Continental philosophy

European thought

Continental philosophy, series of Western philosophical schools and movements associated primarily with the countries of the western European continent, especially Germany and France. The term continental philosophy was adopted by professional philosophers in England after World War II to describe the various schools and movements then prominent in continental Europe and to distinguish them from a set of loosely related approaches, commonly known as analytic philosophy, that had been prevalent from the early 20th century in England and later in the United States and other English-speaking countries.

German idealism and the defense of reason

Hume, David [Credit: Courtesy of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery]Hume, DavidCourtesy of the Scottish National Portrait GalleryModern continental philosophy emerged in response to the skeptical challenges posed by the philosophies of the British empiricists, especially George Berkeley (1685–1753) and David Hume (1711–76). Berkeley argued ingeniously that esse est percipi (aut percipere), “to be is to be perceived (or to perceive)”—everything real is either an idea or a mind (see idealism). Hume, in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), rejected the reality of cause and effect as ordinarily conceived, arguing that belief in particular causal connections could not be justified rationally but could be explained psychologically as the product of mere “habit” and the “association of ideas.” In so doing he potentially undermined the rational foundations not only of beliefs about things not immediately present in space or time but of all scientific knowledge (see induction, problem of). Both philosophers questioned the commonplace assumptions that there is a “reality” distinct from the ideas or perceptions given in experience and that it is within the power of human reason to discern that reality’s true nature. The forceful skepticism to which they contributed, which became one of the most powerful philosophical currents of the Enlightenment, treated the scope of human knowledge as severely limited and the powers traditionally attributed to human reason—especially during the era of great metaphysical system building in the 17th century—as little more than dogmatic pretensions.

The philosophy of German idealism arose to challenge the Enlightenment’s skeptical, materialist, empiricist, and antimetaphysical worldview. German idealist philosophers sought thereby to restore reason to its former preeminence and grandeur as the universal tool through which human understanding of reality is possible.


Kant, Immanuel [Credit: Marburg—Art Reference Bureau/Art Resource, New York]Kant, ImmanuelMarburg—Art Reference Bureau/Art Resource, New YorkHume’s skepticism was the explicit point of departure for the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who acknowledged that it was Hume who had awakened him from his “dogmatic slumber.” Although Kant’s subsequent “critical” philosophy emphasized the limitations of human reason, it did so in a manner that ultimately vindicated the claims to knowledge that more-traditional philosophers had made on its behalf.

Following the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650), Kant insisted that any investigation of the scope of human knowledge must begin with an examination of the cognitive faculties through which it is acquired. This general approach became characteristic of later German idealism and has exerted an enormous influence on continental philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787), Kant presciently observed that “the critical path alone is open,” meaning that any approach to the problem of knowledge that failed to respect the limitations that he had laid down risked falling into the metaphysical dogmatism of old.

The problem of knowledge, according to Kant, is to explain how some judgments about the world can be necessarily true and therefore knowable “a priori,” or independently of experience (see a posteriori knowledge). Until Kant’s time, all empirical judgments were regarded as vulnerable to skeptical doubt, because human experience is inherently fallible. On the other hand, all a priori judgments, such as “All bachelors are unmarried,” were regarded as empty of content, because they did not present any information that was not already contained in the concepts with which they were composed (being unmarried is part of what it is to be a bachelor). If human knowledge of the world was to be possible, therefore, there would have to be judgments that were both empirical and a priori.

The genius and originality of Kant’s philosophy lay in the means by which he made room for such judgments. In what he described, in the preface to the second edition (1787) of the Critique of Pure Reason, as his “Copernican” revolution, he proposed that knowledge should not depend on the conformity of a judgment to an object in experience; rather, the existence of an object in experience should depend on its conformity to human knowledge.

Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. But all attempts to extend our knowledge of objects by establishing something in regard to them a priori, by means of concepts, have, on this assumption, ended in failure. We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge.

That is to say, a thing can be an “object of possible experience” for human beings only if it conforms to human knowledge in certain respects. This is because the faculty of intuition—which receives the appearances (“phenomena”) of experience—is structured by the concepts of space and time, and because the faculty of understanding—which orders the phenomena received through intuition—is structured by concepts grouped under the general headings of quantity, quality, relation, and modality. The fact that space and time are forms of possible experience, rather than generalizations derived from experience, explains how the judgments of geometry, for example, can be both empirical (about experience) and knowable a priori. Similarly, a judgment such as “Every event has a cause,” is both empirical and a priori, because causality (under the heading “relation”) is one of the concepts imposed on experience by the understanding, not a generalization derived by the understanding from experience.

