sons?
3. Which of Hegel’s friend was a poet?
3.4 The Absolute Spirit
In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, German idealism reached its apogee. Having been
influenced by his predecessors – Kant, Fichte and Shelling – Hegel says that the world and all that
is in it, is a culmination of one ultimate reality which he called the Absolute Spirit or Mind.
According to him, the history of mind (spirit) involves a sort of development toward a more
enlightened consciousness, which he views as one that is essentially based on reason. Hegel's
philosophy has its culmination in our knowledge of the Absolute. In the process of dialectic,
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knowledge of the Absolute is the synthesis of subjective spirit and objective spirit. Because reality
is rationality (Thought, Idea), it followed for Hegel that our knowledge of the Absolute is actually
the Absolute knowing itself through the finite spirit of human beings (Stumpf and Fieser 308).
Hegel described the Absolute as a dynamic process, as an organism having parts but nevertheless
unified into a complex system. The Absolute is, therefore, not some entity separate from the world;
rather, it is the world when viewed in a special way.
Hegel conceives of the whole world as a single great organism through which an external
uniformity manifests itself (Darty 367). This uniformity expresses itself both as a spirit and as an
external nature. This means that for Hegel, reality is a fusion of both the spiritual and the material.
Without mind or spirit, matter is lifeless, it remains formless and becomes a mere chaos. Therefore,
Hegel maintains that it is only through the entrance of the spirit into the material that the cosmos
originates (Rusk and Scotland 83). Hegel sees the central idea of reality as the whole which is the
absolute. The absolute, for him, then, us the infinite creative totality in which all finite distractions
are unified. This absolute is a necessary process of self-development from potentiality to actuality.
This means that the absolute spirit by its nature undergoes self-projection, self-expression, self-
externalization, and self-manifestation.
In his Phenomenology of spirit, he sets out to show the various processes in which the mind
undergoes in order to get to absolute knowing. Hegel identifies these processes as consciousness,
self- consciousness, reason, religion and absolute knowing, where knowledge of a thing is known
mainly through the standpoint of its essence as the element of existence or the form of objective
for consciousness where the spirit externalizes itself. Hegel believes that our consciousness of the
Absolute, is achieved progressively as we move through the three stages from art, to religion, and
finally to philosophy. Art provides "a sensuous semblance of the Idea" by providing us with an
object of sense. In the object of art, the mind apprehends the Absolute as beauty. The object of art,
moreover, is the creation of Spirit and, as such, contains some aspect of the Idea. There is an ever-
deepening insight into the Absolute as we move from Asian symbolic art, to classical Greek art,
and finally to romantic Christian art.
1. How does Hegel describes the Absolute?

2. Following from his description of the Absolute, how does Hegel conceives of the world
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3. What is Hegel’s view of the whole of reality?
4. How is our consciousness of the Absolute achieved?
5. Hegel’s philosophy has its culmination in our knowledge of the ____
3.5 Hegelian Dialectics
Hegel maintains that the manifestation of the absolute spirit involves a movement that
occurs through a dialectical process, where different ideas are counterposed to each other at any
given point. In fact, for Hegel, reality as absolute reason is revealed objectively in the dialectic
processes of nature through the reasoning processes of individual human minds (Harrison-Barbet
8). Hegel's dialectic process exhibits a triadic movement. Usually; this triadic structure of the
dialectic process is described as a movement from thesis to antithesis and finally to synthesis, after
which the synthesis becomes a new thesis, and this process continues until it ends in the Absolute
Idea. What Hegel emphasized in his dialectic logic was that thought moves. Contradiction does
not bring knowledge to a halt but acts as a positive moving force in human reasoning.
To illustrate Hegel's dialectic method, we can take the first basic triad of his logic, namely,
the triad of being, nothing, and becoming. In the movement of the absolute spirit, he sees being as
the thesis, non-being or nothing, as the antithesis and becoming as the synthesis. The movement
of the mind from being to nothing produces becoming. According to Hegel, the concept of
becoming is formed by the mind when it understands that being, for the reasons already mentioned,
is the same as nothing. Becoming, Hegel says, is the unity of being and nothing" and constitutes
singular idea." Becoming is, therefore, the synthesis of being and nothing. If we ask how something
can both be and not be, Hegel would answer that it can both be and not be when it becomes (Stumpf
and Fieser 301). Hegel believes that the mind must always move from the more general and
abstract to the specific and concrete. The most general concept we can form about things is what
they are. The process, according to Hegel, is essential to the understanding of the result. Each later
stage of the dialectic contains all the earlier stages, as it were in solution; none of them is wholly
superseded, but is given its proper place as a moment in the Whole. It is therefore impossible to
reach the truth except by going through all the steps of the dialectic.
Knowledge as a whole has its triadic movement. It begins with sense perception, in which
there is only awareness of the object. Then, through skeptical criticism of the senses, it becomes
purely subjective. At last, it reaches the stage of self-knowledge, in which subject and object are
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no longer distinct. Thus, self-consciousness is the highest form of knowledge. This, of course,
must be the case in Hegel’s system, for the highest kind of knowledge must be that possessed by
the Absolute, and as the Absolute is the Whole there is nothing outside itself for it to know. In the
best thinking, according to Hegel, thoughts become fluent and interfuse. Truth and falsehood are
not sharply defined opposites, as is commonly supposed; nothing is wholly false, and nothing that
we can know is wholly true. ‘We can know in a way that is false’; this happens when we attribute
absolute truth to some detached piece of information. Such a question as ‘Where was Caesar born?’
has a straightforward answer, which is true in a sense, but not in the philosophical sense. For
philosophy, ‘the truth is the whole’, and nothing partial is quite true. ‘Reason,’ Hegel says, ‘is the
conscious certainty of being all reality.’ This does not mean that a separate person is all reality; in
his separateness he is not quite real, but what is real in him is his participation in Reality as a
whole. In proportion as we become more rational, this participation is increased. The Absolute
Idea, with which the Logic ends, is something like Aristotle’s God. It is thought thinking about
itself. Clearly the Absolute cannot think about anything but itself, since there is nothing else, except
to our partial and erroneous ways of apprehending reality (Stumpf and Fieser 301).
1. How does the Absolute manifests itself?

2. Outline the triadic movement of Hegel’s dialectics.
3. How is the concept of becoming formed, according to Hegel?
4. According to Hegel, how does knowledge begins?
A crucial feature of Hegel’s philosophy is his commitment to historicism. Historicism is

the claim that ideas are not eternal objects but are products of their time and that the truth of any
idea cannot be understood apart from its origin and role in its historical setting. In Hegel's view,
the history of the world is the history of nations. The dynamic unfolding of history represents the
"'progress in the consciousness of freedom" (Stumpf and Fieser 307). This progress is not a matter
of mere chance but is rather a rational process. Hegel maintains that reason dominates the world,
therefore, world history is a manifestation of rational process. However, Hegel argues that the state
is the bearer of reason, and because of this, the state is "the Idea of Spirit" in external form and is
"the Divine Idea as it exists on earth." But the dialectic of the historical process consists in the
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opposition between states. Each state expresses a national spirit and, indeed, the world spirit in its
own collective consciousness. To be sure, only individual minds are capable of consciousness.
Still, the minds of a particular people develop a spirit of unity, and for this reason it is possible to
speak of a national spirit. According to Hegel, each national spirit represents a moment in the
development of the world spirit, and the interplay between national spirits represents the dialectic
in history.
Hegel says that the conflict between nations is inevitable inasmuch as the historical process
is the very stuff of reality and is the gradual working out of the Idea of Freedom (Stumpf and Fieser
307). Nations are carried along by the wave of history, so that in each epoch a particular nation is
the dominant people in world history for this epoch. As Hegel points out, a nation cannot choose
when it will be great, for it is only once that it can make its hour strike. Hegel refers to this as a
decisive point in history. Hegel holds that at decisive points in history, special world-historical
people emerge as agents of the world spirit. These persons lift nations to a new level of
development and perfection. For Hegel, such individuals could hardly be judged in terms of a
morality that belonged to the epoch out of which a nation is being led. Instead, the value of such
people consists in their creative responsiveness to the unfolding Idea of Freedom.
1. What is historicism?
2. What does the dynamic unfolding of history represents for Hegel?
3. What is Hegel’s description of national spirit?
3.7 Social/Political Philosophy
Hegel’s social and political philosophy, as articulated in his Philosophy of Right presents
a vision of the rational social order that, despite certain obvious archaisms, is still of relevance to
anyone interested in reconciling the best aspects of liberal social thought, including its concern for
the rights and dignity of individuals, with the human need for deep and enduring communal
attachments (Neuhouser 204). Hegel’s fundamental claim is that a single idea, properly understood
– the idea of freedom – provides the philosophical resources needed to ground a comprehensive
account of the good society: what makes social institutions good, on Hegel’s view, is that they
play an indispensable role in “realizing” freedom (Neuhouser 204).
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Hegel’s political theory stems directly from his main philosophy, his metaphysics. Hegel
argues that human beings constantly strive for freedom. However, he holds that the individual’s
freedom an only be realized in the state. Hegel sees the state as the highest form of human society
in which the spirit objectifies and actualizes itself (Omoregbe 86). Below the state, we have the
family and the civil society. The spirit first objectifies itself in the family, then in the civil society
and finally in the State. Civil society is a stage in the development of the State, a stage between
the family and the State. The State is itself the synthesis of the unity of the family and the diversity
of the civil society. The family is characterized by unity, but this unity i.e., thesis of the family is
negated by the diversity of the civil society which stands to it as an antithesis. The State then
develops as the synthesis in which the thesis and the antithesis (the unity of the family and the
diversity of civil society) are resolved, and preserved. In this way, the negation of the unity of the
family by the individuality and diversity of civil society is in turn negated by the unity of the State
which develops from the negation of the negation. Hegel emphasizes the unity and supremacy of
the State. The will of the State is the universal will; it is the will of the absolute and consequently
the authentic will of the individual citizens. Every individual citizen should therefore endeavour
to bring his will in conformity with the will of the state (Omorgbe 87).
Although Hegel talks of individual freedom, he certainly does not mean the freedom to
differ from the will of the State (which is the 'universal will' or the will of the absolute which has
objectified itself in the State). The State, according to Hegel, is not a human construction freely
and deliberately set up by some kind of social contract. Human beings did not decide to form a
State to provide their needs, as we are told by philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.
These philosophers tell us that the State is the product of the conscious, deliberate and free action
of men who decided to organize themselves into a political society so that in it they may find the
satisfaction of their needs which they cannot satisfy individually. But in Hegel's philosophy, it is
not a question of human beings deciding to organize themselves into a State for whatever end in
view (Omorgbe 87). For the origin of the State and the purpose for which it exists is beyond them.
It is not men who decide to form a State; it is the absolute which objectifies itself in the state
through the instrumentality of human beings and their activities.
The appearance of the State in its proper time is part of the necessary and dialectical process
of the self-objectification and self-development of the absolute spirit. The State therefore, in
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Hegel's philosophy, does not exist for the purpose of serving the individual citizens and providing
their needs as we are told by men like Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. On the contrary, it is the
individual citizens that exist to fulfill the universal will of the State, that is, the will of the absolute
which has objectified itself in the State for the purpose of its own self-development (Omoregbe
88).
1. What is Hegel’s conception of the state?

2. In Hegel’s political thought, how did the state come to be?
3. What is the purpose of the state in Hegel’s philosophy?
3.8 Conclusion
The idealist metaphysics of Hegel which subsumes matter into spirit sees the absolute spirit
as the only medium through which matter can have life and form. It was this understanding of
reality that the materialistic conception of reality championed by the logical positivists was
basically opposed to. Redding (8) writes that with its dark mystical roots, and its overtly religious
content, it is hardly surprising that Hegel's philosophy so understood, is regarded as being very
confrontational to the largely secular and scientific conceptions of reality that have been dominant
from the twentieth century till now. It is true that Hegel's metaphysical system which presages the
final stage in German idealism was an extraordinary achievement. This is why Hegel ranks as one
of the greatest and most influential Western thinkers. His thought greatly inspired other thinkers
like Marx and Sartre while it negatively influenced others like Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard.
3.9 Summary
In this unit, you have learnt that Hegel's philosophy hangs on his doctrine of the Absolute Spirit.
That the Absolute Spirit manifests itself in a dialectical process. You also learnt that in his theory
of the state, the state is the objectification of the Absolute Spirit.

