Chekhov's words sum up the motivation for his comedy: laughter as medicine, and a vital prerequisite for any treatment of his fellow human beings. Implicit is the sense that laughter - and comedy - are restorative, and that the objectivity and detachment which laughter may produce could inoculate us against such human diseases as pomposity, hypocrisy, selfcentredness, laziness, or - the worst of all - wasting life.

It is Doctor Chekhov who wrote those words, and beneath them lies a serious but non-judgemental sense that laughter is curative and healthy. Chekhov's comedy is therefore not only a stylistic feature in his works, but is also a vital part of his philosophy. It is the point where content and form meet, the one usually inseparable from the other. And this, in turn, relates to the subject matter of his works - not the artificial and complex, though enjoyable, plot lines of farces by Labiche or Feydeau, or their third-rate imitators, but the daily lives of ordinary people.

Ian McKellen has played more Chekhov roles than any other actor of his generation. These have included Konstantin in The Seagull in 1961-2 for The Belgrade Theatre, Coventry; Tusenbach for radio in a Caedmon production of Three Sisters, 1966; Konstantin in a BBC Radio production of The Seagull in 1967; a radio version of Chekhov's story 'A Provincial Life', dramatised by Peter Gill in 1970; Svetlovidov in Swan Song for the opening of the (then) new Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, November 1971; Khrushchev in The Wood-Demon, the Actors' Company in 1973, directed by David Giles, in Ronald Hingley's translation, Edinburgh Festival and then touring; Andrey (a part taken over by Timothy Spall for the Stratford run and televised production) in Trevor Nunn's Royal Shakespeare Company production of Three Sisters in the 1978 touring production (see chapter 9 in this volume); Lopakhin in a revival of The Cherry Orchard, directed and translated with Lilia Sokolova by Mike Alfreds at The National Theatre, designed by Paul Dart, opened December 1985 (first performed at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, September 1981, with Roger Sloman as Lopakhin); Platonov in Michael Frayn's version, Wild Honey, of Chekhov's unfinished play Platonov, directed by Christopher Morahan, The National Theatre, 1984-6; Vanya in Sean Mathias' production of Uncle Vanya, translated by Pam Gems, with Antony Sher as Astrov and Janet McTeer as Yelena, Royal National Theatre Studio production, then the Cottesloe, National Theatre, 1991. Most recently (October 1998) he has played Dr Dorn in Jude Kelly's production of The Seagull at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, designed by Robert Innes-Hopkins, in a translation/version by Tom Stoppard.

Introduction

It is a commonplace of intellectual history that any philosophical movement must be understood in its historical context. This dictum is especially true of German Idealism, whose aims and problems become intelligible only in the context of the culture of late eighteenth-century Germany. This culture was essentially that of the Enlightenment or Aufklärung, which had dominated intellectual life in Germany since the middle of the eighteenth century.

Toward the close of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment began to show signs of a crisis. The more it extended its fundamental principles, the more they seemed to lead to dire consequences. The fundamental principles of the Enlightenment were rational criticism and scientific naturalism. While criticism seemed to end in skepticism, naturalism appeared to result in materialism. Both results were unacceptable. If skepticism undermines our common-sense beliefs in the reality of the external world, other minds, and even our own selves, materialism threatens the beliefs in freedom, immortality, and the sui generis status of the mind. There were few Aufklärer in Germany ready to admit such disastrous consequences; but there were also few willing to limit the principles of criticism and naturalism.

The path to the Phenomenology

Hegel always described the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, his first major published book, as his “voyage of discovery.” In that work, he brought to completion in a highly original way a whole series of youthful reflections on various topics, and he came to terms with some issues that had long vexed him. However, he came to display a great ambivalence about the book, never lecturing on it while in Berlin and in 1825 even disavowing it as the proper “introduction” to his system of philosophy, but then later signing a contract in 1831 (the year he died) to publish a revised edition of it. He did not have the same qualms about his Logic (published originally between 1812 and 1816). Although he undertook some revisions of parts of the book later in his career, he always saw it more or less as the fundamental keystone of his system. Curiously, though, late in his career, his Logic became less and less popular with the students as their interest in his youthful Phenomenology began to grow. After his death, the Phenomenology rapidly eclipsed the Logic as the central Hegelian text.