Behind the phenomena of experience, according to Kant, there is a realm of “noumena,” e.g., “things in themselves,” that is in principle unknowable. The mistake of traditional philosophers had been to assume that reason could use a priori principles to derive metaphysical knowledge of things outside or beyond any possible experience. In this respect the skeptical philosophers had been right to criticize the traditional proofs of the existence of God or of the immortality of the soul as so much empty dogmatism.

Not surprisingly, neither of Kant’s chief philosophical antagonists was satisfied with the new critical philosophy. For the skeptics, Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena was redolent of earlier metaphysics. If knowledge of the noumenal realm is impossible, on what basis could Kant claim that it exists? Why refer to it at all? For the dogmatists, conversely, Kant’s supposed defense of the powers of reason ceded far too much ground to the antimetaphysical camp.

Kant’s moral philosophy, as elaborated in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), also proved extremely influential. In these works his central concern was human freedom, or the autonomy of the will, just as the autonomy of reason had been the focus of the first critique (see free will). The immediate problem for Kant was to reconcile the idea of freedom with the evident causal determinism operative in the phenomenal world, a determinism that the first critique itself had endorsed.

Against the champions of determinism, Kant insisted on the autonomous capacities of the human will: by universalizing one’s maxims (or reasons) for action in accordance with the categorical imperative—“Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”—one acts freely, or autonomously. By following universal imperatives, the will escapes the contingencies and determinism of the phenomenal or empirical realm. Thereby, its actions obtain an ethical dignity or moral purity that approximates the sublimity of what Kant called the “kingdom of ends”: a noumenal realm of pure morality, unaffected by the vagaries of experience. In Kant’s ethical theory, the kingdom of ends possesses the sublimity of an idea of pure reason, inasmuch as it is free of empirical taint. Kant’s formula for autonomy is thus opposed to utilitarianism, the view that actions are right or wrong by virtue of their consequences. Whereas utilitarian moral theories suggest that morally right actions are properly motivated by desires or interests—e.g., to maximize consequences that are good, such as pleasure or happiness—Kant’s brand of moral rigorism is predicated on reason alone.

Yet, Kant openly admitted that, according to the letter of his approach, human freedom possesses a merely “formal” or “noumenal” character. Once one tries to act freely in a phenomenal world dominated by the principle of causality, or to act morally in a world in which human action is always motivated by interests, “rational” or “free” outcomes cannot be guaranteed. Thus, Kant’s practical philosophy is beset by the antinomy (contradiction) between freedom and necessity: human beings are inwardly free but outwardly subject to the laws of causality. This Pyrrhic vindication of freedom left many of Kant’s heirs dissatisfied and striving vigorously to transcend the oppositions and limitations his philosophy had bequeathed.


One such successor was the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). Taking Kant’s second critique as his starting point, Fichte declared that all being is posited by the ego, which posits itself. As Fichte states in The Science of Ethics as Based on the Science of Knowledge (1794), “That whose being (essence) consists merely in the fact that it posits itself as existent is the ego as absolute subject. As it posits itself, so it is; and as it is, so it posits itself.” In Fichte’s view, if the ego is in reality the basis of all experience, then it qualifies as “unconditioned”: it is free of empirical taint; it is no longer subject to the limitations of causality emanating from the external world. In this way, Kant’s antithesis or opposition between the noumenal and phenomenal realms disappears.

Fichte gave a practical or voluntarist cast to the formula cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), which Descartes had proposed as the bedrock of certainty on which the edifice of human knowledge could be constructed. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) would remark, in a Fichtean spirit, in Faust (1808): “In the beginning was the deed.” However, on the whole Fichte’s heirs remained unsatisfied with his voluntaristic resolution of the tension between subject and object, will and experience. They perceived his claims as little more than an abstract declaration rather than a substantive resolution or authentic working through of the problem. Subsequent thinkers also wondered whether his elevation of the subject to the position of an absolute did not result in an impoverishment of experience.


Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich [Credit: Deutsche Fotothek, Dresden]Hegel, Georg Wilhelm FriedrichDeutsche Fotothek, DresdenKant’s most important successor, G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), attempted to transcend systematically all the antinomies of Kantian thought—noumenon and phenomenon, freedom and necessity, subject and object. Whereas Kant had claimed that humans could aspire only to knowledge of phenomena, Hegel set out to prove that, as in the metaphysics of old, reason was in fact capable of an “absolute knowledge” that penetrated into essences, or things-in-themselves. For Kant the ideas of pure reason possessed merely a noumenal status: they could serve as regulative ideals for human thought or achievement, yet, insofar as they transcended the bounds of experience, they could never be verified or redeemed by the understanding.