Harrison-Barbet, Anthony. Philosophical connections. https://philosophos.com
Rusk, Robert and James Scotland. The doctrines of the great educators. Macmillan publishers,
1979.
212
Darty, Darty. German idealist’s Metaphysics: Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Scopenhauer. In
Uduigwomen, Andrew and Chris Akpan. (eds.). Mataphysics: A book of readings. Ultimate index
book publishers ltd.
Redding, Paul. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In Edward Zalta. (ed.). The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://www.plato.stanford.edu
Omoregbe, Joseph. Socio-Political Philosophy: A Systematic and Historical Study. JOJA press
limited, 2010.
Answers to SAE 1
1. Hegel was born in Stuttgart in southern Germany in 1770. In the same year, Beethoven was
born and Kant was made a professor at Königsberg.
2. His marriage was blessed with two sons.
3. Hegel’s friend that was a poet was Holderlin.
Answers to SAE 2
1. Hegel described the Absolute as a dynamic process, as an organism having parts but
nevertheless unified into a complex system. The Absolute is, therefore, not some entity
separate from the world; rather, it is the world when viewed in a special way.
2. Hegel conceives of the whole world as a single great organism through which an external
uniformity manifests itself.
3. Hegel sees the central idea of reality as the whole which is the absolute. The absolute, for
him, then, us the infinite creative totality in which all finite distractions are unified. This
absolute is a necessary process of self-development from potentiality to actuality.
4. Hegel believes that our consciousness of the Absolute, is achieved progressively as we
move through the three stages from art, to religion, and finally to philosophy.
5. The Absolute.
Answers to SAE 3
213
1. Hegel maintains that the manifestation of the absolute spirit involves a movement that
occurs through a dialectical process, where different ideas are counterposed to each other
at any given point.
2. The triadic movement of Hegel’s dialectical process are the thesis, the antithesis and the
synthesis.
3. According to Hegel, the concept of becoming is formed by the mind when it understands
that being is the same as nothing.
4. Knowledge, according to Hegel, begins with sense perception, in which there is only
awareness of the object.
Answers to SAE 4
1. Historicism is the claim that ideas are not eternal objects but are products of their time and
that the truth of any idea cannot be understood apart from its origin and role in its historical
setting.
2. For Hegel, the dynamic unfolding of history represents the "'progress in the consciousness
of freedom."
3. According to Hegel, each national spirit represents a moment in the development of the
world spirit, and the interplay between national spirits represents the dialectic in history.
Answers to SAE 5
1. Hegel sees the state as the highest form of human society in which the spirit objectifies and
actualizes itself
2. The appearance of the State in its proper time is part of the necessary and dialectical process
of the self-objectification and self-development of the absolute spirit.
3. In Hegel's philosophy, the state does not exist for the purpose of serving the individual
citizens and providing their needs as we are told by men like Aristotle and St. Thomas
Aquinas. On the contrary, it is the individual citizens that exist to fulfill the universal will
of the State, that is, the will of the absolute which has objectified itself in the State for the
purpose of its own self-development. In other words, for Hegel, the state exists for itself.
214
Contents
4.1. Introduction
4.3 A Brief Biography of Arthur Schopenhauer
4.4 On Consciousness and the Nature of Reality
4.5 The World as Will and Representation
4.6 Ethics and Aesthetics
4.7 Conclusion
4.8 Summary
4.1 Introduction
Schopenhauer is sometimes termed an irrationality philosopher. His philosophy attacked most of
his contemporaries, notably Hegel. He transformed Hegel's Absolute Spirit to the Will.
Schopenhauer refused to acknowledge that Hegel was an appropriate or adequate successor to
Kant. Schopenhauer had great disrespect for Hegel that he believed there wss no philosophy in the
period between Kant and himself; but only mere University charlatanism. This criticism aimed at
Hegel accompanied by another of his comment that "out of every page of Hume's there is more to
be learned than out of (all) of the philosophical works of Hegel (Stumpf and Fieser 309). But Hegel
was not the only target of Schopenhauer's withering criticism. He expressed his broader disdain in
the judgment that "I should like to see the man who could boast of a more miserable set of
contemporaries than mine." In this unit, therefore, we will learn the philosopher of this critical
philosopher.
215
1. The theory of consciousness in Schopenhauer's thought.
2. His notion of reality.
3. Understand his notion of the will
4. Have an insight into his ethics and aesthetics theory.
4.3 A Brief Biography of Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was born at Danzig on February 22nd, 1788. His father, a wealthy
merchant, hoped that his son would follow in his footsteps, and he allowed the boy to spend the
years 1803-4 in visiting England, France and other countries on the understanding that at the
conclusion of the tour he would take up work in a business house. The young Schopenhauer
fulfilled his promise, but he had no relish for a business career and on his father's death in 1803 he
obtained his mother's consent to his lecture. The enterprise was a complete failure, and
Schopenhauer left off lecturing after one semester. His doctrine was scarcely representative of the
dominant Zeitgeist or spirit of the time. After some wanderings Schopenhauer settled at Frankfurt
on the Main in 1833. He read widely in European literature, consulted scientific books and
journals, being quick to notice points which would serve as illustrations or empirical confirmation
of his philosophical theories, visited the theatre and continues writing.
In I836 he published On the Will in Nature (Ueber den Willen in der Natur), and in 1839
he won a prize from the Scientific Society of Drontheim in Norway for an essay on freedom. He
failed, however, to obtain a similar prize from the Royal Danish Academy of the Sciences for an
essay on the foundations of ethics. One of the reasons given for the refusal of the prize was the
writer's disrespectful references to leading philosophers. Schopenhauer had a great admiration for
Kant, but he had .the habit of referring to thinkers such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in terms
which were, to put it mildly, unconventional, however amusing his expressions may be to later
generations. The two essays were published together in I84I under the title The Two Fundamental
Problems of Ethics (Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik).
In 1844 Schopenhauer published a second edition of The World as Will and Idea with fifty
supplementary chapters. In the preface to this edition he took the opportunity of making quite clear
his views about German university professors of philosophy, just in case his attitude might not
216
have been sufficiently indicated already. In 1851 he published a successful collection of essays
entitled Parerga and Paralipomena, dealing with a wide variety of topics. Finally, in 1859 he
published a third and augmented edition of his magnum opus. After the failure of the Revolution
of 1848, a revolution for which Schopenhauer had no sympathy at all, people were more ready to
pay attention to a philosophy which emphasized the evil in the world and the vanity of life and
preached a turning away from life to aesthetic contemplation and asceticism. And in the last decade
of his life Schopenhauer became a famous man. Visitors came to see him from all sides and were
entertained by his brilliant conversational powers. And though the German professors had not
forgotten his sarcasm and abuse, lectures were delivered on his system in several universities, a
sure sign that he had at last arrived. He died in September 1860.
1. When was Schopenhauer born?

2. When did he die?
3. Mention two of his works.
4.4 On Consciousness and the Nature of Reality
Schopenhauer maintains a simple and an uncluttered view about the nature of reality.
According to Schopenhauer, individual material things exist in space and time. He conceives of
material thing as something capable of interacting to causally with other material things. Again,
he believes that every change that occurs to a material thing is the necessary result of some
preceding change that occurs to a material thing (Janaway 21). For him, material things would not
exist without the mind.
Sharing in the thought of Kant, Schopenhauer holds that that the whole structure we have
just described exists only as something presented to us as subjects, not in itself. When
Schopenhauer says that empirical things in space and time are objects, he means that they are
objects for a subject. 'Object' in his parlance means something met with in experience, or in the
subject's consciousness. Space and time are the fundamental forms brought to experience by us.
So the material occupants of space and time would not exist if it were not for the subject, and the
causal connections which obtain between the states of material things are connections which we,
as subjects, impose. In his work, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason,
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Schopenhauer sets out to answer the questions “What can I know?” and “What is the nature of
things?” From these questions, he intends to embark on a thorough investigation of the whole
scope of reality. The term, sufficient reason, simply is the view that nothing is without a reason.
Schopenhauer sets out four basic forms of the principle of sufficient reason which corresponds to
the four different kinds of ideas comprised in the whole range of human thought. Accordingly, he
identifies these as:
1. Physical objects. These refers to the causal relationship between what exist in space and
time, which we come to have knowledge of through our ordinary experience of things. According
to Schopenhauer, physical objects provide the subject matter of the material sciences, such as, for
example, physics. At this point Schopenhauer closely follows Kant’s basic theory that knowledge
begins with experience but is not limited, as Hume thought, to what is empirically given or
presented to us. Instead, the elements of our experience are organized by our human minds, which
brings to our experience a priori categories of space, time, and causality as though these categories
are lenses through which we look at objects (Stumpf and Fieser 312). In this realm of phenomena,
the principle of sufficient reason explains becoming or change.
2. Abstract concepts. These objects take the form of conclusions that we draw from other
concepts, as when we apply the rules of inference or implication. The relationship between
concepts and the conclusions they infer or imply is governed by the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
This is the realm of logic, and here the Principle of Sufficient Reason is applied to the ways of
knowing.
3. Mathematical objects. Here we encounter, for example, arithmetic and geometry as they
are related to space and time. Geometry is grounded in the principle that governs the various
positions of the parts of space. Arithmetic, on the other hand, involves the parts of time, for as
Schopenhauer says on the connection of the parts of time rests all counting. He concludes that the
principle of sufficient reason of being is the law according to which the parts of space and time
determine one another.
4. The self: Schopenhauer maintains that the self is the subject that wills and because it is a
willing subject, it is also the object for the knowing subject. This is what he calls self-
consciousness. The principle of sufficient reason, therefore, acts as the law of motivation which
governs our knowledge of the relationship between the self and its acts of will.
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From these four forms of the principle of sufficient reason, Schopenhauer draws the
striking conclusion that necessity or determinism is present everywhere. He stresses the fact of
necessity through the whole range of objects, whether they are physical objects, the abstract
concepts of logic, mathematical objects, or the self as the object of a knowing subject. Thus, we
encounter physical necessity, logical necessity, mathematical necessity, and moral necessity. This
element of necessity in the very nature of things is what led Schopenhauer to hold that people
behave in daily life by necessity (Stumpf and Fieser 313).
1. What is Schopenhauer’s idea of space and time?

2. List the four basic forms of the principle of sufficient reason which corresponds to the four
different kinds of ideas comprised in the whole range of human thought.
4.5 The World as Will and Representation
Schopenhauer’s philosophy takes the transcendental idealism of Kant as its starting-point.

Like most of his contemporaries Schopenhauer construed this theory in what I have called the
‘subjective’ version (Schopenhauer 141). He held that Kant had proved that the world we
experience through the senses is a construction out of appearances (or ‘representations’, as he
called them), and, while ostensibly repudiating the Kantian idea of a category, he nevertheless saw
these ‘representations’ as the creative embodiment of the intellect, which orders the world of
knowledge in accordance with concepts of space, time and causality. It was this simplified
Transcendental Idealism that Schopenhauer opposed to the elaborate system of Kant. As the title
of his principal work - The World as Will and Representation (1818) - implies, he thought that
there is more to the world than the system of appearance. The world contains not only
representations and their systematic relationships, but also will; and it is on account of his
philosophy of will that Schopenhauer is now principally studied. This philosophy bears a relation
to that of Fichte. It is, however, extraordinarily ambitious, deriving from the single dichotomy
between will and representation the whole of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and the
philosophy of mind, and providing both new answers to old problems, and a new consciousness
of the problems themselves.
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The philosophy of will begins from the well-known paradox of the thing-in-itself.
Transcendental idealism, Schopenhauer argues, implies that the empirical world exists only as
representation: ‘every object, whatever its origin, is, as object, already conditioned by the subject,
and thus is essentially only the subject’s representation.’ A representation is a subjective state that
has been ordered according to space, time and causality - the primary forms of sensibility and
understanding. So long as we turn our thoughts towards the natural world, the search for the thing-
in-itself behind the representation is futile. Every argument and every experience leads only to the
same end: the system of representations, standing like a veil between the subject and the thing-in-
itself. No scientific investigation can penetrate the veil; and yet it is only a veil, Schopenhauer
affirms, a tissue of illusions which we can, if we choose, penetrate by another means. He lavishly
praises the Hindu writers for perceiving this (Scruton 177).
The way to penetrate the veil, according to Schopenhauer, was stumbled upon by Kant,
though he did not see the significance of his own arguments. In self-knowledge, we are confronted
precisely with that which cannot be known as appearance, since it is the source of all appearances:
the transcendental subject. To know this subject as object is precisely not to know it, but to confront
once again the veil of representation. But we can know it as subject through the immediate and
non-conceptual awareness that we have of the will - in short, through practical reason.
Schopenhauer says that the world and all that exist is nothing but a manifestation of the
“Will” and whatever becomes of our conscious as representations of the will. This will, according
to him, is a clear guide to the way the world is. Therefore, the will must be understood in terms of
its application to human actions; however, we must enlarge its sense at least far enough to avoid
the barbarity of thinking that every process in the world has a mind, a consciousness, or a purpose
behind it (Janaway 35). For the most part, Schopenhauer assures us, the world operates blindly
and in a dull, one-sided, and unalterable manner - and the same is true of many manifestations of
the will within each human individual. The world, then, is a representation. In other words, the
world is what presents itself in a subject's experience, and this subject’s experience is the will. He
asserts thus:
Only the will is thing in itself. It is that of which all representation, all
object, is the phenomenon, the visibility, the objectivity. It is the innermost
essence, the kernel, of every particular thing and also of the whole. It
appears in every blindly acting force of nature, and also in the deliberate
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conduct of man, and the great difference between the two concerns only the
degree of the manifestation, not the inner nature of what is manifested
(Schopenhauer 110).
This means that the will is a force which permeates everything in nature, both those that
are conscious and the ones that are unconscious. The will, therefore, must be understood as end-
directed. For Schopenhauer, space and time are the principle of individuation, whereas the thing
in itself (the will), cannot be split up into separate individuals. He argues that beyond
representation, space and time, it is simply the world as a whole that is to be conceived as will.
Secondly, there can be no causal interaction between the will, as thing in itself, and events in the
ordinary empirical world.(Janaway 37-38).
But what then is the relation of the will to the individual subject? Schopenhauer’s answer
is framed in terms taken from Leibniz. I am an individual, and identified as such by means of a
principium individuationis (a principle of individuation). It is only in the world of representation
that such a principle can be found: things can be individuated only in space and time, and only
when understood in terms of the web of causal connection. The thing-in-itself, which has neither
spatial nor temporal nor causal relations, is therefore without a principle of identity. In no sense,
therefore, am I identical with the will. All we can say is that will is manifest in me, trapped, as it
were, into a condition of individual existence by its restless desire to embody itself in the world of
representation. The will in itself is timeless and imperishable. It is the universal substratum from
which every individual arises into the world of appearances, only to sink again after a brief and
futile struggle for existence (Scruton 178)..
Will manifests itself among phenomena in two ways: as individual striving and as Idea. An
Idea is something like a complete conception of the will, in so far as this can be grasped in the
world of representation - it corresponds to the universal, not the particular, and it is therefore only
in the species that the Idea is truly present to our perception. In the natural world, therefore, the
species is favoured over the individual, since in the species the will to live finds a durable
embodiment, while the individual, judged in himself, is a passing and dispensable aberration.
Schopenhauer derives a masterly portrait of nature’s indifference to the individual, in terms

