Abstract
In the heyday of linguistic philosophy, more than half a century ago, the impenetrable terminology of German philosophical idealism provoked horror, mixed with contempt. Precision in the use of language was valued above all else. Yet lucidity in writing cannot be an end in itself, and thinkers such as Hegel were wrestling with fundamental issues concerning human life and history. In so doing, they had an influence on human affairs that more recent philosophy has failed to achieve, even though that influence could be malign. Professor Michael Rosen in this superb book remarks that Hegel laid the ground ‘for Prussian militarism and state worship’ (p. 234).
Rosen’s magisterial survey of German idealism from Kant onwards is densely argued, but it offers rich rewards for those inclined to follow his interpretations of notoriously difficult thinkers. The idea of the shadow left by former beliefs in God comes from Nietzsche, whose influence is apparent throughout this book. Rosen traces the secularizing effects of much German philosophical thought. Kant believed in a just God and was not a secular thinker. By failing, though, to see the loving and merciful character of God, and by removing the possibility of a personal relationship between creature and Creator, Kant, as Rosen points out, laid the path to a more thorough secularism.
A central thesis of this book is that the belief in personal immortality, which was important to Kant, was replaced by a notion of an ‘historical immortality’. The ‘invisible’ Church became transmuted into the fate of cultures and peoples. This was part of a process, which was initiated, Rosen suggests, by the nineteenth-century theologian Schleiermacher, of locating religious reasoning ‘beyond the sphere of objective reasoning entirely’ (p. 293). Religions were seen instead as referring to personal emotions and dispositions, not focused on some transcendent reality.
In an Afterword, Rosen mentions that he has always been torn between philosophy and history of ideas. As philosophy, this book can be hard going, with large chunks of quotation permeating the text, often more than a page long at a time. Rosen does, however, draw out some of the philosophical consequences of the collapse of religious belief. We are left with the choice, even in one society, of different doxai, or commitments, particularly ethical ones. He concludes by saying that each of us must find a set of doxai ‘that we can inhabit with some degree of comfort’ (p. 307). Yet in a chilling final paragraph he remarks that Auschwitz is ‘an awful reminder of the fragility of such commitments’. The removal of a belief in a transcendent God will not leave everything the same. However long the shadow of God lingers, it may finally fade from sight, with incalculable consequences.