KANT (1724-1804)
Immanuel Kant is a German philosopher. He is especially known for his works on epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. He investigates the types of knowledge of mathematics, natural sciences and metaphysics, and the mental faculties corresponding to these are sensitivity, understanding and pure reason. Pure reason is our faculty of reason that has no relation to sense experience and works only with rational concepts. He examines why metaphysics, which is based on questions such as the existence and nature of God, whether man really has freedom of will and whether the human soul is immortal, does not provide valid information like mathematics and natural sciences.
Critique of Pure Reason
Phenomena are the appearances of the objects we experience that we perceive with our senses. Our knowledge and experience are shaped through phenomena. Kant's Transcendental Idealism does not deny the existence of nature from which our sense perceptions come. It is Transcendental in the sense that we can know what is outside our minds, and Idealism in the sense that we can know what is outside our minds according to our own mental structure.
Kant first separates the types of knowledge as a priori (necessary truth and also universal) and a posteriori (coming from experience), then as analytic (identity between subject and predicate) and synthetic (the concept of predicate is not included in the concept of subject). Then, by establishing a relationship between these, he proposes the existence of synthetic a priori judgments as a new type of judgment. He suggests that the basic principles of natural sciences and the propositions of mathematics are of the synthetic a priori judgment type.
Transcendental Analytic
Kant examines the faculty of understanding under the title of Transcendental Analytic. The basic function of this faculty is thinking. Our faculty of understanding works through concepts. According to Kant, not only consciousness takes shape according to things, but also things take shape according to consciousness. This view is as new and radical as Copernicus's determination that the Earth does not revolve around the Sun, but around the Sun.
Judgment is the combination of data from the senses through concepts to create knowledge. Kant calls the basic ways of combination the unity functions in judgment, these are the a priori structure of the faculty of understanding. Categories are a priori concepts, they constitute the laws of our faculty of understanding. These categories are necessary conditions for the data provided by our faculty of understanding to be thought, there are 12 categories; categories of quantity (unity, multiplicity, totality), categories of quality (reality, negation, limitation), categories of relation (substance-accident, cause-effect, effect-activity), categories of manner (Mode) (possibility-impossibility, existence-non-existence, necessary-contingent).
The types of judgments corresponding to these are as follows, respectively; judgments in terms of quantity (universal, particular, singular), judgments in terms of quality (positive, negative, infinite), judgments in terms of relation (definite, conditional, disjunctive), judgments in terms of modality (modality, manner) (possible, presumptive, necessary).
Imagination mediates between sensibility and the faculty of understanding. The schematization of categories occurs on the imagination. Category schemas are the principles of natural sciences and the faculty of understanding. Kant groups them under four main headings; axioms of perception related to time and space, expectations of perception (degree of magnitude of perception), analogies of experience (continuity, succession and simultaneity), postulates of empirical thinking (possibility, reality and necessity).
The categories of the faculty of understanding are only applicable to empirical intuition, this is how knowledge is formed. Our knowledge of objects is limited to phenomenal reality. This does not mean that they are only phenomena. Beyond the limit there is noumenon. The literal meaning of this term is the object of thought. The concept of noumenon names things in themselves. Kant argues that God is not a phenomenon but a noumenon, and that it should be conceived as a thing in itself. There can be no objective knowledge of noumenon because the human mind is not equipped to perceive things in themselves. The human mind cannot transcend the limits of experience, and since things in themselves are not sensory, they cannot be subject to experience. Categories cannot be applied to the ideas of God, the universe (cosmos) and the soul, which are a priori ideas carried by pure reason. This area must remain unknowable. This approach of Kant is called agnostic realism. Kant thinks that even if we cannot prove the existence of the ideas of God, the universe (cosmos) and the soul, our beliefs about them cannot be refuted. Kant limited knowledge in order to make room for belief.
Critique of Practical Reason and Kant's Understanding of Ethics
According to Kant, good action is independent of its purpose and consequences (unconditional imperative). For the first time, Kant bases good and bad action on the intention of the action. The fact that the action is in accordance with duty is not enough to show that an action is ethically good, the action must also be done in accordance with duty and because of duty. This type of law is valid for everyone, it is an unconditional human duty, therefore Kant's moral teaching is called duty ethics.
Freedom, immortality and God are postulates of practical reason (propositions that cannot be proven but are accepted as true). A person's free will does not mean not obeying any law. Freedom means obeying an autonomous law. Autonomy is the person's will obeying its own law. The highest moral element is the autonomy of the will.
A being that can completely combine happiness and morality is not possible, it is only God, it exists as a postulate of pure practical reason.