that anticipate evolutionary biology. His pessimism, which keenly inserts itself into every niche
where people seek comfort and consolation, stems in part from his sociobiology. And it is in
sociobiological terms that he spells out one of the most impressive theories of sexual love in the
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philosophical literature. However, Schopenhauer’s pessimism has other and more metaphysical
roots. According to Schopenhauer individual existence is really a kind of mistake, yet one into
which the will to live is constantly tempted by its need to show itself to itself as Idea. The will falls
into individuality and exists for a while trapped in the world of representation, sundered from the
calm ocean of eternity that is its home. Its life as an individual (my life) is really an expiation of
original sin, ‘the crime of existence itself (Scruton 179).
Although intellect is in most things the slave of the will, helplessly commenting on
processes that it cannot control, it has one gift within its power—the gift of renunciation. The
intellect can overcome the will’s resistance to death, by showing that we have nothing to fear from
death, which cannot extinguish the will, but only the veil that covers it. And though the thing which
survives death is not an individual but the universal, this should not worry us, since it was the
mistake of existing as an individual which caused all our suffering in the first place. In such a way
Schopenhauer justifies suicide, a step that he himself showed no inclination to take.
1. Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will begins from the well-known paradox of Kant’s ______
2. How does Schopenhauer sees the world and all that exists?
3. Mention two ways in which Schopenhauer’s will manifests.
4. How does Schopenhauer justifies suicide?
4.6 Ethics and Aesthetics
Schopenhauer’s concept of the will sees the whole of nature as moving in response to the
driving force in all things. Everything in nature, for him, is constantly in a motion and driven by
the same force, the will. Because of this, he rejects the assumption that human beings are superior
to animals. He argues that though human beings are guided by intellect and animals by instinct,
however, the intellect is fashioned by the universal will so that the human intellect is on the same
level as the instincts of animals. However, Schopenhauer believes that the will has an
overpowering force that pervades everything in nature. It will infects all our thoughts and actions.
Nevertheless, we can stand back from it, hold it in abeyance and see things objectively,
independently of our transient goals. Then and only then can we be content with the world, having
freed ourselves from the restless desire to change it. How then, is it possible for human beings to
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escape the overpowering effect of the will? Schopenhauer proposes two ways, a moral and
aesthetic perspectives.
From a moral perspective we can deny passions and desire; from an aesthetic standpoint
we can contemplate artistic beauty. There is, of course, the question of whether the power of the
universal will is so strong that any escape from it can only be temporary. What complicates a
person's life and causes pain is the continuous will to live, which expresses itself in the form of
endless desires. Desire produces aggressiveness, striving, destruction, and self-centeredness. If
there could be some way to reduce the intensity of human desire, a person could achieve at least
periodic moments of happiness. To be sure, Schopenhauer always reminds us that "man is at
bottom a dreadful wild animal... in no way inferior to the tiger or hyena." Still, we are able from
time to time to rise to a level of thought and consciousness that is above the realm of things.
Problems arise when we desire things and other people, for these objects of desire stimulate our
inner will to live at the level of both hunger and procreation. But when these biological functions
are satisfied, there still remains the aim of physical survival against violence and conquest.
Beyond even this level, a person can, Schopenhauer says, understand the difference
between the specific individual objects of his desire and certain general or universal objects. That
is, we are capable of knowing not only the individuals John and Mary but also universal humanity.
This should enable us to move from an intense desire for a person to a sense of sympathy for all
humankind. To this extent desire can give way to an ethics of a more disinterested love. At this
point we recognize that we all share the same nature, and this awareness can produce an ethics of
gentleness. Or, as Schopenhauer says, "My true inner being exists in every living creature as
immediately as in my own consciousness. It is this confession that breaks forth as pity, on which
every unselfish virtue rests, and whose practical expression is every good deed. It is this conviction
to which every appeal to gentleness, love and mercy is directed; for these remind us of the respect
in which we are all the same being."
In a similar way aesthetic enjoyment can shift our attention away from those objects that
stimulate our aggressive will to live and focus attention instead on objects of contemplation that
are unrelated to passion and desire. When we contemplate a work of art, we become a pure
knowing subject—as opposed to a willing subject. What we observe in art, whether in painting or
even music, is the general or universal element. We see in a painting of a person not some specific
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person but a representation of some aspect of humanity that we all share. Here Schopenhauer
expresses views very similar to Plato's concept of Forms and shows the strong influence of the
philosophy of India. Here, too, Schopenhauer’s ethics and aesthetics have a similar function, for
they both attempt to raise our consciousness above earthly; passion-filled striving to a level beyond
the activity of the will where the supreme act is restful contemplation.
In spite of these attempts through ethics and aesthetics to escape from the restricting and
directing power of the universal will, Schopenhauer simply does not succeed in discovering a truly
free individual will in human beings. His last word on the subject of human behavior is that "our
individual actions are . .. in no way free . .. so that every individual... can absolutely never do
anything other than precisely what he does at that particular moment
1. How is it possible for human beings to escape the overpowering effect of the will,
according to Schopenhauer?
2. In what way can aesthetic experience assist us to overcome the will?
4.7 Conclusion
Schopenhauer did not only present the Kantian system in easily digestible Form, but he also made
it coincide with the prevailing mood of nineteenth-century Germany, which was one of baffled
hope and romantic resignation. By his philosophy of will and renunciation he gave new forms of
life (or at any rate new forms of death) to Christian culture. Without Schopenhauer there would
have been neither Wagner nor Nietzsche as we know them, and it was Nietzsche’s final choice of
will against renunciation that brought German romantic philosophy to an end.
4.8 Summary
In this unit, you have learnt that Schopenhauer conceives of material thing as something capable
of interacting causally with other material things. Everything in nature, for him, is constantly in
motion and driven by the same force, the will. Schopenhauer says that the world and all that exist
is nothing but a manifestation of the “Will” and whatever becomes of our conscious as
representations of the will.
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Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Janaway, Christopher. (Ed.).
Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Cambridge
University Press, 2012.
Janaway, Christopher. Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2002.
Routledge, 1995.

Answers to SAE 1
1. Arthur Schopenhauer was born at Danzig on February 22nd, 1788.

2. He died in September 1860.
3. His works are: On the Will in Nature and The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics and
On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason
Answers to SAE 2
1. Space and time are the fundamental forms brought to experience by us. So the material
occupants of space and time would not exist if it were not for the subject, and the causal
connections which obtain between the states of material things are connections which we,
as subjects, impose.
2. The four basic forms of the principle of sufficient reason which corresponds to the four
different kinds of ideas comprised in the whole range of human thought are (a) Physical
objects (b) Abstract concepts(c) Mathematical objects, and (d) The Self.
Answers to SAE 3
1. Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will begins from the well-known paradox of Kant’s thing-
in-itself.
2. Schopenhauer says that the world and all that exist is nothing but a manifestation of the
“Will” and whatever becomes of our conscious as representations of the will. This will,
according to him, is a clear guide to the way the world is.
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3. Will manifests itself among phenomena in two ways: as individual striving and as Idea.
4. Schopenhauer justifies suicide through his view that it is the mistake of existing as an
individual which cause all our suffering in the first place.
Answers to SAE 4
1. Schopenhauer proposes two ways, a moral and aesthetic perspectives, as the means through
which we can escape the overpowering actions of the will.
2. Aesthetic enjoyment can shift our attention away from those objects that stimulate our
aggressive will to live and focus attention instead on objects of contemplation that are
unrelated to passion and desire.
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Module 3
Unit 1 Soren Kierkegaard
Unit 2 Karl Marx
Unit 3 Fredrich Nietzsche
Unit 4 John Dewey
Unit 1: Soren Kierkegaard

Contents
1.1 Introduction
1.3 A Brief Biography of Soren Kierkegaard
1.4 Laying a Foundation for Philosophy of Existence
1.5 Spheres of Human Existence
1.6 Truth as Subjectivity
1.7 Conclusion
1.8 Summary
1.1 Introduction
It is generally acknowledged that if existentialism is a “movement” at all, Kierkegaard is

its prime mover (Solomon 1). Kierkegaard’s philosophy is a quick diversion from the argument
on the possibility of absolute knowledge. Soren Kierkegaard whose philosophy laid the foundation
for existentialist school of thoughts could be described as a passionate anti-metaphysician.
Describing metaphysics as an abstract discipline, Kierkegaard says that looking for guidance from
such a philosophy is synonymous to "travelling in Denmark with the help of a small map of
Europe, on which Denmark shows no larger than a steel pen-point" (Kierkegaard, 1941, p.275).
Kierkegaard, therefore, turned his attention to a more practical form of philosophy, the form of
existence.
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1. The notion of truth as subjectivity in the philosophy of Kierkegaard.
2. The theme of existentialism in his thought
3. Know the various stages of existence, according to Kierkegaard.
1.3 A Brief Biography of Soren Kierkegaard
Soren Kierkegaard was born on May 5, 1813, in Copenhagen. When he was seventeen, he
entered Copenhagen University. Initially, at his father’s insistence he majored in theology, but he
later changed to philosophy. Although his academic studies influenced his thought, the spirit of
his writings arose from four turning points in his life. These were two relationships (with his father
and his only female love affair) and two battles (with the press and with the Danish Church).
Kierkegaard’s father had grown up as a poor peasant but through hard work and good luck became
so successful in business that he was able to retire at age forty. He was a deeply religious Protestant,
but his life was tortured by a morbid sense of guilt for all his moral failures. The result was that he
gave his son a very stern, oppressive religious upbringing. As a university student, Kierkegaard
rebelled against the religious pressures of his childhood.
Just before his father’s death, Kierkegaard became reconciled to him. The son realized that
his father’s harsh religious training was actually a loving attempt to spare him from the melancholy
and guilt his father had experienced. With this new realization of his father’s love, Kierkegaard
began to understand God’s love and turned back toward Christianity. Finally, Kierkegaard entered
into a battle with the Danish State Church. His complaint was that to be a Christian in Denmark
was a taken-for-granted, cultural event. In his view, the Church was a comfortable institution that
had abandoned authentic Christianity long ago. He satirized the churchgoers of Denmark as
bloated geese that met every Sunday to praise the Creator for giving them wings, but who had
grown too fat to fly and reviled those that did use their wings. Although he was still battling
“Christendom” in the name of Christianity, his health began to fail and he died on November 5,
1855 (Lawhead 433).
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1. When was Kierkegaard born and when did he die?
2. Mention the four turning points in Kierkegaard’s life.
1.4 Laying a Foundation for Philosophy of Existence.

Kierkegaard’s interest lies not in the properties of the individual, nor in the knowledge of
the world that might be derived from them, but in the sheer fact of individual existence, conceived
independently of all our attempts to bring it under concepts. Kierkegaard’s first and principal target
was Hegel. He attacked the idea of ‘universal or absolute’ spirit, and the associated Hegelian
attempt to describe the nature and development of spirit in abstraction, without reference to the
individual. It is in the individual, according to Kierkegaard, that the true essence of spirit—its
essence as ‘subjectivity’—is revealed. He was particularly hostile to the Hegelian philosophy of
history, which he rightly saw as inviting both the deification of history and the loss of the sense of
individual responsibility towards events. This sense he sometimes describes as ‘subjectivity’,
sometimes as ‘existential pathos’, and sometimes as ‘anxiety’; without it, all freedom, all ethical
life, and all hope of religious salvation are cancelled.
Kierkegaard’s philosophy begins and ends with the individual. This individual is, very
crudely, the Cartesian subject; his predicament is described by Kierkegaard as one of
‘subjectivity’. In order to characterize it more completely, Kierkegaard thinks it is necessary to
develop a philosophy of existence. But, as he argues, an existential system is impossible, since any
system, in abstracting from the individuality of what it describes, must ignore that which is
important, namely existence itself. Like almost every philosopher who has located his subject in
the unsayable, Kierkegaard goes on to say a great deal about it. He seems to accept at one point,
the Hegelian conception of the ‘moment of consciousness’. There he argues that the essence of the
individual is temporal, but that this existence in time is conditioned by an ineradicable longing for
the eternal.
Existence was for Kierkegaard, a category relating to the free individual. In his use of the
term, to exist means realizing oneself through free choice between alternatives, through self-
commitment. To exist, therefore, means becoming more and more an individual and less and less
a mere member of a group. It mean, one can say, transcending universality in favour of
individuality. Hence Kierkegaard has scant sympathy with what he took to be Hegel's view, that a
man realizes his true self or essence in proportion as he transcends his particularity and becomes
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a spectator of all time and existence as a moment in the life of universal thought. Hegelianism, in
Kierkegaard's opinion, had no place for the existing individual: it could only universalize him in a
fantastic manner. And what could not be universalized it dismissed as unimportant, whereas in
point of fact it is that which is most important and significant. To merge or sink oneself in the
universal, whether this is conceived as the State or as universal thought, is to reject personal
responsibility and authentic existence.
Kierkegaard's emphasis on self-commitment through free choice, a self-commitment

whereby the individual resolutely chooses one alternative and rejects another, is an aspect of his
general tendency to underline antitheses and distinctions rather than to gloss them over. For
example, God is not man, and man is not God. And the gulf between them cannot be bridged by
dialectical thinking. It can be bridged only by the leap of faith, by a voluntary act by which man
relates himself to God and freely appropriates, as it were, his relation as creature to the Creator, as
a finite individual to the transcendent Absolute. Kierkegaard argues that Hegel confounds what
ought to be distinguished. According to him, Hegel’s dialectical mediation between the infinite
and the finite, between God and man, leaves us in the end with neither God nor man but only with
the pale ghost of hypostatized thought, dignified by the name of absolute Spirit (Coplestone 336).
With this emphasis on the individual, on choice, on self-commitment, Kierkegaard's

philosophical thought tends to become a clarification of issues and an appeal to choose, an attempt
to get men to see their existential situation and the great alternatives with which they are faced. It
is certainly not an attempt to master all reality by thought and to exhibit it as a necessary system
of concepts. In his view, speculative systematic philosophy, the greatest example of which was for
him absolute idealism, radically misrepresented human existence (Coplestone 336).
Kierkegaard is often described as an anti-metaphysician, for with Kant he did not believe
we can have logical, speculative knowledge of reality. Although he always expresses respect for
Hegel’s great mind, Kierkegaard concludes rather ironically, that Hegel’s magnificent
metaphysical system was not only intellectually mistaken, but also that it was a comedy of errors.
In his disapproval of Hegel’s thought, Kierkegaard says that If Hegel had written his whole logic
and had written in the preface that it was only a thought-experiment, he undoubtedly would have
been the greatest thinker who has ever lived. But for failing to do so, he describes Hegel as merely
comic (Kierkegaard 217). Kierkegaard emphasizes that the really important problems, that is, the
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problems which are of real importance for man as the existing individual, are not solved by thought
or by adopting the absolute standpoint of the speculative philosopher, but by the act of choice, on
the level of existence rather than on that of detached, objective reflection.
1. What constitutes the beginning and ending of Kierkegaard’s philosophy?