In Hegel’s thought the limitations to knowledge repeatedly stressed by Kant had become nothing less than a scandal to Reason. As Hegel declared polemically in the Science of Logic (1812; 1816): “The Kantian philosophy becomes a pillow for intellectual sloth, which soothes itself with the idea that everything has been already proved and done with.” Hegel’s major works, including, in addition to the Science of Logic, the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and the Philosophy of Right (1821), all contain detailed and powerful rejoinders to Kantian conceptions of knowledge, truth, and freedom.

For Hegel the challenge was to articulate a philosophy that went beyond Kant without regressing behind him, without relapsing into dogmatic metaphysics. In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel undertook a genuinely novel approach to the problem of knowledge, tracing the immanent movement of the “shapes of consciousness”—the different historical conceptions of knowledge—from “sense certainty” through “perception,” “force,” “consciousness,” “self-consciousness,” “reason,” “spirit,” and finally “absolute knowing.” At the final stage, “otherness” has been eliminated, and consciousness has reached the plane of unconditional truth. At this point a conception of knowledge is obtained—which Hegel called the Begriff, or idea—that is free of the aforementioned Kantian oppositions and thus suitable for producing a “first philosophy”: a doctrine of essences that accurately captures the rational structure of reality. No longer limited, as with Kant, to knowledge of appearances, consciousness is at last able to obtain genuine knowledge of the way things truly are.

Announcing his philosophical program in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel declared that “substance must become subject.” This terse formula characterized one of his main philosophical goals: to reconcile classical and modern philosophy. In Hegel’s view, Greek philosophy had attained an adequate notion of substance yet for historical reasons had fallen short of the modern concept of subjectivity. Conversely, modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, appreciated the value of subjectivity as a philosophical starting point but failed to develop an adequate notion of objective truth. Hegel’s philosophy sought to combine the virtues of both approaches by linking ontology (the philosophical study of being, or existence) and epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge).

At the same time, Hegel believed that by embracing subjectivity Kant and other modern philosophers had prematurely abandoned the claims of ontology. By making truth inordinately dependent on the standpoint of the knowing subject, they failed to give “essence,” or the intrinsic nature of objective reality, its due. Consequently, their philosophies were tainted by “subjectivism.” In Kant’s case, this defect was evident not only in his conclusion that phenomena are the only possible objects of knowledge but also in the solipsistic implications of his moral doctrine, which posited mutually isolated subjects who formulate universal laws valid for all moral agents. The Kantian moral subject, which prized autonomy above all else, radically devalued habit, custom, and tradition—what Hegel described as substantial ethical life, or Sittlichkeit. In Hegel’s view, these modern approaches placed a burden on the idea of subjectivity that was more than the concept could bear. In this regard as well, Hegel sought a compromise between modernity’s extreme devaluation of tradition and the elements of rootedness and continuity that it could provide, thereby preventing the autonomous subject from spinning out of control as it were.

Hegel thought that he discerned the disastrous consequences of such willfulness in the rise of bourgeois society—which he perceived, following Thomas Hobbes, as a competitive “war of all against all”—and in the despotic outcome of the French Revolution. Because bourgeois society, whose doctrine of “rights” had elevated the modern subject to a virtual absolute, gave unfettered rein to individual liberty, it invited anarchy, with tyranny as the only stopgap. Hegel held Kant’s philosophy to be the consummate expression of this modern standpoint, with all its debilities and risks. Consequently, in his political philosophy Hegel argued that substantial ethical life resided in the state. In his view, the state alone was capable of reconciling the antagonisms and contradictions of bourgeois society. The quietistic (if not reactionary) implications of his political thought were epitomized by his famous declaration in the Philosophy of Right that “what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.”

Moreover, it became increasingly difficult for Hegel’s followers to defend his later philosophy against the charge of having regressed to a pre-Kantian metaphysical dogmatism. In the Science of Logic, Hegel presumptuously claimed that his treatise contained “the thoughts of God before He created the world.” Later critics would strongly object to his “pan-logism”—his a priori assumption that the categories of reason necessarily underlay the whole of reality, or being. Although Hegel optimistically proclaimed that history demonstrated “progress in the consciousness of freedom,” his doctrine of the “cunning of reason”— according to which the aims of the World Spirit are willy-nilly realized behind the backs of individual actors—appeared to justify misery and injustice in the world as part of a larger plan visible only to Hegel himself (see evil, problem of). “History,” he observed unapologetically, is “the slaughter-bench on which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed.”


