The shape of modern French and German philosophy

Abstract

Twentieth century philosophy on the continent has passed through two quite distinct phases with respect to historic reference. During the period immediately following World War II, Karl Jaspers asserted that "Emmanuel Kant is the nodal point of modern philosophy, the absolutely indispensible philosopher." Few scholars, I suspect, would have contested this assertion with any vigor. But now it is entirely evident, as both Vincent Descombes and Riidiger Bubner contend in their respective analyses of modern "French" and "German" philosophy, that once the contemporary philosopher has worked through the critical philosophy of Kant, he must pass through the even more encompassing shadow of Hegel. The common element between these two excellent studies has precisely to do with how the Hegel renaissance during the past fifty years or so, and especially the past twenty, is the dominant influence on modern French and German philosophy. Descombes begins his work, out of Kojeve, with an explicit statement to this effect: "It may well be that the future of the world, and thus the sense of the present and the significance of the past, will depend in the last analysis on contemporary interpretations of Hegel" (D, 9). Kojeve made this observation in 1933 when few were listening the great watershed of Hegel studies not to take place for another thirty years in the works of scholars such as Charles Taylor, J.N. Findlay, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Each of these persons, in their respective ways, asserted that the critical responses of both the so-called "Left" and "Right" interpretations were profoundly deficient that Hegel must be read for Hegel and not filtered through various twentieth century ideologies such as neo-Marxism, Existentialism, Freudianism, and so forth. The early Heidegger, as Bubner shows, was one of the