2. What does existence means for Kierkegaard?
3. Why is Kierkegaard often referred to as anti-metaphysician?
4. According to Kierkegaard, how are the real problems that is of importance to man solved?
1.5 Spheres of Human Existence
Kierkegaard distinguishes three spheres of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the
religious. According to his analysis of human experience, every individual faces the option of
choosing between this three fundamental kinds of commitments. Kierkegaard also refers to this
spheres as the stages on life’s way.
1.5.1 The Aesthetic Stage
According to Kierkegaard, the first stage, the aesthetic stage is characterized by self-
dispersal on the level of sense. The aesthetic man is governed by sense, impulse and emotion. But
we must not conceive him as being simply and solely the grossly sensual man. The aesthetic stage
can also be exemplified, for instance, in the poet who transmutes the world into an imaginative
realm and in the romantic. The essential features of the aesthetic consciousness are the absence of
fixed universal moral ·standards and of determinate religious faith and the presence of a desire to
enjoy the whole range of emotive and sense experience. True, there can be discrimination. But the
principle of discrimination is aesthetic rather than obedience to a universal moral law considered
as the dictate of impersonal reason. The aesthetic man strives after infinity, but in the sense of a
bad infinity which is nothing else but the absence of all limitations other than those imposed by
his own tastes. Open to all emotional and sense experience, sampling the nectar from every flower,
he hates all that would limit his field of choice and he never gives definite form to his life. Or,
rather, the form of his life is its very formlessness, self-dispersal on the level of sense (Coplestone
342). To the aesthetic man sees his existence as an expression of freedom but in actual sense, they
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are simply organism, endowed with emotive and imaginative power and the capacity for sense
enjoyment.
1.5.2 The Ethical Stage
The ethical stage is described as a stage where man comes to accept a determinate moral
standards and obligations, the voice of universal reason, and thus gives form and consistency to
his life. What makes this a new stage different from the first is that the morality of one’s choices
is even considered at all. In the ethical stage, the world is divided into the dichotomy of good and
bad. Lawhead (441), argues that although the decision to live in the ethical sphere is not one based
on reason, once a person decides to be moral she can derive ethical principles rationally, just as
Kant claimed we could.
Kierkegaard’s ethical stage, however, is not simply a theorizing about ethics, this is
because a person could play with ethical philosophies the way one might with a coin collection
and still live life aesthetically. Instead, achieving the ethical means that one’s existence is
dominated by ethical concerns. Because existence in the ethical stage is characterized by ethical
concerns, Kierkegaard says that this stage has its own heroism. It can produce what Kierkegaard
calls the tragic hero. The tragic hero renounces himself in order to express the universal
(Kierkegaard 109). This is what Socrates did, and Antigone was prepared to give her life in defense
of the unwritten natural law.
1.5.3 The Religious Stage
At the religious stage a person discovers what it means to be a self. This stage is not
characterized by the adoption of a set of religious doctrines, but is nothing less than an encounter
with the living God. In the aesthetic and ethical spheres, I try to find fulfillment in terms of what I
can control. However, in the religious sphere I give up my need to be autonomous and in control
and my stance is one of simply being open to what I can’t control, which is God’s initiative. The
sense of self within the ethical sphere is always measured by the standard of other finite persons,
which gives one a limited understanding of selfhood. Only when an individual stands before an
infinite God does she obtain a true sense of her authentic self (Lawhead 443).
The relationship between God and each individual is a unique and subjective experience.
There is no way; prior to the actual relationship, to get any knowledge about it. Any attempt to get
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objective knowledge about it is entirely an approximation process. Only an act of faith can assure
me of my personal relation to God. As I discover the inadequacy of my existence at the aesthetic
and ethical levels, self-fulfillment in God becomes clear to me. Through despair and guilt I am
brought to the decisive moment in life when I confront the final either-or of faith (Stumpf and
Fieser 345).
Kierkegaard believes that the more conception we have of God, the more we recognize our
self and the more self, the more conception of God (Kierkegaard 211). An important factor here is
that our individuality is only fully realized with the highest degree of self-honesty and this is
possible only when confronted with our individual inadequacy. Kierkegaard sees this as an
explanation for why Christianity begins with the doctrine of sin, and therefore with the individual
(Kierkegaard 251). When we encounter the living God, we stand naked, free of our socially defined
roles and free of our masks. Stripped of every possibility of self-deception, we are able to know
our individual self for the first time.
1. Mention the three spheres of existence.

2. Another name for the spheres of existence, according to Kierkegaard, is ______
3. How does Kierkegaard describe the relationship between God and each individual?
4. Briefly describe the religious sphere of existence
1.6 Truth as Subjectivity
According to Kierkegaard, reason, which produces only abstractions, negates our

individual essence. This essence is subjectivity, and subjectivity exists only in the ‘leap of faith,’
or ‘leap into the unknown’, whereby the individual casts in his lot with eternity in the only manner
that will also guarantee his present being. Kierkegaard sees truth as subjectivity. By this, he meant
that for existing, stirring, deciding persons, there is nothing like an available out-there, a pre-
fabricated truth. Citing the pragmatism of William James who said that truth is made by an act of
the will, Kierkegaard argues that what is out there is an objective uncertainty. He argued that the
highest attainable truth for an existing individual is an objective uncertainty held just in the
passionate personal experience. For Kierkegaard, therefore, the cultivation of mind is not
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important or decisive thing in life. But of more consequence is the development of maturity of
personality (Essien 275).
Kierkegaard was a convinced Christian, despite his lifelong reaction against the mingled bleakness
and hypocrisy of his native Protestant church. He therefore devoted much of his writing to the
somewhat self-defeating task of showing that the Christian faith is precisely the one which best
calls forth this existential leap. In his efforts to establish this he came up with the doctrine that
‘truth is subjectivity’. The traditional conceptions of truth - either as correspondence with reality
or as coherence with the system of true ideas - he regarded as equally empty, not because false,
but because tautologous. Truth, like everything else, ceased to be empty only when related to the
subject. And ‘for a subjective reflection the truth becomes a matter of appropriation, of inwardness,
of subjectivity, and thought must probe more and more deeply into the subject and his subjectivity.’
However, as a literary idea, and as an invitation to exalt the individual to a position of eminence
that he had never achieved before, Kierkegaard’s notion of truth is fairly comprehensible. But as
a philosophical theory it has the obvious weakness that the distinction between appearance and
reality disappears. For truth, the concept in terms of which that distinction has ultimately to be
made, has been absorbed into the realm of appearance, resulting in the following obscure
definition: truth is ‘an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most
passionate inwardness,’ hence ‘the mode of apprehension of the truth is precisely the truth.’ We
could put this more simply by saying that there is, for Kierkegaard, no longer any distinction
between subject and object. The leap into subjectivity and the leap of faith are ultimately one and
the same, and while Kierkegaard supposes that the individual finds him/herself, at the end of this
vertiginous process, emerging into the full reality of the ‘ethical life’, certain of his/her own
eternity, and yet living in time with true ‘existential pathos,’ it is difficult to see how he/she is
supposed to achieve this. The best that we can do, in our state of subjectivity, is to believe that the
world is larger than ourselves.
1. According to Kierkegaard, where does subjectivity exists?

2. In Kierkegaard’s view of the world, what is out there?
3. What is his doctrine of truth?
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1.7 Conclusion
Kierkegaard’s philosophy adopts a new approach from other philosophers before him. He
simply refuses to take over traditional problems or the problems most discussed in contemporary
philosophical circles but instead made a radical attempt to solve them in a purely objective and
disinterested spirit. However, his problems arise out of his own ideas, in the sense in the
development of his ideas, he encounters a form of alternatives presented for his own personal
choice, a choice involving a radical self-commitment. His philosophy is a lived philosophy.
However, one criticism against Kierkegaard’s philosophy is its lack of universalization as he
constantly advocates subjectivity. As argued by Coplestone (337), universalization of thought is
important in philosophy because without it, there would only be autobiography. At the same time
it is abundantly clear that it is the actor who speaks rather than the spectator. In fact, it has been
argued further that this feature of his philosophy constitutes a weakness because it makes his
thought appear too subjective, too hostile to objectivity. In fact, some would refuse it the name of
philosophy at all.
But despite the objections, the intensely personal character of Kierkegaard's thought
constitutes its strength. For it gives to his writing a degree of seriousness and depth which sets it
entirely outside the concept of philosophy as a game or as an academic pastime for those who have
the requisite aptitude and inclination. Conclusively, Kierkegaard gave existentialism its framework
as he was the first to address all the basic tenets of existentialism. Kierkegaard has been a unique
figure in the sense that he has been thought to play a role in so many different academic fields.
Given his ideas about the different modes of existence, it is perhaps not surprising that readers
continue to return to him for insight in the areas of philosophy, theology, literature, the social
sciences, and social‐political thought. However, the complexity does not end here, since there are
also a number of different methodological approaches to interpreting his ideas in these different
fields. These approaches are not in any strict way tied to a specific field and thus can be applied
equally to all of them.
1.8 Summary
In this unit, you have learnt that Kierkegaard questions the relevance of the various systems of
knowledge to human existence. He made human existence the centre piece of his philosophy.
Kierkegaard identifies three stages of existence. For him, there is no objective truth, the world is
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only characterized by subjectivity. According, Kierkegaard laid the foundation to the philosophy
of human existence by making an individual the starting point of his philosophy.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Soren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 2, no. 1605,trans. and ed.
Howard and Edna Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967).
Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling. (translated by R. Payne. London. 1939)
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Sickness unto Death in Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death,
trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968).
Solomon, Robert. Existentialism. Oxford University Press, 2005.
Idealists to Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Image Books, 1962.
Answers to SAE 1
1. Soren Kierkegaard was born on May 5, 1813 and he died on November 5, 1855
2. The four relationships that marked a turning point in Kierkegaard’s life were two
relationships with his father and his only female love affair, and two battles with the press
and with the Danish Church.
Answers to SAE 2
1. Kierkegaard’s philosophy begins and ends with the individual.

2. Existence was for Kierkegaard, a category relating to the free individual. In his use of the
term, to exist means realizing oneself through free choice between alternatives, through
self-commitment. To exist, therefore, means becoming more and more an individual and
less and less a mere member of a group.
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3. Kierkegaard is often described as an anti-metaphysician, because like Kant, he did not
believe we can have logical, speculative knowledge of reality.
4. Kierkegaard emphasizes that the really important problems, that is, the problems which are
of real importance for man as the existing individual, are not solved by thought or by
adopting the absolute standpoint of the speculative philosopher, but by the act of choice,
on the level of existence rather than on that of detached, objective reflection.
Answers to SAE 3
1. The three spheres of existence are the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.
2. Stages on life’s way
3. Kierkegaard describes the relationship between God and each individual as a unique and
subjective experience.
4. At the religious stage a person discovers what it means to be a self. This stage is not
characterized by the adoption of a set of religious doctrines, but is nothing less than an
encounter with the living God.
Answers to SAE 4
1. According to Kierkegaard, subjectivity exists only in the ‘leap of faith,’ or ‘leap into the
unknown’, whereby the individual casts in his lot with eternity in the only manner that will
also guarantee his present being.
2. Kierkegaard argues that what is out there is an objective uncertainty.
3. Kierkegaard’s doctrine of truth is that truth is subjective.
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Unit 2: Karl Marx
Contents
2.1 Introduction
2.3 A Brief Biography of Karl Marx
2.4 Historical/Dialectical Materialism
2.5 Marx's Criticism of Capitalism
2.6 On the Emergence of Communism
2.7 The Dialectics of Marx
2.8 The Theory of Alienation
2.10 Conclusion
2.11 Summary
2.1 Introduction
Marxism provided the official philosophical point of view for at least one-third of the
world's population in the second half of the twentieth century. When we consider that Marx spent
a considerable portion of his adult life in relative obscurity, it is all the more remarkable that his
views should have achieved such immense influence for several generations. People debate the
credibility of Marx’s theories, but no one disputes their influence. It is not possible to conceive of
a philosopher in history who can claim to have had an international, organized, and activist
following of such proportion as Marx. In this unit, we shall discuss his philosophy.
1. How a civil society grows as a result of material conflict.
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2. Understand Marx's historical and dialectical materialism.
3. Apply Marx's dialectical materialism to the dynamics of change in the society.
4. Differentiate between forces of production and relations of production.
5. Explain the concept of alienation in Marx's philosophy.
2.3 A Brief Biography of Karl Marx
Karl Marx was born in 1818. When Hegel died he was thus just in his early teens. Still,
the influence of Hegel was still dominant at German universities, particularly at the university of
Berlin where Hegel had taught and Marx concluded his studies; after receiving his doctorate, not
from the university of Berlin, where one found his views too controversial, but from the more
liberal university at Jena, for a dissertation on “The Difference Between the Democritean and
Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,” he ended up writing for a radical newspaper in Cologne. In 1843
he married and moved to Paris, where revolution was in the air. It was here that here he met his
life-long collaborator, Friedrich Engels, who co-authored the Communist Manifesto.
In Paris, too, Marx wrote for a radical newspaper that in 1845, was closed by the French
authorities, under pressure from the Prussian king. Marx had to leave Paris. Some restless years
followed, that brought him to Brussels, then back to Cologne, where he was tried for treason and
acquitted, then briefly again to Paris and finally to London, were he settled in 1849 and died in
1883.
1. Who was Marx life-long collaborator?

2. Which year was Marx born?
3. Which year did he die?
2.4 Historical/Dialectical Materialism
The basis of Karl Marx's philosophy is the thesis that the prevailing mode of economic
production and exchange determines the political and intellectual history of society. According to
Marx, the mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life-
process in general. It is not the consciousness of human beings that determines their being; on the
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contrary it is their social being that determines their consciousness’ (Marx, p. x). There were two
elements that determined the course of history: the forces and the relations of production.
By the forces of production Marx meant the raw materials, the technology, and the labour
that are necessary to make a finished product; as wheat, a mill, and a millworker are all needed to
produce flour. The relations of production, on the other hand, are the economic arrangements
governing these forces, such as the ownership of the mill and the hiring of the worker. Relations
of production are not static; they alter as technology develops. In the age of the hand-mill, for
instance, the worker is the serf of a feudal lord, tied to the land; in the age of the steam-mill he is
the mobile employee of the capitalist. Relations of production are not matters of free choice; they
are determined by the interplay of the productive forces. If, at any time, they become inappropriate
to the productive forces, then a social revolution takes place (Kenny 281).
In his theory of historical/dialectical materialism, Marx says that the history of the society
is the history of class struggle. He distinguished five such phases or epochs: (1) primitive
communal, (2) slave, (3) feudal, (4) capitalist, and, as a prediction of things to come, (5) socialist
and communist (Stumpf and Fieser, 350). Marx believed that in the earliest stages of history,
human beings had been organized into primitive communist tribes, holding land in common,
owning no private property, and ruled by a matriarchy. In the Iron Age, however, society became
patriarchal, it became possible to accumulate private wealth, and slavery was introduced. Slavery
was the dominant economic feature of classical antiquity. Society was to be divided into classes:
patrician and plebeian, freemen and slaves. Thus, there began the story of class antagonism which
was, henceforth, to be the fundamental feature of human history. The splendour of the classical
culture of Greece and one was merely an ideological superstructure built upon the relations of
production between the classes. The ancient world gave way to the feudal system, with its
relationships between lord and serf, and between guildsmen and journeymen. Once again, the
philosophy and religion of the Middle Ages were an ideological superstructure sustained by the
economic system of the age. From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of
the earliest towns: these were the first bourgeois, a middle class between the servile labourers and
the aristocratic landowners. Since the time of the French evolution the bourgeoisie had been
gaining the upper hand over the aristocrats (Kenny 281).
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The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not
done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of
oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. The next epoch, the epoch of capitalism,
possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a
whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly
facing each other; Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. (Marx 3). Marx believed that the capitalist society
in which he lived had reached a state of crisis. The opposition between bourgeoisie and proletariat
would become steadily stronger and lead to a revolutionary change which would usher in the final
stages, first of socialism, in which all property would pass to the state, and finally to communism,
after the state had withered away. The crisis which capitalism had reached, Marx maintained, was
not a contingent fact of history; it was something entailed by the nature of capitalism itself.
1. What is the basis of Karl Marx’s philosophy?