Introduction

In its philosophical and political aspects the romantic movement is firmly linked to German Idealism. Like idealism, the philosophy of the romantics counts terms such as “organism,”“individuality,” and “imagination” as part of its systematic basis and distances itself from terms such as “mechanism,” “division,”and “atomism.” Even though German Idealism and the early romantic movement are characterized by a decidedly critical reaction to the Enlightenment, they agree with several of its key political convictions.

The turn of the century represents a break in romantic philosophy. The end of collaboration on the journal Athenaeum by Novalis and the brothers Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel marks the transition to the later romantic period. The Berlin circle (1810–15) and the Vienna circle that formed around Joseph Görres after 1820 are important stages of this later period. Even though Fichte and Schelling still pursued ambitious speculative projects, the main figures of Late Romanticism lost interest in philosophical projects. Instead, the examination of the history of Christian and German culture, speculation on nature, projects in aesthetics, and, above all, a new formulation of concepts of the state and politics moved into the center of attention.

In Hegel's Encyclopedia system, what we would nowadays call his practical philosophy is called the “philosophy of spirit.” By practical philosophy, we usually mean a philosophical account of the possibility of the distinct sorts of events for which we may appropriately demand reasons or justifications from subjects whom we take to be responsible for such events occurring, or we mean an account of actions, and an assessment of what rightly count as such reasons or justifications. The central problem in other words is the status of the condition usually taken as necessary for such a delimitation of a class of events as actions: freedom. What is it, is it possible, how important is it?

Such a philosophy of spirit has a specific place in Hegel’s systematic enterprise. That system is divided into what looks like the basic or foundational enterprise, a “Science of Logic,” or his own version of a theory of concepts and the possibility of conceptual content (an account of all possible account-giving, as it were); and then into a “Philosophy of Nature” and a “Philosophy of Spirit”; or it relies on some argument about why the very possibility of an objective judgment requires just such delimited contents, that a successful account must be an account either of nature or of spirit.

Truth, art, and philosophy

The complexity of the relationship between German Idealism and the arts becomes apparent if one considers the following contentions from two of its most famous texts. Hegel announced in his Lectures on Aesthetics, given in the 1820s, that “[t]he science of art is . . . in our time much more necessary than at times in which art for itself as art provided complete satisfaction.” In his 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism Schelling claimed, in contrast, that art is “the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy, which always and continuously documents what philosophy cannot represent externally.” Some of the most important debates in modern philosophy, whose significance extends not only beyond their initial appearance in German Idealism but also beyond the narrowly conceived sphere of aesthetics, took place in the space between these positions.

Introduction

In Jena in May 1795, Hölderlin and Novalis were introduced to one another in Fichte's presence by their mutual friend, Immanuel Niethammer. How unfortunate that we do not know the details of their conversation! For Hölderlin and Novalis were not simply on their way to becoming the two most important poets of Early Romanticism in Germany. They were already philosophers of great accomplishment. At this time, Hölderlin had developed a powerful critique of Fichte's philosophy, and in the following months Novalis would begin to do the same. Moreover, their thought moved in similar directions. Both charged Fichte with wrongly supposing that consciousness enjoys an immediate acquaintance with its own nature. Our subjectivity, they argued, has its basis in a dimension of “Being,” which eludes not only introspection but philosophical analysis as well. By “Being” they understood different things. But they agreed in opposing one of the leading assumptions of Fichte's and later Hegel's idealism, namely, that reality is transparent to reason. For both of them, philosophy runs up against limits that poetry alone can point beyond.

If one looks to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel for illumination of the problems addressed by other philosophers - such as the nature of things, the freedom of the will, and the existence of God - one may experience at least initial frustration. They seem to write as though the completion of “the system” were philosophy's principal problem, under which all others are subsumed. Not only do they appear mostly to take this view for granted, they also assume a particular view of systematicity, requiring the whole of philosophy to articulate a single principle. Why interpret systematicity in this monistic fashion, and why ascribe it such importance? Why must it be all or nothing?

