Vittorio Hösle’s A Short History of German Philosophy masterfully combines philosophical commentary, probing questions, thematic synthesis and historical summary. Any broad overview risks being merely encyclopedic – a compendium of authors and dates, a list of publications and pamphlets – but Hösle’s narrative of German philosophy’s history never gets bogged down in details. In sixteen dense chapters, Hösle captures the adventurous spirit as well as the conscientious, disciplined ethic that animated German philosophizing for 500 years, which at its best combined moral seriousness, logical rigour and intellectual probity.

After a brief preface, responding to objections to the German-language edition, Hösle’s introduction outlines the book’s animating ideas – notable are the claims that Lutheranism ‘shaped the German spirit more than any other factor’ and that ‘reflection on the concept of Geist (spirit) is a crucial part of the German spirit’ – and states the book’s aim of answering two questions: ‘what factors helped German philosophy rise to be one of the two most fascinating in human history, and how, despite this philosophical tradition, the moral and political catastrophe of 1933–1945 could happen’ (pp. 5, 12). The book divides roughly into four main parts: (i) medieval and early modern up to Leibniz (chapters 2–4), (ii) Kant and German idealism (chapters 5–7), (iii) the revolt against systematic philosophy (chapters 8–11), and (iv) phenomenology, Heidegger’s ontological speculations and the disaster of National Socialism (chapters 12–14). Hösle then concludes with a swift summation of post-war philosophical developments from Gadamer’s hermeneutics to the Frankfurt school, Habermas and Hans Jonas (chapter 15), before giving a rather grim prognosis for the continuation of a distinctly German mode of philosophizing (chapter 16).

A short review must be selective and cannot do justice to Hösle’s tremendous erudition. Accordingly, I will focus on the apogee of German philosophy in its ‘classical period’, before briefly discussing the nadir of German spiritual life – the catastrophe of the 1930s and 1940s. This entails passing over important figures and giving short shrift to Hösle’s capacity to connect diverse figures such as Meister Eckhart and Fichte or Jacob Böhme and Hegel (pp. 102, 118) or to capture in a brief remark some profound continuity or rupture, e.g. ‘Nietzsche’s aggressive atheism is Lutheran in its sincerity’ or ‘if Leibniz tamed the theodicy problem logically, Schopenhauer declares its existential insolubility’ (pp. 83, 132).

Hösle concurs with Heinrich Heine’s judgement of Kant’s essential importance to the ‘history of consciousness’ (p. 59). Destroying ‘the old metaphysics’, he opened an entirely new approach to the traditional objects of religious thought, offering ‘a new mode of access to God’ by ‘detaching the foundations of ethics entirely from any hopes of an afterworld’ (pp. 59–60). As in the medieval philosopher-theologian Meister Eckhart (c.1260–1327), the ethical is divorced from outcome, emphasis is placed on intention, and autonomy and theonomy become closely associated. The moral act is, therefore, an end in itself and ethics is a science of categorical rather than hypothetical imperatives. (Hösle earlier claims that the ‘path from Luther to German Idealism was to consist in a return to Eckhart’s rationalism’, p. 22.)

By carrying out the Copernican turn and emphasizing the metaphysical priority of the practical, Kant formulated a novel and uniquely German response to the paradoxes so forcefully articulated by Hume and Rousseau that seemed to threaten reason’s sovereignty. In finding a balance between the Enlightenment and pietism, he ‘opened German religiousness not only to all scientific influences, as Leibniz had done, but also to the wish to transform society, and conversely he gave enlightenment an ethical, indeed almost religious impulse’ (p. 62). The progressive emancipation of mankind from all tutelary authority required ‘summoning everything before the tribunal of reason’, which was understood as ‘a religious duty’ (p. 62).

Transcendental idealism, which emphasized the conditions of the possibility of experience, provided a liberating and elevating impetus to German culture, giving intellectuals the ‘courage to believe in a metaphysically understood freedom, indeed, to adopt a worldview that depreciated external reality in favour of the human spirit’ (p. 63). Thus, without Kant, ‘Romanticism would not have existed’ (p. 63). Concomitantly, by emphasizing that the fundamental philosophical question was the ground of synthetic a priori judgements, Kant not only made that specific epistemological question central to German philosophizing but also initiated the ‘striving to ground at any price [that] also permanently shaped German culture and distinguished it as particularly thorough in comparison to neighboring cultures’ (pp. 65–6).