2. What does Marx mean by the forces of production and relations of production?
3. How does Marx describes the history of the society?
4. Enumerate the different phases that the society has undergone, according to Marx.
5. The capitalist system has divided the society into two classes namely, the _____ and _____
2.5 Marx's Criticism of Capitalism
Marx’s chief criticisms of capitalism revolve around his theory of surplus labor. He begins
with what is known as the “labor theory of value,” which was held by many of the economists of
his day. This theory states that the value of any commodity is a function of the amount of labor
that it took to produce it. In capitalism the worker’s labor is a commodity, so the value of that labor
is determined by its cost. What it takes to produce a worker’s labor is what it takes to sustain him.
Giving what he thinks is the most charitable account of capitalism, Marx assumes the product will
be sold for its just price. However, this alone would leave the capitalist without any profit. So the
capitalist must find some way to work profit into this scenario. He does so by forcing the worker
to labor more hours than is necessary for his own survival.
Marx theorizes that the worker’s day can be divided into two parts. First, there are the hours
that he spends producing products whose total value are equivalent to his wages (wages that are
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equal to what it takes to sustain the worker). The second part of the workday consists of the hours
he spends producing commodities whose value is expropriated by the capitalist. Thus the capitalist
makes a profit on this “surplus value.” For these reasons, Marx describes the capitalist as having
a “vampire thirst for the living blood of labour” (Marx 367).
2.6 On the Emergence of Communism
After capitalism has become yet one more obsolete system to join the junk pile of dialectical
history, there will be a stage of transition that Marx calls “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” This
will be a necessarily grim time when the proletariat will use their political power to clean out the
last remnants of capitalism. Next will come the first stage of communism, the stage now known
as “socialism.” Here the state takes over the means of production. However, this will eventually
give way to the final stage of ultimate communism. At this stage, the people will control not only
political decisions but also the economic life of the country (Lawhead 427).
Marx says that thus far, history has been moved forward by a continual succession of class
conflicts. In each era, it has been the same ball game, only the teams have been changed. Under
communism, Marx says, the nature of the game will have changed altogether. With no more private
ownership of the means of production, society will no longer have the tensions and contradictions
produced by class divisions. Without class conflict, history will change from a vicious competitive
game to one of mutual cooperation, where there will no longer be winners and losers. Hence, the
dialectical struggles of history will come to rest, for the driving force of history, the struggle to
achieve a rational society, will have achieved its goal (Lawhead 427).
1. What moves history forward, according to Karl Marx?

2. What is the function of class conflict in shaping history?
3. What do you understand by the term, dictatorship of the proletariat?
2.7 The Dialectics of Marx
As earlier stated, Marx's philosophy believes that history is shaped by conflicts between the
relations of production and the forces of production. To convert he study of history into a science,
therefore, Marx needed a general law that would enable him to explain past events and predict
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future ones. Hegel’s notion that history follows a dialectical development provided Marx with the
solution he needed. Even though he sharply criticizes Hegel’s idealism, Marx learned from
Feuerbach that Hegel could be salvaged. Hegel’s only problem was that he had turned things
upside down with his mystical view that the world is the external unfolding of a rational, spiritual
Idea. Instead, the opposite is true, Marx says, for the ideal world is nothing more than the material
world as reflected in human consciousness.
According to the dialectical view of history, an internal logic to events guides their
development. Marx saw that if one purged Hegel’s dialectic of its spiritual fluff and replaced
Hegel’s struggle and opposition of ideas with the conflict of classes, Hegel’s model could be taken
over. In the Marxist dialectic, an initial state of affairs (called the thesis) develops to a point where
it produces its own contradiction (the antithesis). The two remain in tension until another state of
affairs supersedes them (the synthesis). In each round of the dialectic, the deficiencies of one stage
bring forth opposing forces to balance out what is lacking. Thus, conflict and struggle are an
inevitable part of history (Lawhead 419).
Marx was convinced that the dialectic process inevitably involves tragic conflicts. He saw
in history the deep tension between forces that are incompatible, each exerting its power to
overcome the other. The use of revolutionary force could hardly be avoided, but force could not
bring into being simply any desired utopian system. Only the relations of production toward which
the inner logic of the material order was driving in a determined way could be the objective of
revolution. Even when a society is aware of its ultimate direction, this society can neither clear by
bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its
normal development" (Stumpf and Fieser 358).
1. Describe, in few words, the Marxist dialectic.

2. For Marx, the force of dialectical antagonism is purely _______
3. The tripartite nature of Marx’s dialectics take the form of ______,______and ______
2.8 The Theory of Alienation
The Marxist theory of alienation can only be understood if we also add to it a second
Kantian idea, one with which we are already familiar. According to one formulation of the Kantian
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categorical imperative, a rational being is constrained to treat all others of his kind as ends and
never as means only. We have seen, in Hegel, the attempt to found this imperative in an analysis
of lordship and bondage as necessary ‘moments’ in the self-consciousness of a rational being. To
the extent that a man treats another as a means, so does he become a means to himself. In exploiting
the other he exploits himself, losing his freedom in a form of subservience all the greater for his
inability to recognize it as such. It is this theory that lends support to Marx’s contention that
alienation, being a form of isolation from social life, is experienced as alienation from self.
We might put the developed forms of the two original ideas thus:
1. A man is an object for himself to the extent that he invests objects with human powers, and so
ceases to see those powers as having their origin in himself.
2 A man becomes an object for himself to the extent that others are objects for him (where X is an
object for Y = X is only a means for Y).
The combination of 1 and 2 is the state of self-alienation. The true realization of oneself as
subject requires and is required by two things: first, the recognition of others as ends, and secondly
the rediscovery through social life of one’s actual human potential. But any lapse into self-
alienation must also precipitate an alienation from species-life, and vice versa.
The difficult philosophical claim, never properly established by Marx, and in itself
contentious, is that this state of alienation is directly connected with the institution of property.
Marx hoped to make the connection in the following way. Under the rule of private property,
objects become the focus of individual rights, and thus take on the character of human life. There
is a sense in which, through the institution of property, we endow objects with a soul. Since the
only origin of this soul must be in us, it follows that there is an element of systematic ‘fetishism’
in the process. This fetishism develops as property develops from use-value (which is intelligibly
related to human need) to exchange-value, in which the commodity begins to acquire life and
autonomy of its own. With the arrival of pure exchange-value in the form of money, the
transformation of objects into fetishes is complete; and with this transformation - effected only
under the rule of the free market, which is itself the consummation of property relations—we have
the establishment of capitalism. Under capitalism it is not only objects, but also men, who are
bought and sold. And in this buying and selling, under the regime of which one party has nothing
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to dispose of but his labour power, we reach the ultimate point in the treatment of men as means.
Men have become objects for each other, and whatever remnants of their human (social) life
remain will be dissipated, being projected outwards onto the world of commodities.
The major problem that Marx discovered in a capitalist system concerns the alienation of
human labour. The term, alienation , simply refers to separation. It is a state of being separated
from one’s true self. What concrete conditions make us fulfilled human beings? Marx says we
differ from animals because we produce the means of our subsistence. Not only do humans engage
in work to fulfill their needs, they do so in conscious, creative ways. The bee constructs a
honeycomb by blind instinct, but the architect conceives her creation in the imagination before
building it. Furthermore, our creativity goes beyond merely meeting our immediate, physical
needs. The human species “forms things in accordance with the laws of beauty” (EPM, T 76). In
other words, to be human is to engage in productive work and, by doing so, experiencing the
fulfillment that comes from free, spontaneous, and creative activity.
Although Marx was by no means the first to develop a theory of alienation, his views were
unique because they were based on his particular economic and philosophical assumptions, which
formed the basis of his criticism of capitalism. For Marx there is something crucial within our
human nature from which we can be alienated, namely; our work. Marx describes four aspects of
alienation. We are alienated (1) from nature, (2) from ourselves, (3) from our species-being, and
(4) from other people (Stumpf and Fieser 356).
According to him, our relation to the product of our labour was quite intimate. We took
things from the material world, shaped them, and made them our own. Capitalism, though, breaks
this relationship by forcing us to forfeit the products of our labour in exchange for money. In the
productive process our labor becomes as much an object as the physical material that is worked
upon, since labor is now bought and sold. The more objects we produce, the fewer we can
personally possess and therefore the greater is our loss. To the extent that we are embodied in our
labour, we become alienated from the natural world in which we work. As Marx sees it, the worker
puts his life into the object, and his life then belongs no longer to himself but to the object. The
object is appropriated and owned by someone else. In this way the original relation between people
and nature is destroyed.
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Next, we are alienated from ourselves by participating in capitalist labour. This comes about
because work is external to us and not part of our nature. Work is not voluntary but is imposed
upon us. We have a feeling of misery instead of well-being. Rather than fulfilling ourselves, we
must deny ourselves. We do not freely develop our physical and mental capacities but are instead
physically exhausted and mentally debased. As a consequence, we feel like human beings only
during our leisure hours. Most important of all, we are alienated from our work because it is not
our own work but rather work for someone else. In this sense, as workers, we do not belong to
themselves but to someone else, and we have more or less become prostitutes. The result is that a
worker feels himself to be freely active only in his animal functions—eating, drinking and
procreating― at most also in his dwelling and personal adornment—while in his human functions
he is reduced to an animal. Although eating, drinking and procreating are genuine human
functions, even these become animal functions when separated from our other human functions.
At still another level, we are alienated from our species-being, that is, from our truly human
nature. The character of any species resides in the type of activity it expresses. The species-
character of human beings is "free, conscious activity."inner logic of the material order was driving
in a determined way could be the objective of revolution. Even when a society is aware of its
ultimate direction, this society can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments,
the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. By contrast, an animal
cannot distinguish itself from its activity; the animal is its activity. But, Marx says, a person makes
his life activity itself an This leads to our alienation from other people. The breakdown in our
relations to other people is similar to our alienation from the objects of our labour. In an
environment of alienated labour, we look upon other people from the point of view of workers.
We see other workers as objects whose labour is bought and sold, and not as full members of the
human species. To say, then, that our species-being species' nature is alienated or estranged from
ourselves means that we are estranged from other people.
Marx asks, "If the product of labour is alien to me, to whom does it belong? According to
him, in an earlier age, when temples were built in Egypt and India, people thought that the product
belonged to the gods. But, Marx says, the alienated product of labor can belong only to some
human being. If it does not belong to the worker, it must belong to a person other than the worker.
Thus, as a result of alienated labor, workers produce a new relationship between themselves and
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another person, and this other person is the capitalist. The final product of alienated labor is private
property. Private property, in the form of capitalist business, is both a product of alienated labor
and the means by which labor is alienated. In the wage system entailed by private property; labor
finds itself not as an end but as the servant of wages. Nor would a forced increase in wages restore
to either the workers or to their work their human significance or value. As a statement of eventual
liberation, Marx concludes that the freeing of society from private property involves the
emancipation of the workers, which in turn will lead to the emancipation of humanity as a whole
(Stumpf and Fieser 357).
1. What do you understand by the term, alienation?

2. Identify four aspects of alienation, according to Marx.
In the later development of his thought, Marx made a sharp deviation from Hegel’s heritage. Part
of the reason for this shift of emphasis was the important insight that Marx was able to obtain into
the theory of history, once he had replaced the Hegelian representation of its movement by a theory
that was more scientifically inspired. This new theory of history, in a version due partly to Friedrich
Engels, has been called ‘dialectical materialism.’ It is unclear whether the word ‘dialectical’ is
correctly used to describe it: for this seems to imply that Marx, like Hegel, believed that history
proceeds by the successive resolution of ‘contradictions.’
Hegel had seen history as the development of consciousness. Marx argued that the fundamental
things that develop, and so bring about the movement of history, are not features of consciousness
at all, but ‘material’ forces. The development of consciousness is to be explained in terms of the
material reality, and does not explain it. Thus, in the famous phrase of Engels (Ludwig Feuerbach
and the End of Classical German Philosophy) quoted above, Marx’s theory of history ‘sets Hegel
on his feet’. Moreover, the theory was held to validate, as a prediction, the original view that
capitalism would be superseded by a more humane social arrangement. Having faith in this
prediction, it seemed less important to Marx to provide a description of man’s unhappiness. For it
is redundant to give reasons for bringing about what is inevitable.
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The theory of history begins from the distinction between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’. Marxist
philosophers who have wished to hold on to the Hegelian antecedents of the theory (for example,
George Lukács and certain philosophers of ‘Frankfurt School’) have criticized or underplayed this
distinction, believing that a truly philosophical Marxism must found itself, like the theory of
alienation, in an understanding of human consciousness. The purpose of Marx’s distinction, on the
other hand, was to show human consciousness as an offshoot of a deeper social and economic
reality. Consciousness is something to be explained, in terms that may not be recognizable to the
conscious being himself. One may say that, in moving to the scientific theory of history, Marx also
takes a step from the first-person to the third-person point of view, a step which inevitably takes
him away from the standpoint of the agent, towards that of the observer.
The base of all human institutions is that upon which the forms of consciousness are built, and in
terms of which institutions (and the consciousness which derives from them) are to be explained.
This base consists, for Marx, in two parts: first, a system of economic relations, secondly, certain
active ‘productive forces’. The existence of any particular system of economic relations is
explained in terms of the level of development of the productive forces. These forces consist of
labour power, and accumulated knowledge. As man’s mastery over nature increases, the
productive forces will inevitably develop. At each level of development a particular system of
economic relations will be most suited to contain and facilitate their operation. Hence we can
explain, rather in the manner of Darwin (with whose theory of evolution early Marxists compared
the theory of Marx), the existence of any given economic system in terms of its suitability to the
productive forces which, were they at a different stage of development, would either not require,
or else actively destroy it.
Upon the system of economic relations rises the superstructure of legal and political institutions.
These serve to consolidate and protect the economic base, and are therefore similarly explicable
in terms of their sustaining and protective function. Finally, the political institutions generate their
own peculiar ‘ideology’. This is the system of beliefs, perceptions, values and prejudices, which
together consolidate the entire structure, and serve both to conceal the changeability, and to dignify
the actuality, of each particular arrangement.
1. Marxist theory of history starts from the distinction between _____and _____
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2. The base structure, according to Marx, consists of two parts. Name these parts.
3. According to Marx, the superstructure of legal and political institutions are influenced by
______
2.10 Conclusion
In this unit, we have discussed the key elements of Marx's philosophy. We have seen how he
changed the idealism in Hegel to come up with economic materialism as the force of progress in
the society. Marx’s philosophy recognized as the basis of all political thought the intuition that
man is both object and subject for himself. From this intuition came the doctrine of ‘praxis’,
according to which theory and practice must be one.
2.11 Summary
In this unit, you have learnt that Marx sees economy as what drives changes in the society.
Whenever there is a class division, a new society is formed. Capitalist system leads to alienation
of human beings. Marx maintains that oppression will end the moment the society attain the stage
of communism.
Marx, Karl. Critique of Political Economy. Progress, 1971
Marx, Karl. Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes. Penguin Books, 1990.
Cengage Advantage Books, 2015.
Kenny, Anthony. A New History of Philosophy: Philosophy in the Modern World. Vol IV. Oxford
University Press, 2007.
Routledge, 1995.

