**** Help needed ****

"In 1841, Schelling was invited to Berlin. His task, according to the new Prussian Minister of Culture, was "to expurge the dragon's seed of Hegelian pantheism" from the minds of Prussian youth. In his first lecture, Schelling insisted that the task of refuting Hegel had already been accomplished by "life". Schelling's own mystical ideas failed to win many converts and attendenace at his lectures was disappointing. Schelling argued that Hegel's whole system was based on a confusion of Essence and Existence. A return to the philosophy of Existence was necessary.

Kierkegaard was in the audience. Others included the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and the young Friedrich Engels. Kiekegaard accused modern philosophy - meaning Hegel - of being based on a comical presupposition. Hegel's retrospective world history, bereft of a future, struck Kierkegaard as equally inhuman. "It may be that life can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards". [quoted from Hegel for Beginners]

From Kierkegaard, we have Nietzsche, Heidegger and in part Jean-Paul Sartre. Also from the same time and place comes Arthur Schopenhauer who overcomes Hegelianism with "the world as Will", and thus we have voluntarism and that input to Nietzsche, etc and also US reactionary philosophies, and in France from the same period, Auguste Comte rejecting the possibility of any objective logic, and from whom springs positivism and thus a whole other stream of reactionary philosophy.

And of course, on the other hand, we have Marx and Engels.

***** Question for our correspondents: Can anyone tell me where I can find out more about that 1841 meeting? ***

andy-at-mira.net