The pivot between Kant and subsequent idealists is a fascinating chapter on a host of less famous but often brilliant figures ranging from Lessing to Humboldt. Hösle notes the intricate trinity of theology, philosophy and philology that dominated German intellectual life in this age of ‘Human Sciences as a Religious Duty’ (p. 82). The word of God was ‘no longer limited to the Bible, but manifested itself in the whole history of the human spirit’ (p. 83). This expansion of the sacred is evident in the intersecting studies of philosophical history and natural theology and attendant explorations of forms of pantheism. Johann Gottfried Herder’s philosophy of history proves particularly important, for although approving of progress like Voltaire, Herder like Vico ‘insists that the individual epochs have their distinctive logics which have to be grasped as such’ and that the historian ought ‘to recognize without prejudice the values that are possible at a specific stage of development and that are sometimes incompatible with later ones’ – virtues and vices often being interwoven (p. 89). This period also saw the origin of the peculiarly German concern with Kultur, understood in contrast to the French civilisation, which gave German poetry, philosophy, theology and even novels a distinct inflection (cf. the Bildungsroman), but also laid the ground for subsequent justifications of troubling political ideologies (for example, in Thomas Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, 1918). Finally, Schleiermacher’s theological innovation, which emphasized the autonomy of feeling – ‘a “sense and taste for the infinite”’ – over metaphysics or morality, constitutes in Hösle’s estimation ‘the greatest caesura in the history of theology since Thomas Aquinas’ (p. 93).

While acknowledging the importance of less well-known figures such as Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757–1823) and Salomon Maimon (1753–1800), Hösle follows the tradition in his focus on the three greatest post-Kantians: Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Towering above the rest, they produce ‘the most intellectually ambitious philosophy that Germany has produced’, integrating previous philosophical achievements ‘in the shape of a system, the most complex form of philosophical thought’ (p. 97). Moreover, they reach maturity when Europe is convulsed by the French Revolution and its aftermath. Fichte’s socio-political reactions are illustrative: from an early public defence of Jacobinism in the 1790s, Fichte’s youthful universalism had by 1808 with his Reden an die deutsche Nation transmogrified into German nationalism. Distinguishing the Germans from other Europeans, he argued that, unlike ‘the French, Germans have not only intellect, but also soul; the educated classes remain connected to the people; instead of affectation, naturalness prevails’ (p. 104). Stressing Luther’s role in forming the German character, Fichte observes (and Hösle concurs) that the opposition between religion and philosophy is less stark than in other European nations ‘because the struggle for autonomy had religious roots; belief in the supersensible was never abandoned, but was instead reoriented by reason’ (p. 104). The religious character of Fichte’s concern with freedom inflects his various theoretical speculations from the attempt to formulate a self-grounding philosophical science to the deduction of intersubjectivity in Grundlage des Naturrechts.

Though similarly concerned with autonomy and grounding a philosophical system, Schelling’s religious sentiment ranged from ‘a youthful pantheism to a form of Christianity that comes closer to traditional Christology than Fichte’s or Hegel’s forms’ (p. 105). Although judging critical philosophy the sole means ‘possible to conceive freedom of the will’, he was fascinated by Spinoza’s monism and transformed ‘Kant’s question about synthetic judgements … into a metaphysical one: how can the absolute proceed from itself?’ (p. 107). Breaking with Fichte, for whom ‘nature was only the non-I’, Schelling’s interest in ‘the substantial richness of the world’ led him toward a physico-theology which conceives ‘of the whole of reality on the basis of [a] polar structure’ (pp. 107–8). Schelling extended his investigations of the absolute’s self-articulation through fundamental dualities into the self-conscious human realm, privileging artistic production and the work of genius as the striving for infinite harmony. Art ultimately surpasses science in laying ‘bare the unity that underlies nature and history’ (p. 110).