Answers to SAE 1
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1. Friedrich Engels
2. He was born in 1818
3. He died in 1883
Answers to SAE 2
1. The basis of Karl Marx's philosophy is the thesis that the prevailing mode of economic
production and exchange determines the political and intellectual history of society.
2. By the forces of production Marx meant the raw materials, the technology, and the labour
that are necessary to make a finished product; as wheat, a mill, and a millworker are all
needed to produce flour. The relations of production, on the other hand, are the economic
arrangements governing these forces, such as the ownership of the mill and the hiring of
the worker.
3. Marx says that the history of the society is the history of class struggle.
4. (1) primitive communal, (2) slave, (3) feudal, (4) capitalist, and, as a prediction of things
to come, (5) socialist and communist.
5. Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
Answers to SAE 3
1. Marx says that history has been moved forward by a continual succession of class conflicts.
2. Without class conflict, history will change from a vicious competitive game to one of
mutual cooperation, where there will no longer be winners and losers.
3. This is a necessarily grim time when the proletariat will use their political power to clean
out the last remnants of capitalism.
Answers to SAE 4
1. In the Marxist dialectic, an initial state of affairs (called the thesis) develops to a point
where it produces its own contradiction (the antithesis). The two remain in tension until
another state of affairs supersedes them (the synthesis). In each round of the dialectic, the
deficiencies of one stage bring forth opposing forces to balance out what is lacking. Thus,
conflict and struggle are an inevitable part of history.
2. Materialistic.
3. Thesis, antithesis and synthesis
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Answers to SAE 5
1. The term, alienation , simply refers to separation. It is a state of being separated from one’s
true self.
2. We are alienated (1) from nature, (2) from ourselves, (3) from our species-being, and (4)
from other people
Answers to SAE 6
1. Base’ and ‘superstructure.

2. A system of economic relations and an active productive forces.
3. The system of economic relations.
Unit 3: Fredrich Nietzsche
Contents
3.1 Introduction
3.3 A Brief Biography of Fredrich Nietzsche
3.4 A Critique of Greek Culture
3.3 The Two Types of Morality
3.5 The Will to Power
3.6 The Superman
3.7 The Nature of Knowledge and Truth
3.8 The Dead of God
3.9 Conclusion
3.10 Summary
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3.1 Introduction
Friedrich Nietzsche is considered as one of the most controversial thinkers in the history
of Western philosophy. His powerful and provocative ideas have had a widespread impact upon
twentieth century culture. This pervasive influence can be explained in part by the powerful and
provocative nature of his writings, but perhaps even more so because of the sense in which his
thought seemed to have anticipated the twentieth century. In a time when European culture wasstill
confident of achieving its Enlightenment ideal of the progress of human society, progress towards
unlocking the secrets of nature and progress towards founding society upon universal foundation
of reason, Nietzsche’s writings anticipated a cataclysmic crisis. As the confidence of European
culture was shattered in the cataclysms of two world wars and the atomic age which seemed to
place the future of human civilization in question, Nietzsche’s vision seems to have been prophetic.
At the end of this unit, you will learn the following:
1. Nietzsche's idea of truth as perspective.
2. The two types of morality in Nietzsche's philosophy.
3. The concept of the Will to Power
4. The concept of the Superman.
5. Nietzsche's announcement of the the dead of God
3.3 A Brief Biography of Fredrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Prussian Saxony. His father and both his
grandfathers were Lutheran ministers. However, his father died when Nietzsche was four, leaving
him to be brought up by his sister, mother, grandmother, and two aunts. He was a brilliant student
and distinguished himself at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig, where he studied classics and
philology. Nietzsche was religiously devout in his younger years (we even have a number of
examples of his devotional poetry). However, he gradually drifted away from his earlier piety and
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by the time he reached his early twenties he had embraced the spirited atheism that was one of the
most distinguishing features of his philosophy.
At the early age of twenty-five, he was appointed professor of classical philology at the
University of Basel. He had not yet completed his doctoral degree, but had already attracted the
attention of scholars through his published papers. In 1879, tired of academic life and suffering
from the ill health that plagued him the rest of his life, he retired from teaching. Struggling with
migraine headaches, nausea, insomnia, and bad eyesight, he traveled from one resort to another
throughout Switzerland and Italy in an attempt to regain his health. Despite these problems, he
wrote eighteen books and a lengthy unfinished manuscript during the years 1872 to 1888.
His final years were a time of deep loneliness. Eventually, both his physical and mental
health deteriorated from what appeared to be a neurological disorder. In January 1889, he collapsed
in the street while protecting a horse being beaten by its owner. For the remaining twelve years of
his life, he was physically disabled and pathetically insane. After an unsuccessful treatment in a
clinic, he was taken home to be cared for by his mother and later by his sister. By now, his writings
were receiving a great deal of attention, but he was not lucid enough to enjoy his fame. Nietzsche
spent his life forecasting the future cultural crises just over the horizon at a time when most in his
century were oblivious to what lay ahead. Appropriately, as the twentieth century was coming into
place, Nietzsche handed the torch over to his cultural offspring and died on August 25, 1900.
1. How would you describe the final years of Nietzsche?

2. According to this section, what was Nietzsche’s life-time task?
3.4 A Critique of Greek Culture
Nietzsche’s view involves a critique of 19th century culture. He said Europe is sick and
cannot be healed by prosperity or technology. He claims that culture has no unity of outlook and
it is too eclectic. In his work, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche says that the Greeks knew very well
that life is terrible, inexplicable, dangerous. But though they were alive to the real character of the
world and of human life, they did not surrender to pessimism by turning their backs on life. What
they did was to transmute the world and human life through the medium of art. And they were
then able to say 'yes' to the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. There were, however, two ways of
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doing this, corresponding respectively to the Dionysian and Apollonian attitudes or mentalities.
Dionysus is for Nietzsche the symbol of the stream of life itself, breaking down all barriers and
ignoring all restraints .. In the Dionysian or Baechic rites we can see the intoxicated votaries
becoming, as it were, one with life.
Nietzsche’s philosophy begins, like Kierkegaard’s, in the individual; but unlike his
predecessor, Nietzsche remained profoundly skeptical that anything significant remained to the
individual when the veil of appearance had been torn away. He accepted the doctrine that all
description, being conceptual, abstracts from the individuality of what it describes. Moreover, he
regarded the description and classification of the individual as peculiarly pernicious, in that it
attributed to each individual only that ‘common nature’ which it was his duty to ‘overcome’.
Nietzsche tried to avoid the paradoxes involved in this stance by adopting a skepticism towards all
forms of objective knowledge. He repeated Hume’s arguments concerning causality, and Kant’s
rejection of the thing-in-itself. (The thing-in-itself is a fabrication of that vulgar common sense
with which every true philosopher must be at war.) Nietzsche sought for a ‘life-affirming
skepticism’ which would transcend all the doctrines that stemmed from the ‘herd instinct’, and so
allow the individual to emerge as master, and not as slave, of the experience to which he is
condemned.
1. How did Nietzsche describe the Europe of his time?

2. What is the central focus of Nietzsche’s philosophy?
3. According to this section, what was Nietzsche skeptical about?
3.5 The Two Types of Morality
In Beyond Good and Evil (1886) Nietzsche argued that there are no moral facts, only
different ways of representing the world. Nevertheless one can represent the world in, ways that
express and enhance one’s strength, just as one can represent it under the aspect of an inner
weakness. Clearly it is appropriate for a person to engage in the first of these activities, rather than
the second. Only then will he be in command of his experience and so fulfilled by it. This thought
led Nietzsche to expound again the Aristotelian philosophy of virtue, or excellence, but in a
peculiarly modern form. Like Aristotle, Nietzsche found the aim of life in ‘flourishing’; excellence
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resides in the qualities that contribute to that aim. Nietzsche’s style is of course very different from
Aristotle’s, being poetic and exhortatory (as in the famous pastiche of Old Testament prophecy
entitled Thus Spake Zarathustra (1892)). But there are arguments concealed within his rhetoric,
and they are so Aristotelian as to demand restatement as such.
First, Nietzsche rejects the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as encapsulating a
theological morality inappropriate to an age without religious belief. The word ‘good’ has a clear
sense when contrasted with ‘bad’, where the good and the bad are the good and bad specimens of
humanity. It lacks a clear sense, however, when contrasted with the term ‘evil’. The good specimen
is the one whose power is maintained, and who therefore flourishes. The capacity to flourish
resides not in the ‘good will’ of Kant (whom Nietzsche described as a ‘catastrophic spider’) nor in
the universal aim of the utilitarians. (‘As for happiness, only the Englishman wants that.’) It is to
be found in those dispositions of character which permit the exercise of will: dispositions like
courage, pride and firmness. Such dispositions, which have their place, too, among the Aristotelian
virtues, constitute self-mastery. They also permit the mastery of others, and prevent the great
‘badness’ of self-abasement. One does not arrive at these dispositions by killing the passions—on
the contrary the passions enter into the virtuous character in a constitutive way. The Nietzschean
man is able to ‘will his own desire as a law unto himself.
Nietzsche rejected the notion that there is a universal and absolute system of morality that
everyone must equally obey. According to Nietzsche, all morality is a manifestation of the will to
power. However, it exhibits itself through two kinds of temperaments. One is driven by the will to
power and revels in it, the other is driven by the will to power but attempts to deny this. Christianity
is the supreme example of the latter, dishonest approach. The two main types of morality are what
he calls “master morality” and “slave morality.” Historically, they developed out of literal master–
slave relationships (the Egyptians versus the Jews, or the Romans versus the early Christians, for
example). Despite their historical origins, however, the terms “master” and “slave” actually
represent two ideal types of personalities. For example, even though the proper, nineteenth-century
European socialites were anything but literal slaves, Nietzsche viewed them as living examples of
slave morality.
The term “master morality” refers to the values of psychologically powerful and strong-
willed people. Nietzsche identifies these people as the higher, more noble, aristocratic, or elite
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segment of humanity. These adjectives do not refer to their actual social status, but to their abilities
as creative achievers, whether their accomplishments are in art, politics, philosophy, or war. The
noble types are characterized by a spontaneous overflowing of power. They are moral legislators
or commanders in the sense that they determine their own values and are never at the mercy of the
approval of others. Instead of resting comfortably on social convention, authority, metaphysical
principles, or revelation, the only sanction hey need for their values is the confidence to say,“My
judgment is my judgment” (Nietzsche 43).
For such people “good” refers to whatever leads to self-fulfillment and affirms one’s sense
of personal power. Thus, what they pronounce “good” are such values as nobility, strength,
courage, power, and pride. In contrast, the notion of “bad” is defined relative to their good. They
have no notion of “sin” (for this assumes something higher to which they are subject). Instead,
“bad” designates what is contemptible, common, banal, pathetic, cowardly, timid, petty, and
humble. In short, it is anything that restricts growth or accomplishment, and everything born of
weakness. The antithesis of master morality is slave morality. It is the morality that appeals to
those who are downtrodden, uncertain of themselves, and weak-willed. Lacking the power to be
creatively assertive, they have no values of their own. Their values arise out of a fearful, resentful
reaction to the values of the strong. Since the weak lack the psychological resources of the noble
person, they turn the tables and make the latter’s strengths into vices. In turn, they define “good”
as what makes life easier, safer, and justifies the existence of the weak. Thus, such qualities as
patience, humility, pity, charity, abstinence, modesty, compassion, resignation, and
submissiveness are considered virtuous. Slave morality is a “sour grapes” morality, a way of
getting even. In an aphorism, Nietzsche sums up the hidden motive behind most traditional
morality as “I don’t like him.” - Why? - “I am not equal to him”(Nietzsche 185).
Behind the gentle facade of slave morality really lies a desire for power. For example, these
types comfort themselves with the notion “the meek shall inherit the earth.” We could imagine
Nietzsche replying, “Maybe so, but they will not be creative artists, leaders, philosophers, or even
great lovers.” Moral values are neither true nor false; we can classify them according to whether
they diminish our humanity or enhance it. Despite their mediocrity, however, Nietzsche says that
the slaves have the strength of numbers and through this they have been able to dominate the
culture, leaving the master morality to be lived out by isolated individuals and social outcasts. For
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example, slave morality took root among oppressed people such as the ancient Jews and early
Christians. Motivated by resentment, they made their weakness a virtue and viewed anyone who
was powerful as evil. With the spread of Christianity and the conversion of the Romans under
Constantine, the weak got their revenge and took control. They were so skillful at this that
eventually the strong came to accept the slave morality, and became apologetic and disdainful of
their own powers and excellence.
1. What reason would you offer on why Nietzsche rejected the notion that there is a universal
and absolute system of morality that everyone must equally obey?
2. What is Nietzsche’s perception of man as a moral agent?
3. What are the two types of morality in Nietzsche’s moral theory?
4. What do you understand by the term, master morality?
5. The antithesis of master morality is _____
3.6 The Will to Power
Nietzsche transforms Schopenhauer’s concept of the will to live or will to existence to the
Will to Power. According to him, the world and all that exists in it is nothing but the Will to Power
manifesting itself. Nietzsche does not see the world as an illusion. Nor does the Will to Power exist
in a state of transcendence. Instead, he conceives the world, the universe, as a unity, a process of
becoming; and it is the Will to Power in the sense that this Will is its intelligible character. This
will to power expresses itself everywhere and in everything. However, though Nietzsche argues
the Will to Power is the inner reality of the universe, he argues that this reality exists only in its
manifestations.
Nietzsche's theory of the Will to Power is thus an interpretation of the universe, a way of
looking at it and describing it, rather than a metaphysical doctrine about a reality which lies behind
the visible world and transcends it (Coplestone 407). In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche says
that we are compelled by logical method to inquire whether we can find one principle of
explanation, one fundamental form of causal activity, through which we can unify vital
phenomena. And he finds this principle in the Will to Power. Nietzsche then proceeds to extend
this principle of explanation to the world as a whole. The world as seen from within, the world as
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defined and characterized according to its "intelligible character", would be precisely "Will to
Power" and nothing else.
According to Coplestone (408), Nietzsche's theory of the Will to Power should not be seen
as apriori metaphysical thesis but as a sweeping empirical hypothesis. As Nietzsche envisioned, if
we believe in the causality of the will, a belief which is really belief in causality itself, we must
make the attempt to posit hypothetically the causality of the will as the only form of causality. In
Nietzsche's intention, therefore, the theory of the will to power is an explanatory hypothesis, and
in his projected works, he applied the principle to different classes of phenomena, showing how
they could be unified in terms of this hypothesis.
1. How does Nietzsche conceives of the world?