Religion and Politics
Religion; The duties of morality are seen as divine commands. Kant explains evil, one of the most important questions of religion, as a situation related to the reversal of human instincts. Salvation is not through reason but through religious thoughts and beliefs.
According to Kant, legal obligations are related to moral obligations. Kant, who is quite libertarian in the field of political philosophy, is an admirer of the French Revolution. He advocates a kind of political liberalism. The basis of the highest political authority is the will of the people. He advocated the establishment of a federative republic of free states.
Critique of the Power of Judgement and Kant's Understanding of Aesthetics
Following Baumgarden, Kant was the first to systematically study aesthetics and reveal the aesthetics of idealism. Kant investigated the beautiful and the sublime. The judgment of taste is an emotional proposition, not conceptual, and declares that something is beautiful.
Kant determines the meaning of the concept of beauty in four aspects;
1. In terms of the category of quality, beauty is something that is enjoyed without seeking benefit. Beauty is qualitative, while the Sublime is related to quantity, that is, magnitude.
2. In terms of the category of quantity, beautiful is that which is universally pleasing without a concept of the object.
3. In terms of the category of relation, beautiful is the form of a purposeless finality in an object.
4. In terms of the category of modality, beautiful is that which is accepted as the object of a necessary pleasure. According to common sense, everyone is expected to approve of it.
According to Kant, the production of beautiful works of art is the work of genius. Genius produces works that carry their own rules within themselves, not general rules. The genius's creative ability is innate. The order found in a work of art is not directed towards a specific external purpose, the work of art has a high purpose in terms of its own internal harmony, that is, it has a purposeless finality. We have difficulty in expressing what the work tells us.
GERMAN IDEALISTS
BAUMGARTEN (1714-1762)
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten is a German philosopher. He is the first to use the word aesthetic. Aesthetic truth calls for richness, chaos and matter, while logical truth sacrifices rich sensory content, making perception colorless and lifeless. In his work Aesthetica, he presents a comprehensive examination of beauty, art and aesthetic experience. In Metaphysica, he explains his thoughts on metaphysics. He influenced Kant and later thinkers.
FICHTE (1762-1814)
Johann Gottlieb Fichte is a German philosopher. Fichte is especially known for his views on self-consciousness, freedom and the relationship between the individual and society.
According to Fichte, the first principle of philosophy should be the conscious being, the thinking self. No matter how much we try to objectify the self, a pure self or transcendental self that transcends objectification will remain the first principle of philosophy. Since we have an intellectual intuition of the pure self, we do not agree with Kant's view that the pure self is a principle beyond the limits of experience.
There are three basic propositions of his philosophical system, where the transcendental self consciousness is at the center. 1- the self only posits its own existence in an original way, 2- there is a non-self in general opposite the self, 3- in the self, there is a divisible non-self as opposed to a divisible self. Fichte says that human knowledge has three steps as a dialectical thesis antithesis synthesis, and the three basic propositions comply with this.
He reduced the external world and all its contents to the immanent acts of consciousness and thus became a representative of subjective idealism. The thing-in-itself, which is outside the limits of knowledge in Kant, is a concept that is found in the basic content of consciousness and is formed through abstraction, according to Fichte. Fichte thinks that the ultimate reality is the absolute will, and that the consciousness of the absolute being is realized through the consciousness of finite beings. The realm of material existence has a secondary existence compared to absolute existence and is for a moral purpose.
The essence of man is action, and the nature of action is morality. Man is a system of instincts. The self-preservation instinct that represents the system. Conscience is the infallible and direct consciousness of our duties. The concept of equity, or the principle of right, is that the freedom of each member of society is limited by the freedom of the other members of the community.
There should be a legal power that will ensure that rights are respected in society and that guarantees the freedom of individuals. Fichte is against both despotism and democracy. The state's interference in the freedom of the individual should be limited in order to protect public safety and the system of rights.
In his work The Closed Commercial State, he states that all people have the right not only to live, but also to live a humane life. If an economic class grows disproportionately, the balances are disrupted. The state should have the right to control and regulate the division of labor among individuals for the common good of society.
Fichte says that history also progresses dialectically to a synthesis where understanding and believing reconcile.
SCHELLING (775-1854)
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was a German philosopher. His philosophical development has followed each other in four periods that can be characterized as subjective idealism, philosophy of nature, philosophy of identity and philosophy in opposition to the negative and positive.
In his article titled On the Self as the Principle of Philosophy during the period of subjective idealism, he postulated the concept of the self (ego) as the highest and unconditional element of human knowledge.
In his Ideas Concerning a Philosophy of Nature, which he published during the period when he switched to natural philosophy, he created an artificial duality between nature and spirit, objective and subjective, by defining nature as non-self. The Absolute, which objectifies itself as nature, turns into absoluteness as subjectivity, and again appears as a single Absolute.
