/lit/ - Literature

According to Schopenhauer, Kant's original philosophy, with its refutation of all speculative theology, had been transformed by the German Idealists. Through the use of his technical terms, such as "transcendental," "transcendent," "reason," "intelligibility," and "thing-in-itself" they attempted to speak of what exists beyond experience and, in this way, to revive the notions of God, free will, and immortality of soul. Kant had effectively relegated these ineffable notions to faith and belief.

I don't think spinozas philosophy involved change. Wasn't everything in his monism just another mode of his single substance? Hegels philosophy reality itself changing over time.

Schopenhauer isn't alone in recognizing the debt that the post-Kantians owe to Spinoza; in fact, many of them are quite explicit about this. Hegel gets it mostly second hand through Fichte and Schelling, but even he acknowledges the importance of Spinoza (going so far as to write this: "It is therefore worthy of note that thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spinozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy").

Nonetheless, Schopenhauer overstates the case, largely due to his dislike of other post-Kantian philosophers, whose achievements and originality he regularly dismisses or downplays.

If you want a more cautious and scholarly assessment of similarities between Spinoza and German Idealism, you could read some of Beiser's work on 19th century German philosophy.

>>7071346
Schopy is right in a few aspects, here. Spinoza's philosophy had an immense effect on the German idealists and his influence is easily traced in the works of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. I wrote a pretty lengthy thesis on the relationship between Fichte and Spinoza and how Fichte's notion of abstraction of experience can be teased out of part five of Spinoza's Ethics. The same can be done for various 'original ideas' of Kant and Hegel, though they certainly tweak Spinoza in a way. However, that isn't to say that all their ideas are merely distorting Spinoza, I disagree with Schopy here. For instance, >>7071388 is correct in that in Spinoza's philosophy everything is merely a mode of a singular substance and reality is fixed. Furthermore, both Hegel and Kant work to allow some free-will whereas Spinoza seems to be blatantly against such an idea (although, and this is a controversial stance, I would say that part Five of the Ethics does allow for a minute bit of free-will).

Bump

>>7071346

Spinoza made sense, a great man of ethics, while Hegel actively tried to obfuscate.

>>7072206
>Hegel actively tried to obfuscate

That's not been my experience of reading Hegel. I know that's a pretty common criticism of his work, but why do -you- think that's the case?