2. What do you understand by Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power?
3. What role does the theory of will to power play in Nietzsche’s philosophy?
3.7 The Superman
Like Aristotle, Nietzsche did not draw back from the consequences of his anti-theological
stance. Since the aim of the good life is excellence, the moral philosopher must lay before us the
ideal of human excellence. Moral development requires the refining away of what is common,
herdlike, ‘all too human’. Hence this ideal lies, of its nature, outside the reach of the common man.
Moreover the ideal may be (Aristotle), or even ought to be (Nietzsche), repulsive to those whose
weakness of spirit deprives them of sympathy for anything which is not more feeble than
themselves. Aristotle called this ideal creature the ‘great-souled man’ (megalopsuchos); Nietzsche
called it the ‘Übermensch’ (‘Superman’). In each case, pride, self-confidence, disdain for the trivial
and the ineffectual, together with a lofty cheerfulness of outlook and a desire always to dominate
and never to be beholden were regarded as essential attributes of the self-fulfilled man. It is easy
to scoff at this picture, but in each case strong arguments are presented for the view that there is
no coherent view of human nature (other than a theological one) which does not have some such
ideal of excellence as its corollary.
The essence of the ‘new man’ whom Nietzsche thus announced to the world was ‘joyful
wisdom’: the ability to make choices with the whole self, and so not to be at variance with the
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motives of one’s action. The aim is success, not just for this or that desire but for the will which
underlies them (In Nietzsche we find the Schopenhauerian will reemerging as something positive
and individual, with a specific aim: that of personal dominion over the world. Nietzsche’s early
admiration for and subsequent passionate attack on Richard Wagner express the same ambivalent
relationship to Schopenhauer.) This success is essentially the success of the individual. There is
no place in Nietzsche’s picture of the ideal man for pity: pity is nothing more than a morbid
fascination with failure. It is the great weakener of the will, and forms the bond between slaves
which perpetuates their bondage. Nietzsche’s principal complaint against Christianity was that it
had elevated this morbid feeling into a single criterion of virtue; thus it had prepared the way for
the ‘slave’ morality which, being founded in pity, must inevitably reject the available possibilities
of human flourishing.
Nietzsche's notion of the Will to Power is most clearly represented in the attitudes and
behavior of the Superperson. We have already seen that Nietzsche rejected the concept of equality.
He also showed that morality must suit each rank. Even after the revaluation of all values, the
"common herd" will not be intellectually capable of reaching the heights of the "free spirits. In
short, there can be no "common good." Great things, Nietzsche says, remain for the great,
everything rare for the rare. The Superperson will be rare but is the next stage in human evolution.
History is moving not toward some abstract developed "humanity" but toward the emergence of
some exceptional people; the Superman is the goal.
However, Nietzsche maintains that the Superperson will not be the product of a mechanical
process of evolution. The next stage can be reached only when superior people have the courage
to revalue all values and respond with freedom to their internal Will to Power. Human beings need
to be surpassed, and it is the Superman who represents the highest level of development and
expression of physical, intellectual, and emotional strength. The Superman will be the truly free
person for whom nothing is forbidden except what obstructs the Will to Power. The Superman will
be the very embodiment of the spontaneous affirmation of life. Nietzsche did not think that his
Superman would be a tyrant. To be sure, there would be much of the Dionysian element within
the Superman. But these passions would be controlled, thereby harmonizing the animal nature with
the intellect, and giving style to his or her behavior.
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1. Identify some of the characters of the Superman.
2. What is the essence of Nietzsche’s new man (the Superman)?
3. What does the Superman represents?
3.8 The Nature of Knowledge and Truth
In the thought of Nietzsche, knowledge works as an instrument of power. This, therefore,

makes it an obvious fact that it grows with every increase of power . For Nietzsche, The desire of
knowledge, the will to know, depends on the will to power, that is, on a given kind of being's
impulse to master a certain field of reality and to enlist it in its service. The aim of knowledge is
not to know, in the sense of grasping absolute truth for its own sake, but to master. Reality as
Nietzsche sees it, as becoming. For Nietzsche, it is we who turn it into Being, imposing stable
patterns on the flux of Bmbecoming. And this activity is an expression of the Will to Power.
Knowledge, for Nietzsche, is a process of interpretation. However, he sees this process as

being grounded on vital needs and expressing the will to master the otherwise unintelligible flux
of Becoming. And it is a question of reading an interpretation into reality rather than of reading it,
so to speak, off or in reality. For instance, the concept of the ego or self as a permanent substance
is an interpretation imposed upon the flux of Becoming: it is our creation for practical purposes.
To be sure, the idea that 'we' interpret psychical states as similar and attribute them to a permanent
subject involves Nietzsche in obvious and, in the opinion of the present writer, insoluble
difficulties. His general contention is, however, that we cannot legitimately argue from the utility
of an interpretation to its objetivity. For a useful fiction, an interpretation which was devoid of
objectivity in the sense in which believers in absolute truth would understand objectivity, might
be required and thereby justified by our needs.
Nietzsche denies the possibility of any absolute truth. The possibility of absolute truth.
Truth, according to him, is an invention of philosophers who are dissatisfied with the world of
Becoming and seek an abiding world of Being. 'Truth is that sort of error without which a particular
type of living being could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive. Nietzsche believes the
issue of knowledge and truth is obscured by language. In his view, we may be misled by our
language and imagination that our way of speaking about the world necessarily mirrors reality.
Nietzsche says that in our attempts to grasp any idea about reality, we are still being constantly led
astray by words and concepts into thinking things are simpler than they are, as separate from one
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another, indivisible and existing each on its own. According to Nietzsche, a philosophical
mythology lies hidden in language, and it breaks out at every moment, however careful one may
be (Coplestone 410).
Nietzsche sees truth as perspective. According to him, truths' are 'fictions'; all such fictions are
interpretations, and so also our interpretations are based on perspectives. Even every instinct has
its perspective, its point of view, which it endeavours to impose on other instincts. And the
categories of reason are also logical fictions and perspectives, not necessary truths, nor a priori
forms. But the perspectival view of truth admits, of course, of differences. The obvious comment
on Nietzsche's general view of truth is that it presupposes the possibility of occupying an absolute
standpoint from which the relativity of all truth or its fictional character can be asserted, and that
this presupposition is at variance with the relativist interpretation of truth.
1. According to Nietzsche, how does knowledge works?

2. In relationship to other philosophers, how does Nietzsche sees truth?
3. What is his idea of truth?
4. What is knowledge, according to Nietzsche?
3.9 The Dead of God
Nietzsche boldly prophesied that power politics and bloody wars were in store for the future. He
sensed an approaching period of nihilism, the seeds of which had already been sown. He did not
base this either on the military power of Germany or on the unfolding advances of science. Instead,
he was influenced by the incontrovertible fact that belief in the Christian God had drastically
declined to the point where he could confidently say that God is dead.
Although Nietzsche was an atheist, he reflected on the "death" of God with mixed
reactions. He was appalled at the consequences that would follow once everyone became fully
aware of all the implications of the death of God. He thought about both the collapse of religious
faith and the mounting belief in the Darwinian notion of a relentless evolution of the species. He
could see in this combination the destruction of any basic distinction between human and animal.
If this is what we are asked to believe he said, then we should not be surprised when the future
brings us colossal wars such as we have never seen before on earth. At the same time, the death of
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God meant for Nietzsche the dawn of a new day—a day when the essentially life-denying ethics
of Christianity could be replaced with a life-affirming philosophy. For Nietzsche, man has lost his
dignity since he lost faith in God and now has lost faith in himself.
1. What was Nietzsche’s thought on the collapse of religious faith and the mounting belief in
evolution?
2. What did the death of God mean for Nietzsche?
3. What is the implication of the death of God to man?
3.10 Conclusion
Nietzsche began the building of his intellectual personality to complete the circle of nineteenth –
century European skepticism and pessimism. He took a different path to create a name for himself.
Over the years, scholars have assessed him from the perspective of his views which, of course, is
still very relevant in our contemporary society. Though a professed atheist, his thought is more
prophetic than atheistic.
3.11 Summary
In this unit, you have learnt that Nietzsche was a moralist who maintains that there there are two
types of morality. For him, the world and all that exists in it is nothing but the Will to Power
manifesting itself. You have also learnt that reality, for Nietzsche, exist as becoming. Nietzsche
develops a theory of truth as perspective. The highlight of his philosophy is in his announcement
of the dead of God.

Idealists to Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Image Books, 1962
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Vintage Press, 1966
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. In The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. edited
and translated by Ronald Speirs. Cambridge University Press, 1999.
262
Routledge, 1995.
Answers to SAE 1
1. His final years were a time of deep loneliness. Eventually, both his physical and mental
health deteriorated from what appeared to be a neurological disorder.
2. Nietzsche spent his life forecasting the future cultural crises just over the horizon at a time
when most in his century were oblivious to what lay ahead.
Answers to SAE 2
1. Nietzsche described Europe of his time as sick and that which cannot be healed by
prosperity or technology.
2. The central focus of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the individual.
3. Nietzsche remained profoundly skeptical that anything significant remained to the
individual when the veil of appearance had been torn away. He accepted the doctrine that
all description, being conceptual, abstracts from the individuality of what it describes.
Answers to SAE 3
1. Nietzsche rejected the notion that there is a universal and absolute system of morality that
everyone must equally obey because for him, all morality is a manifestation of the will to
power.
2. According to Nietzsche, man is able to ‘will his own desire as a law unto himself.
3. The two types of morality, according to Nietzsche, are the slave morality and the master
morality.
4. The term “master morality” refers to the values of psychologically powerful and strong-
willed people.
5. The antithesis of master morality is slave morality.
Answers to SAE 4
263
1. He conceives the world, the universe, as a unity, a process of becoming; and it is the Will
to Power in the sense that this Will is its intelligible character.
2. Nietzsche's theory of the Will to Power is thus an interpretation of the universe, a way of
looking at it and describing it, rather than a metaphysical doctrine about a reality which
lies behind the visible world and transcends it.
3. The theory of the will to power is an explanatory hypothesis in Nietzsche’s philosophy and
in his projected works, he applied the principle to different classes of phenomena, showing
how they could be unified in terms of this hypothesis.
Answers to SAE 5
1. Pride, self-confidence, disdain for the trivial and the ineffectual, together with a lofty
cheerfulness of outlook and a desire always to dominate and never to be beholden are
regarded as essential attributes of the Superman.
2. The essence of the ‘new man’ whom Nietzsche announced to the world was ‘joyful
wisdom’: the ability to make choices with the whole self, and so not to be at variance with
the motives of one’s action.
3. The Superman represents the very embodiment of the spontaneous affirmation of life.
Answers to SAE 6
1. In the thought of Nietzsche, knowledge works as an instrument of power.

2. Truth, according to him, is an invention of philosophers who are dissatisfied with the world
of Becoming and seek an abiding world of Being.
3. Nietzsche sees truth as perspective.
4. Knowledge, for Nietzsche, is a process of interpretation. However, he sees this process as
being grounded on vital needs and expressing the will to master the otherwise
unintelligible flux of Becoming.
Answers to SAE 7
1. He could see in this combination the destruction of any basic distinction between human
and animal.
264
2. The death of God meant for Nietzsche, the dawn of a new day—a day when the essentially
life-denying ethics of Christianity could be replaced with a life-affirming philosophy. He
also sees it as the death of morality.
3. For Nietzsche, man has lost his dignity since he lost faith in God and now has lost faith in
himself.
Unit 4: John Dewey
Contents
4.1 Introduction
4.3 A Brief Biography of John Dewey
4.4 The Task of Philosophy: Revisiting the History of Thought
4.5 Knowledge as Instrument
4.6 The Quest for Human Rationality
4.7 Relevance of Dewey
4.8 Conclusion
4.9 Summary
4.1 Introduction
Dewey’s philosophy, known as experimentalism, or instrumentalism, largely centered on

human experience. Rejecting the more rigid ideas of transcendentalism as which started from the
ancient epoch, he viewed ideas as tools for experimenting, with the goal of improving the human
265
experience. As one of the influential proponents of pragmatism, his philosophy centres on
knowledge as a useful tool in the society. In what follows, we shall explore his thought.
By the end of this unit, you will be able to:
1. Know Dewey’s idea of what consists the central task of philosophy.

2. Explain Dewey’s notion of knowledge as instrument.
3. Explain his reconstruction of philosophy and
4. Identify the pragmatic element in Dewey’s thought.
4.3 A Brief Biography of John Dewey
John Dewey was Born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1859, Dewey was educated at the
University of Vermont and at Johns Hopkins University; where he received his Ph.D. in
philosophy in 1884. For the next ten years, except for one year when he was at Minnesota, he
taught at the University of Michigan, and for the decade after that at the University of Chicago,
where he gained renown for his pragmatic concepts of education. As director of the Laboratory
School for children at the University of Chicago, he experimented with a more permissive and
creative atmosphere for learning. He set aside the more traditional and formal method of
learning—that isz listening and taking notes—and instead encouraged students to become directly
involved with educational projects. From 1904 to 1929 he was a member of the faculty at Columbia
University. He produced an enormous number of writings even after his retirement in 1929. His
interests covered a wide range, and he wrote on logic, metaphysics, and the theory of knowledge.
But as Dewey's chief expression of pragmatism was in the social rather than individual realm, his
most influential works related to education, democracy, ethics, religion, and art. He died in 1952,
aged 92.
1. Dewey’s chief expression of pragmatism covers _____ realm