The term self does not symbolize the individual self, but the act of self-consciousness in general. Reason is one and infinite. Its highest law is the law of identity, and there is no difference in essence between subject and object. Schelling's philosophy of identity is a type of pantheism. Unlike Spinoza's dead, material and deterministic pantheism, it emphasizes the vitality of nature.
According to Schelling, in negative philosophy, he argues that the system that aims to explain the universe is completely limited to concepts or essences and that these systems remain at the level of logical inference, at the level of rationality. Here, the need to emphasize existence will be made by the positive philosopher. The basis of positive philosophy is belief in God. What is essential is the person's desire to reach God.
According to Schelling, aesthetics is the highest step that the self can reach. The artist has not gained his creative power by learning, and he does not know how he did it. Creative geniuses see the harmony and identity in the universe. According to Schelling, true philosophy is the philosophy of art.
SCHLEIERMACHER (1768-1834)
Friedrich Schleiermacher was a German philosopher, theologian and literary critic. According to Schleiermacher, spirit and nature are united in God, that is, they are identical. Therefore, the ultimate reality is God. Conceptual thought cannot understand this identity, but it can sense it. The essence of religion is neither thought nor action, only emotion or intuition.
The common objects of religion, morality and metaphysics are the universe and man's relationship with it, but their approaches are different. According to Schleiermacher, both metaphysics and morality must be integrated with religion. The world cannot exist without God, nor God without the world. Religion is the acquisition of the basic sense of dependence directed towards the infinite. Religion is the subject of the heart and faith.
According to Schleiermacher, the individual and society are not opposing concepts. Individuality gains reality in relation to others. Society and the individual refer to each other.
Schleiermacher is one of the founders of modern hermeneutics due to the religious interpretation method he developed. The knowledge of interpreting texts and meanings is called Hermeneutics.
HEGEL (1770-1831)
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is a German philosopher. He took his independent and original place in the process of German idealism with his work Phenomenology of Spirit. According to him, all objects of knowledge and the entire universe are the product of an absolute subject, an absolute mind, the nature of reality is thought, rationality, ultimate reality is the absolute idea. He rejects the idea of an unknowable being in itself.
The universe is the unfolding of the absolute idea. The absolute (spirit, geist) is thinking whose object is itself, in other words, the subject that thinks itself. The absolute passes into the material world, which is its antithesis. It returns to itself in the human spirit. In this way, thesis, antithesis, synthesis are realized. This is a dialectical process.
Hegel's dialectical process consists of three basic thesis-antithesis-synthesis triads; It consists of the logic of being, the logic of essence and the logic of concept. Of these, the logic of being progresses with the trilogy of being-non-being-becoming. Antithesis, non-being is included in the thesis of being. Becoming is the unity, the synthesis of being and non-being. The logic of essence is the antithesis of the logic of being; it consists of the dialectical triad of essence, force and actuality. The logic of concept is the synthesis of the logic of being and the logic of essence; it is based on the following dialectical triad: subjectivity, objectivity and concept (idea or thought).
Hegel's philosophy of spirit
Hegel's philosophy of spirit progresses in the form of the dialectical trilogy of subjective spirit, objective spirit, and absolute spirit. There is spirit in the subjective spirit stage. Objective spirit is the transition of subjective spirit to an objective stage that develops as moral, legal, religious, and scientific reality.
Justice or law, subjective morality, and social morality; constitute the dialectical triad in the objective spirit. This process reaches its peak in the state, which is one of the three stages of social morality (family, civil society, state). Hegel's main interest was to analyze the state, and like Aristotle, he thought that the highest social achievement of man was the state. Although the objective spirit is necessarily divine in the realm of necessity, security mechanisms that will prevent excesses and despotism must be found in the state.
Since the way to realize self-consciousness is through the acceptance and approval of oneself by other self-consciousnesses, a war reigns between the selves in terms of recognition and power. Under the title of Psychology, Hegel deals with the descriptions of mental and rational acts such as intending, representing, remembering, imagination, memory, thought, descriptions of practical impulses, and post-satisfaction searches.
The final stage is the Absolute Spirit; art, revealed religion and philosophy.
Hegel's understanding of art, religion and philosophy
According to Hegel, the mind grasps the Absolute as beauty in a work of art. Beauty is a rational borrowed from the sensuous. There are types of symbolic art (architecture), classical art (sculpture) and romantic art (painting, music and poetry). Hegel does not completely deny natural beauty, but sees it as a lower level of beauty.
