Electrifying when first delivered in 1973, legendary in the years since, Dieter Henrich's lectures on German Idealism were the first contact a major German philosopher had made with an American audience since the onset of World War II. They remain one of the most eloquent explanations and interpretations of classical German philosophy and of the way it relates to the concerns of contemporary philosophy. Thanks to the editorial work of David Pacini, the lectures appear here with annotations linking them to editions of the masterworks of German philosophy as they are now available.

Henrich describes the movement that led from Kant to Hegel, beginning with an interpretation of the structure and tensions of Kant's system. He locates the Kantian movement and revival of Spinoza, as sketched by F. H. Jacobi, in the intellectual conditions of the time and in the philosophical motivations of modern thought. Providing extensive analysis of the various versions of Fichte's Science of Knowledge, Henrich brings into view a constellation of problems that illuminate the accomplishments of the founders of Romanticism, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, and of the poet Hölderlin's original philosophy. He concludes with an interpretation of the basic design of Hegel's system.

Review

“Belong[s] in the library of every serious student of German idealism. With this volume, Henrich has made a sophisticated, original, and altogether welcome contribution to the interpretation of philosophy between Kant and Hegel.”―Daniel Breazeale, Journal of the History of Philosophy

“Dieter Henrich’s Between Kant and Hegel is one of those rare scholarly works by which others are, and will be, judged, just as Henrich’s scholarship more generally provides a standard by which others in the area of German Idealism have been judged for no less than thirty years.”―Garth W. Green, Review of Metaphysics

“These are excellent lectures and make a valuable and exciting book. Henrich certainly gives a better introduction to the philosophizing that took place between Kant and Hegel than any other that I know of. He wants to show that the positions of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel each represent an option that is still open for live philosophical debate. Can there be a single-track systematic philosophy encompassing nature as well as mind? Dieter Henrich shows how this develops into a wide-ranging problem, allowing both for criticism of Kant and for constructive moves made after the criticisms are taken into account. He thus tries to show us argumentative steps by which one might proceed from a Kantian position to a Fichtean and then on to an Hegelian view. These lectures were given in 1973. Much has been done in English on Hegel since then, but relatively little on the ‘between’ period which Dieter Henrich addresses. This is not an ordinary textbook. It’s very much infused with Dieter Henrich’s own philosophical views. The topics and people Dieter Henrich discusses he really illuminates, both in terms of the historical context and in terms of the soundness or lack of it of the philosophy he is discussing. He is himself deeply inside that tradition, yet knows enough about the work of those outside it to make quite comprehensible to the outsiders what it’s like on the inside.”―J. B. Schneewind, Professor of Philosophy, Johns Hopkins University

Table of Contents

I. THE SYSTEMATIC STRUCTURE OF KANT’S PHILOSOPHY

2 Internal Experience and Philosophical Theory

3 Sensation, Cognition, and the “Riddle of Metaphysics”

4 Freedom as the “Keystone” to the Vault of Reason

II. KANT’S EARLY CRITICS

5 The Allure of “Mysticism” 65

6 Jacobi and the “Spinozism of Freedom”

7 Jacobi and the Philosophy of Immediacy

8 Reinhold and the Systematic Spirit

9 Reinhold and “Elementary Philosophy”

10 Schulze and Post-Kantian Skepticism

III. FICHTE

11 The Aenesidemus Review

12 “Own Meditations on Elementary Philosophy,” I

13 “Own Meditations on Elementary Philosophy,” II

14 The Science of Knowledge (1794–1795)

15 Theories of Imagination and Longing and Their Impact on Schlegel, Novalis, and Hölderlin

16 Foundation and System in The Science of Knowledge

17 The Paradoxical Character of the Self-Relatedness of Consciousness

18 The Turn to Speculative Theology

IV. HÖLDERLIN

19 The Place of Hölderlin’s “Judgment and Being”

V. HEGEL

20 The Way to the Fifth Philosophy (The Science of Logic)

21 The Logic of Negation and Its Application

About the Authors

Dieter Henrich is Professor Emeritus at the University of Munich and the author of dozens of books and articles.

David S. Pacini is Associate Professor of Historical Theology, Candler School of Theology, Emory University, and the author of The Cunning of Modern Religious Thought.