2. Mention at least four areas that Dewey’s philosophy related to.
4.4 The Task of Philosophy: Revisiting the History of Thought
266
In beginning his philosophy, Dewey revisits the origin of philosophy with a sense of
dissatisfaction. His chief quarrel with earlier philosophy was that it confused the true nature and
function of knowledge. The reason for this hierarchy was a longing for absolute, immutable
certainty, and the recognition that such certainty could not be found in the domain of action
(Dewey 1929a, 5-6). The identification of what is absolutely certain with what is immutable led
philosophers such as Plato to a metaphysics, a philosophy about reality, in which it was maintained
that only what is fixed, immutable, and unchangeable can be real, and to an epistemology in which
it was argued that certain knowledge “must relate to that which has antecedent existence or
essential being” (Dewey 1929a, 18).
One implication of these assumptions is that true knowledge can only be acquired if the
process of acquiring knowledge does not exert any influence on the object of knowledge (Dewey
1929a, 19). For this reason the process of the acquisition of knowledge was cut off from action
and was understood in terms of visual perception - a theory that Dewey called the “spectator theory
of knowledge” (Dewey 19). He makes the following point: “The notion which has ruled
philosophy ever since the time of the Greeks, is that the office of knowledge is to uncover the
antecedently real, rather than, as is the case with our practical judgments, to gain the kind of
understanding which is necessary to deal with the problems as they arise” (Dewey 14).
Such ideas deepened the gap between theory and practice. According to this view, theory
has to find out how reality is. Although practical action is based on the knowledge provided by
theory, it is completely disconnected from its acquisition. Practice is “a mere external follower
upon knowledge, having no part in its determination. . . . [I]t is supposed to conform to what is
fixed in the antecedent structure of things” (Dewey 58).
One of the interesting aspects of the Greek worldview was an assumption that values were
part of the world. The Greeks assumed, in other words, that reality was purposeful. Everything
strives to become what it has in potential: An acorn strives to become an oak tree; a human being
strives to become rational. This meant that true, objective knowledge about reality would at the
very same time provide guidelines for the direction of human action. It is not too difficult to see
the kind of problems that arose when the mechanical worldview of modern science, the worldview
of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, emerged. Until then, it had been possible to derive aims and
values from the knowledge of reality. But with the emergence of the scientific worldview “science
267
ceased to disclose in the objects of knowledge the possession of any such properties” (Dewey 34).
This led to the question of how the results of the new science could be accepted and the domain of
values maintained (Dewey 33).
Dewey argued that, given the available philosophical framework, there was only one
possible solution-that values had to be relegated to a separate domain. This resulted in the
fundamental distinction between the domain of nature and the domain of values (a distinction still
with us, for example, in the dictum that “the is must be separate from the ought”). In order to
safeguard the domain of values, it further had to be shown that this domain was superior to the
domain of factual knowledge about nature. According to Dewey, this is precisely what Descartes
and Kant tried to do-argue that the possibility of scientific knowledge has its ultimate foundation
in an immaterial human mind (Dewey 33-34). As a result, Dewey wrote, the “opposition and yet
necessary connection of nature and spirit” (Dewey 43) became part of what was conceived to be
the nature of human beings themselves. It resulted in the dualistic worldview of the material and
the spiritual, and in the assumption that the material constitutes “outer” nature, while the spiritual
is the realm of “inner” mind.
Dewey’s main point in his reading of the development of Western philosophy was to make
clear that the distinction between mind and matter, between the subjective and the objective, and
between facts and values is not the inevitable or necessary point of departure for all philosophy. It
rather was a particular solution that the inaugurators of modern philosophy came up with to tackle
the problem of accepting the conclusions of modern science while at the same time maintaining
the realm of values. What Dewey’s reconstruction also makes clear is that this problem was, in a
sense, an artificial problem from the very start, since it was the product of assumptions inherited
from Greek philosophy (Dewey 34). When, against this background, Dewey looks favourably at
modern science, it is to emphasize that modern science has not only given us a different view about
reality, but that this view has been brought about by an approach-the experimental method-in
which the division between knowing and acting has completely disappeared (Dewey 80). In
practice, modern science was therefore from its very inception already in contradiction with the
spectator theory of knowledge.
1. How did Dewey revisits the origin of philosophy?
268
2. According to Dewey, what is the notion that has ruled philosophy since the time of the
Greeks?
3. Mention one of the interesting aspect of the Greeks worldview as you have learnt in this
section.
4. What is Dewey’s conception of modern science in practice?
4.5 Knowledge as Instrument
According to Dewey, what constitutes our brute experience is the interaction between a
biological organism and its environment. Experience is not an object known but, rather, an action
performed. In the course of the organism’s activities, it encounters situations in which it can no
longer act. Thinking arises as a means of dealing with these disturbing situations by working out
hypotheses, or guides to future actions. The merits of these intellectual acts are determined by a
practical criterion, by whether the organism can now function satisfactorily again. Thought,
especially scientific thought, is instrumental in problem solving. The occurrence of problems sets
off a chain reaction of mental activity directed toward discovering a functional solution to the
difficulties that confront the organism.
Much of earlier philosophizing, Dewey claimed, is actually a hindrance to the task of

problem solving. In separating theorizing from practical concerns, and searching for absolute
solutions to philosophical questions, philosophers have got away almost completely from the
human needs that give rise to thought, and have also tried rigidly to impose certain preconceived
schemes upon human thought, and have refused to allow any new beliefs and new solutions in
human affairs. What is needed nowadays, Dewey insisted, is a reconstruction of philosophy in
terms of the problems that now confront us. In this role, philosophy will no longer be an abstruse
subject, of little or no value in the immediate concerns of the day, but will, instead, be the overall
directive force in developing new instrumental techniques for assisting the human organism in its
struggles with its environment, and in building a better world in which some of the problems now
confronting us will gradually be resolved.
Dewey called his theory of knowledge “instrumentalism,” to distinguish it from the other
versions of pragmatism. The term captures Dewey’s emphasis that ideas are tools for solving
problems and for shaping our environment to our ends. Throughout his works he battled the
spectator view of knowledge, which presents the mind as a closed room detached from the world,
269
containing ideas the way a museum contains pictures. This image of the mind and its contents
existing in isolation from the external world led philosophers such as Descartes to wonder whether
these pictures (ideas) correctly represented what was outside or even whether anything was outside
the mind at all (Lawhead 504). According to Dewey, the Cartesian kind of account completely
misconstrues our situation. In the historical evolution of the species as well as in a person’s
development from infancy to adulthood, our cognitive skills develop in response to a world that
makes demands on us. Hence, when we begin to reason we do so as biological organisms that have
already wrestled with our environment (Lawhead 504).
Dewey characterized knowledge as the mode of experience that supports action. Knowing
has to do with the relationship between our actions and their consequences. It is because of this
that knowledge can help us to get a better control over our actions, at least better than in the case
of blind trial and error. “Where there is the possibility of control,” Dewey wrote, “knowledge is
the sole agency of its realization” (Dewy 29). “Control” here does not mean complete mastery, but
the ability to intelligently plan and direct our actions and their likely consequences. This ability is
first of all important in those situations in which we are not sure how to act-which is expressed in
one of Dewey’s descriptions of knowing as having to do with “the transformation of disturbed and
unsettled situations into those more controlled and more significant” (Dewey 236).
Dewey typically explains the idea of knowledge in terms of the notion of warranted
assertibility. This notion captures Dewey’s conviction that there is no final end of inquiry where
our ideas will be perfectly adequate and immune from the need for revision.Whether our
knowledge is complete or adequate is always a relative matter. Dewey’s understanding of
experience and action provides us with all the main elements of Dewey’s theory of knowledge.
Dewey’s view of knowledge is about reflection and action, and about the reflective transformation
of experience understood as transactional. Education for him, therefore, is an instrument through
which we gain knowledge to direct our live.
1. What constitutes our brute experience, according to Dewey?

2. What is Dewey’s view on the claims of much of earlier philosophizing?
3. Describes Dewey’s characterization of knowledge.
4. What do you understand by Dewey’s notion of warranted assertibility?
270
4.6 The Quest for Human Rationality
Dewey argued that the crisis in culture-which is a crisis of rationality was an effect of the
way in which the mechanistic worldview of modem science was interpreted, namely, as an account
of what reality “really” is. It is this specific interpretation that has brought about the crisis of
rationality, the situation of the two equally unattractive options of inhuman rationality and human
irrationality. Dewey’s reconstruction of the development of Western philosophy shows that this
problem was caused by the fact that the findings of modem science were mistakenly characterized
in terms of philosophical categories and dualities that were developed long before the emergence
of modem science, in a completely different context and for totally different purposes (Biesta and
Burbules 22).
When modern science gained prominence, there were, in principle, two options for
philosophy. The one that was chosen was to use the existing philosophical framework to make
sense of the findings of modern science. This created the problem of how these findings could be
accepted while still maintaining the realm of values. The attempt to solve this problem eventually
led to the dualistic assumptions that lie at the basis of modern philosophy. Dewey’s reconstruction
makes clear, however, that these assumptions are just one possible answer to the problems that
arose with the emergence of modem science. Dewey’s reconstruction suggests that there is another
option. Instead of using the Greek framework to interpret the emergence of modern science,
philosophers could also have asked what would follow if we would amend our understanding of
knowledge and reality according to the findings and methods of modern science itself- which
Dewey believed demonstrated the inseparability of knowledge and action, fact and value. But, to
repeat in conclusion, his reason for exploring this road was not simply to come up with a more
adequate theory of knowledge, but to overcome the dilemma of inhuman rationality versus human
irrationality (Biesta and Burbules, 92). This is a quest, in other words, for a new and different
understanding of human rationality, a theme that ultimately motivates all of Dewey’s writings.
1. What is Dewey’s argument against cultural crisis?

2. According to Dewey, what were the two options for philosophy when modern science
gained prominence?
271
4.7 Relevance of Dewey
Dewey’s philosophy is attractive because of its power to illuminate all areas of human
experience. For example, Dewey’s perspective has had an enormous influence on American
education. In his day, education consisted of the rote memorization of a mass of factual information
and historical classics. Dewey, however, says the goal of education should be to help students
develop effective problem-solving methods and skills for social interaction. Hence, the emphasis
is on process and not content, on learning by doing. With Socrates, Dewey says that the role of the
teacher is not to provide information but to bring the students to the point of discovering truths for
themselves.
Dewey’s pragmatism also has many implications for social philosophy. With Peirce, he
believes inquiry cannot be an individual, subjective project, but will succeed most as a community
effort. Science can only succeed in the context of free communication, free action, and mutual
dialogue that includes as many points of view as possible. Thus this sort of structure will be valued
in a society founded on scientific principles in the broadest sense. Accordingly, Dewey gives a
pragmatic defense of the American ideal of a democracy dominated by the values of freedom,
participation, and inclusiveness. Furthermore, the biological, organic model that guides all his
thought implies that the health of the whole organism is a function of the health of its parts. Hence,
his educational philosophy supports his social philosophy, for society has the need as well as the
responsibility to help each member become an effective decision maker in a changing world.
1. What makes Dewey’s philosophy attractive?

2. What should be the goal of education according to Dewey?
3. What is the implication of his thought to social philosophy
4.8 Conclusion
In this unit, we have discussed the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey. In his pragmatic thought,
knowledge is an instrument for solving problems. In his system, there is nothing like final end in
life.
4.9. Summary
272
In this unit, you have learnt that John Dewey’s philosophy is called instrumentalism. Dewey was
dissatisfied with Greek philosophy on the ground that these scholars confused the true nature and
function of knowledge. His theory of instrumentalism sees knowledge/education as an instrument
for solving problems. Dewey characterized knowledge as the mode of experience that supports
action. His philosophy is distinguished by his conviction that there is no final end of inquiry where
our ideas will be perfectly adequate and immune from the need for revision.
Dewey, John. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1938.
Biesta, Gert and Burbules, Nicholas. Pragmatism and Educational Research. Rowman and
Littlefield Publishers, 2003.
Routledge, 1995.
Answers to SAE 1
1. Social
2. his most influential works related to education, democracy, ethics, religion, and art.
Answers to SAE 2
1. Dewey revisits the origin of philosophy with a sense of dissatisfaction.

2. According to Dewey, the notion which has ruled philosophy ever since the time of the
Greeks, is that the office of knowledge is to uncover the antecedently real, rather than, as
is the case with our practical judgments, to gain the kind of understanding which is
necessary to deal with the problems as they arise.
273
3. One of the interesting aspects of the Greek worldview was an assumption that values were
part of the world. The Greeks assumed, in other words, that reality was purposeful.
4. In practice, modern science was from its very inception, already in contradiction with the
spectator theory of knowledge.
Answers to SAE 3
1. According to Dewey, what constitutes our brute experience is the interaction between a
biological organism and its environment.
2. Much of earlier philosophizing, according to Dewey, is actually a hindrance to the task of
problem solving.
3. Dewey characterized knowledge as the mode of experience that supports action.
4. The notion of warranted assertibility captures Dewey’s conviction that there is no final end
of inquiry where our ideas will be perfectly adequate and immune from the need for
revision.
Answers to SAE 4
1. Dewey argued that the crisis in culture is a crisis of rationality and it is an effect of a
mechanistic worldview.
2. They options available for philosophy were: (a) to use the existing philosophical
framework to make sense of the findings of modern science and (b) instead of using the
Greek framework to interpret the emergence of modern science, philosophers could also
ask what would follow if we would amend our understanding of knowledge and reality
according to the findings and methods of modern science itself.
Answers to SAE 5
1. Dewey’s philosophy is attractive because of its power to illuminate all areas of human
experience.
2. According to Dewey, the goal of education should be to help students develop effective
problem-solving methods and skills for social interaction.
3. The relevance of his thought to social philosophy can be seen in his believe that inquiry
cannot be an individual, subjective project, but will succeed most as a community effort.
274

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NATIONAL OPEN UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA

COURSE TITLE: LATE MODERN PHILOSOPHY

© 2020 by NOUN Press

PHL 442: LATE MODERN PHILOSOPHY

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NATIONAL OPEN UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA (NOUN)

Course Guide for PHL442 – Late Modern Philosophy

Working Through this Course

Unit 1 Mary Wollstonecraft

Unit 1 Soren Kierkegaard

For the Synchronous:

1.2 Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

1.3 Recap of the Early Modern Period

1.3.1 The Renaissance

1.3.2 The Reformation

1.3.3 The Rise of Modern Science

1.3.4. Social and Political Changes

1.3.5 The Copernican Revolution

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) was a Catholic, Polish clergyman, and scientist of

Self Assessment Exercise 1

1.6 References/Further Readings

1.6 Possible Answers to SAE

Module 1: Unit 2: Background to Late Modern Philosophy

2.2 Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

2.3 Background to late modern thought

2.4 General Character of the Late Modern Period

2.4.1 The Influence of Immanuel Kant

2.4.2 The Rise of German Idealism

2.4.3 The Rise of German Idealism

2.4.4 Emergence of Interest in the Discipline of History

2.4.5 The Development in Evolution Theory

2.4.6 The Thesis of Historicism

2.4.7 The Notion of Human Progress

2.5 Questions About Reason and Subjectivity

2.8 References/Further Readings

2.9 Possible Answers to SAEs

2.2 Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

At the end of this unit, you will learn:

1. The influence of Kant in ushering in the late modern period

2.3 Background to late modern thought

Self Assessment Exercise 1

3.4 General Character of the Late Modern Period

2.4.1 The Influence of Immanuel Kant

2.4.2 The Rise of German Idealism

2.4.3 Romanticism Movement

2.4.4 Emergence of Interest in the Discipline of History

2.4.5 The Development in Evolution Theory

2.4.7 The Notion of Human Progress

2.5 Questions About Reason and Subjectivity

Self Assessment Exercise 2

1. Who argued against the relevance of our knowledge of the world?

2.9 Possible Answers to SAEs

Module 1: Unit 3: Immanuel Kant: The Critical Philosophy

3.2 Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

3.3 A Brief Biography of Immanuel Kant

3.3 The Critical Philosophy: The Nature of Knowledge

3.5 Kant’s Copernican Revolution

3.6 Noumena and Phenomena

3.7 Kant on Space and Time

1. Kant was on _ and died on _