According to Hösle, it remained for Hegel to develop Schelling’s absolute idealism in a thoroughly systematic and rigorous fashion – one far more attentive to man’s political nature. The crucial metaphysical innovations consisted in: (1) his substitution of ‘Schelling’s theory of identity’ with an emphasis on a holism – ‘“the true is the totality”’ – wherein ‘the absolute is essentially a result’ and (2) his development of a logico-ontology which articulates ‘a self-constitutive ideal structure that Hegel does not hesitate to designate as God’s essence before Creation’, thus giving his system a threefold structure of logic, nature and spirit (pp. 115–16). Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit, his ‘most brilliant work’, integrated insights from the Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers ‘into a system whose complexity is without peer’, creating a ‘theory of spirit’ that made possible the ‘magnificent development of the German human sciences up to 1933’, e.g. Dilthey’s explorations of Weltanschauungen (p. 122).

The reaction to Hegel’s grand systematic synthesis is swift and vociferous, coming from every possible philosophical angle, beginning with Schopenhauer – the first ‘master of a “hermeneutics of suspicion”’ – deepened by Feuerbach, Marx and Nietzsche (theologically, politically, ethically and aesthetically), and continuing with the rise of analytic philosophy and positivism on epistemic, linguistic and metaphysical grounds (p. 135). Hösle captures the dramatic transformation by observing that Wittgenstein’s silence about ultimate questions and his religiousness ‘is diametrically opposed to Hegel’s pantheism’ (p. 189). The juxtaposition of these two figures expresses the rapidity of the century’s change: from self-consummating absolute spirit to ‘“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”’ (p. 189).

Turning to German history’s darkest chapter, Hösle is bracingly direct: ‘Nazi terror is so enigmatic because it was supported by a culture that had made great and unique intellectual achievements’ (p. 217). Hösle delineates several factors in the rise of National Socialism: (1) the lack of ‘a plausible theory of resistance’ in the German philosophical tradition, (2) the loss of ‘belief in the intrinsic worth of the rule of law’ and ‘in the moral command to avoid war’, (3) a fascination with power politics, (4) the death of Enlightenment ideals in the trenches of the First World War (p. 218). Although Hösle acknowledges the multiple causes of this loss of belief in rationally defensible universal values (e.g. logical positivism’s claim that morality is just subjective), he nevertheless singles out Nietzsche, who ‘contributed like no one else to the moral cynicism without which this enormous rupture in civilization would hardly have occurred, because he made it intellectually and stylistically acceptable’ (p. 219). Considering the period’s greatest thinker, Hösle’s dilemma is encapsulated in his remark, following praise of Karl Jaspers’ moral quality: ‘And yet it is – unfortunately – Heidegger, and not Jaspers, who deserves to be called a “philosophical genius”’ (p. 221).

Heidegger’s masterwork, Being and Time, not only combined a host of profound philosophical meditations on themes such as historicity, hermeneutics, temporality, death, authenticity and resoluteness, but the book’s mood and rhetoric fit the existential angst of the time. As became clear in the Davos debate with Cassirer, Heidegger spoke to the problems of the age. Nevertheless, Hösle is unsparingly critical of Heidegger’s ‘marketable secularization of theologumena’ – especially Heidegger’s discussion of Being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode), which appeals by offering ‘the feeling of being more authentic than others, because one embarks heroically on nothingness’ (p. 227). Resoluteness in the face of nothingness is the heart of Heidegger’s ethical teaching. Lacking content, however, such a morality can be variously directed. While not necessarily leading to National Socialism, this dimension most clearly connects Heidegger’s ontological speculations with the moral and political disasters of his age.

Hösle’s book is packed with lucid arguments and insightful historical reflections, illuminating the essential character of German philosophizing, which in Hösle’s telling is animated by the inextricably interwoven concerns with freedom, morality, conscience and interiority, on the one hand, and with the absolute, the unconditioned, the fundamental ground and God, on the other. Hösle’s book will appeal to a range of audiences. From an undergraduate making her way through the complex and dense thicket of texts, theories and arguments to the specialized scholar trying to work out her own synoptic view of German philosophy, Hösle’s work serves as both a sure guide and a stimulating interlocutor.