Hegel, on the other hand, deals with religion from a philosophical perspective. The closest conscious living area to the field of art is religion. From the perspective of religious consciousness, the world is an imaginary or pictorial design of the free creation of a transcendent god. The individual is aware that he has isolated himself from the external world by attributing everything that is good in himself to the activity of god. Hegel defines this situation as the unhappy consciousness in which the Christian finds himself.
Religion and philosophy are different ways in which the same eternal reality, namely God, reveals itself, and according to Hegel, both are religions in this respect. Hegel uses the term religion to include not only religious experience, belief and cult, but also theology.
Philosophy describes religious thought in a purely conceptual way. The history of philosophy is the history of the process by which thought moves from one inadequate understanding to another, and then combines them at a higher level, bringing itself to a more clear and adequate mode of expression.
SCHOPENHAUER (1788-1860)
Arthur Schopenhauer is a German philosopher. He is considered one of the pioneers of existential thought. He is especially known for his concepts of will and representation. His doctoral thesis is “On the Fourfold Foundation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason” and his book “The World as Will and Representation” are his well-known works.
In his doctoral thesis, he examines the principle of sufficient reason and determines the four basic forms of this principle. Physical Objects; exist in causal relations with each other in space and time and we know them through ordinary experience and again these constitute the subject of study of material sciences. Mathematical Objects; geometry and arithmetic related to space and time. Abstract Concepts; concepts derived from concepts and the relationship between them. Self-Knowledge; the self-object, the subject that makes the request. Necessity (determinism) prevails in all of these areas.
Schopenhauer accepted Kant's distinction between phenomena (what appears to a perceiving mind) and noumen (things in themselves). Schopenhauer combined the forms of sensibility with the categories of the understanding, and saw the categories of causality, time, and space as necessary conditions for our knowledge of the world as representation. He proposed a further class of concepts which he called reflection ideas, or ideas of ideas.
In his book The World as Will and Representation, his philosophical conception finds a concise expression in the sentence "the world is my representation." The world presents itself to us as an object, and we know only the world as we perceive it. Will is consciously made choices, a faculty of our mind, and governed by reason. Schopenhauer defines will as a constant and blind driving force present in everything, even in things that have no soul. Throughout nature, its work is continuous without knowledge, and nature is a fierce battleground in which the will to live constantly generates conflicts. These push Schopenhauer to a pessimistic determinism where pain and unhappiness reign in the world.
A person can only escape from the power of the will that is superior to everything through aesthetics and morality. On the path of aesthetic escape, a person becomes a knowing subject, not a subject who wants, in the face of an aesthetic object to which he does not turn for the purpose of benefit and gain. A person is freed from the captivity of the will, even if only for a while. On the path of moral escape, a person finds a much longer-lasting salvation by giving up the will to live. The will to live is the source of all kinds of evil, manifesting itself in the form of endless desires that drag human life into pain and unhappiness, and producing destructive emotions such as aggression, struggle, destruction and self-centeredness.
KIERKEGAARD (1813-1855)
Soren Kierkegaard is a Danish philosopher. He is one of the pioneers of existentialism, and he focused on the existential problems of the individual, faith, freedom and moral responsibility.
According to Kierkegaard, scientific thought disrupts moral and religious life. A person must participate in life by being conscious of his own choices. Until he fully lives his belief in God, a person is condemned to anxiety.
Kierkegaard says that there are three forms of existence; the aesthetic stage, the ethical stage and the religious stage. A person in the first two stages can suddenly jump to the religious stage, but many people cannot do this. A person in the aesthetic stage always lives from day to day and pursues pleasure. In the ethical stage, decisions are made based on moral criteria (good, bad, duty). In the religious stage, people prefer faith instead of aesthetic pleasures and the commands of reason.
NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)
Friedrich Nietzsche is a German philosopher, writer and poet. He is interested in the subjects of existence, religion, morality and art. In his work The Birth of Tragedy, he deals with the origins and development of Greek tragedy. In his book İnsanca, Çok İnsanca, he explains his thoughts on morality. In his work Beyond Good and Evil, he makes a distinction between slave morality and master morality. He thinks that Christianity elevates the values on which slave morality is based to the level of universality. In his work The Gay Science, he says that God is dead. Belief in the Christian God is not worth believing in. Democracy and socialism continue the Christian moral system on a secular level. The idea of moral law should be abandoned for the sake of nihilism, which is a higher stage.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra and his later writings, he says that the world and all its contents are nothing but the will to power. According to Nietzsche, science is the description of nature by transforming it into concepts in order to dominate it. The concept of absolute truth is an invention of philosophers.
According to Nietzsche, the target is not humanity but the superman. Future philosophers who choose to live life instead of being afraid of and running away from life will realize the superman.
Nietzsche believes that when this world ends, it will start over again and everything that happens in the world will be repeated anew and exactly the same.