Following Hegel’s death in 1831, disenchantment with his philosophy, as well as with the speculative orientation of German philosophy as a whole, was rapid and widespread. F.W.J. Schelling (1775–1854), Hegel’s successor at the University of Berlin, emphatically rejected the idea that reason was capable of grasping reality. He insisted that thought and being belonged to two entirely separate ontological categories. In the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), an early work that was profoundly influenced by Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) as well as by the aesthetic writings of Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), Schelling recommended that philosophy “flow back…into the universal ocean of poetry.” He simultaneously prophesied the advent of “a new mythology…which shall be the creation, not of some individual author, but of a new race.” Schelling’s summons, and his insistence on the superiority of the aesthetic faculty to cognition or intellection, found a sympathetic reception among his German romantic contemporaries. In Schelling’s view, knowledge could not be obtained by recourse to logic. Instead, it was an affair of a quasi-mystical “intellectual intuition”—only thereby could one grasp the absolute, or the ultimate reality of things, as the primordial “one” or “world-soul.” The retreat from reason was in full swing.

The retreat from reason


Kierkegaard, Søren [Credit: Courtesy of the Royal Danish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Copenhagen]Kierkegaard, SørenCourtesy of the Royal Danish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, CopenhagenA young Dane named Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) attended Schelling’s lectures during the 1830s. He was soon disappointed by what he considered the residual Hegelianism of Schelling’s absolute idealism. For Kierkegaard, speculative philosophy remained at odds with the demands of “existence”—the particular qualities and requirements of an individual life. It was this dimension of individuality, Kierkegaard argued, that remained alien to the generalizing character of abstract thought. Kierkegaard found Hegel’s influence in particular to be baneful and irresponsible; it seemed characteristic of German idealism in its Hegelian form to care more about perfecting lifeless and convoluted ideational systems than about the details of human existence. Renouncing the metaphysical quest for certainty or Hegelian absolute knowledge, Kierkegaard became a self-avowed advocate of subjectivity. As he remarked in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846)—whose very title is a jibe at the Hegelian ideal of philosophy as science—“The task of the subjective thinker is to transform himself into that which clearly and definitely expresses in existence whatever is essentially human.”

Kierkegaard frequently wrote pseudonymously and ironically, self-consciously adopted a literary rather than a scientific idiom, and, in works such as Attack upon Christendom (1854–55), mercilessly indicted his contemporaries for their faithlessness and ethical conformity. As a Protestant thinker, Kierkegaard believed that he was returning to the concerns of Pauline Christianity, and he viewed the Confessions of St. Augustine (354–430) as an important literary precedent. Only by probing the recesses of his own inner self or subjectivity can the individual accede to truth. In one of his best-known works, Fear and Trembling (1843), he reconstructed the biblical tale of Abraham, praising the protagonist’s “teleological suspension of the ethical” for his willingness to sacrifice his only son on the basis of his unshakable faith. Kierkegaard’s stress on the forlornness of the human condition, as well as on the absence of certainty concerning the possibility of salvation, made him an important forerunner of 20th-century existentialism.


A further example of the revolt against the rationalist ethos of German idealism was the “philosophy of will” developed by Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). Schopenhauer, too, felt that Hegel had prematurely proclaimed the finality of his own system, and, like Schelling, he believed that life’s most important truths defied comprehension by reason.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy returned to the Kantian distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves, or between phenomena and noumena, in order to stress the limitations of reason. In his major philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation (1819), Schopenhauer reiterated Kant’s claim that, given the structure of human cognition, knowledge of things as they really are is impossible; the best that can be obtained are comparatively superficial representations of things.

But the most influential aspect of Schopenhauer’s philosophy was his recasting of the concept of the will. He viewed the will as a quasi-mystical life force that underlay all of reality: “This word [will] indicates that which is the being-in-itself of everything in the world, and is the sole kernel of every phenomenon.” Although the will remained inaccessible to ideas or concepts, its nature could be fathomed or glimpsed through nonrational aesthetic experience—an insight that was clearly indebted to Schelling’s philosophy as well as to the romantic concept of “genius.”

Although The World as Will and Representation had little impact when it was first published, Schopenhauer’s pessimism—his devaluation of the capacities of the intellect and his corresponding conviction that reality is ultimately unknowable—became a virtual credo for a subsequent generation of European intellectuals whose hopes for democratic reform across the continent were dashed by the failure of the Revolutions of 1848. His belief in the ability of art, particularly music, to afford metaphysical insight profoundly influenced the aesthetic theories of the German composer Richard Wagner. And his philosophy of the will, as well as his stark view of reason as incapable of grasping the true nature of reality, had a considerable impact on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

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