4.4 Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer
Last modified 05/26/2008
| Our confusion over the seeming contradiction of secularism and religion has, as we have suggested, already been resolved at least in principle by the already classic ruminations of the phase of the Enlightenment we call German classical philosophy. This sudden apparition just at the Great Divide as a chord of prodigious emergentism in our putative 'second Axial Age' (actually the third, or fourth, or fifth...) echoes the mysterious contradictions that seem to beset any effort to produce a core interpretation of the Axial Age. We see that the philosophers of this movement unwittingly reproduce the classic dialectic and show the way to its resolution. It is interesting that the period of German classical philosophy, lasting little more than a generation splits once again from Kant into the thinking of Hegel and Schopenhauer, one to process the Christian thematic into a higher abstraction, the other to virtually reinvent Buddhism on the spot. Here we see that the core of the material/spiritual dualism resolves into the brilliantly innovative foundation of so-called transcendental idealism (neither transcendental nor an idealism). This philosophy in many ways reinvents the world of the Upanishads for modern scientific culture. | ||
|
|
||
|
|
||