Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2026
In his lectures on Nietzsche, Heidegger turns to the overcoming of Platonism. He quotes Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols to summarize 'the form of Platonism that is achieved by the Kantian philosophy'. For the new German-Judaic thinkers, a more serious concern was the fact that neo-Kantian philosophy insufficiently apprehended its relationship with the absolute; as Rosenzweig argued, neo-Kantianism had 'found itself at a point where no further advance remained to it'. For Benjamin, the question of the subject's freedom begins to rework the base notion of experience: the concept of freedom stands in a peculiar correlation to the mechanical concept of experience, and was accordingly further developed in neo-Kantianism. Benjamin also rejected the neo-Kantianism that aimed at a science of history, in particular the methodological separation of 'singularity and repetition'. Benjamin and Rosenzweig both critique Kant's impoverished notion of experience with its 'inattention to language and inattention to religion'.
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