Idealism and realism

Richard Kroner's monumental study of German Idealism, From Kant to Hegel, portrays that philosophical movement as a teleological process brought under way by Kant, originally advanced, in different ways, by Fichte and Schelling, and culminating in the universal synthesis of all prior views and standpoints that is Hegel's system. This linear, progressivist, and finalist perspective is informed by Hegel's self-understanding of his place at the end of the history of philosophy and owes much to Hegel's own work in writing the history of philosophy in general and the history of modern philosophy in particular. But it has not remained the only, or even the dominant, reading of German Idealism. Over the past few decades a number of philosophers and scholars have argued for the superior role of Schelling in the later development of German Idealism and sought to show that it was with Schelling and not Hegel that the movement reached its deepest and most far-reaching insights. Similarly, there has been a reassessment of the place that Fichte occupies through his later works in the history of German Idealism. Finally, even Schopenhauer, once excluded from the German idealist canon, has been incorporated into a more comprehensively conceived genealogy of classical German philosophy between Kant and Hegel.

Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), and Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), two sons of Prussian pietists and a Swabian poet, are among a handful of thinkers most responsible for initiating a holistic turn in German thought in the second half of the eighteenth century. If this era is generally associated with the end of the Enlightenment, the writings of Hamann, Herder, and Schiller represent the German “Counter-Enlightenment,” dedicated to the premise that the genuine meanings of things derive from their interactive functions in a developing, self-determining whole. Hamann and Herder are also known to historians of German culture as prime movers of the so-called “Storm and Stress” (Sturm und Drang) movement epitomized in the theater - its artform of choice - by the early plays of Schiller (The Robbers) and Goethe (Götz of Berlichingen). This highly self-reflective movement derives from an identity crisis that is both national and philosophical, because the effort to establish a distinctively German literature in the face of France's cultural hegemony coincides with the question of the nature of reason itself.

The idealist achievement

The period of German Idealism constitutes a cultural phenomenon whose stature and influence has been frequently compared to nothing less than the golden age of Athens. For this reason the era from the 1770s into the 1840s that we tend to call “the age of German Idealism” is often designated in Germany simply as the period of “classical German philosophy.” This designation is meant to indicate a level of preeminent achievement rather than to characterize a specific style or content. It thus bypasses issues such as how philosophers of this era match up with the division in German literature between classicism and romanticism, and how strong a distinction is to be made between the “Critical” or “transcendental”idealism of Kant and the so-called “absolute” idealism that culminated in the work of the three most famous philosophers who came after him: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.

Kant's mature writings about morality and right fall into four different categories. (1) There are the foundational writings, which include Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and the Analytic of the Critique of Practical Reason (1788). (2) There are the writings that attempt to ground a morally motivated answer to metaphysical or religious questions. Kant deals with this concern toward the end of all three Critiques: in The Canon of Pure Reason, The Dialectic of Practical Reason and the Methodology of Teleological Judgment. (3) There are the writings in which Kant applies ethical principles. The central work here is the final product of Kant's ethical thought, the Metaphysics of Morals (1797-8), but this category also includes other works on politics and religion of varying lengths, including On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory but Will Not Work in Practice (1793), Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1794), and Perpetual Peace (1795), as well as a number of short occasional pieces, such as Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (1784), What Does It Mean To Orient Oneself in Thinking? (1786), The End of All Things (1794), On A Presumed Right to Lie from Philanthropy (1797), and Conflict of the Faculties (1798), as well as part of the Methodology of the Critique of Practical Reason and part of the Methodology of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) (“The Discipline of Pure Reason in its Polemical Use”).

Hegel on the sources of Kantian dualism

Absolute idealism, the philosophical movement that culminated with the work of Hegel, defined itself by its attempt to transcend the various dualisms that pervaded the philosophy of Kant. In Hegel's only complete, even if highly schematic, exposition of his system, the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817, further editions in Hegel's lifetime in 1827 and 1830), Hegel defined absolute idealism by contrast to what he called the “subjective idealism ” of Kant, which he described thus:

German idealistic thinking can be approached in many different ways, each of which has peculiar advantages and problems. According to the standard view, the German idealist movement is best looked at as a philosophical program that was developed in the wake of Kant's Critical philosophy with the intention of improving his transcendental idealism in various directions. The now-dominant version of this view has it that, starting with K. L. Reinhold, a whole generation of young German philosophers embarked on the project of arriving at new foundations for Kant's philosophy, of distinguishing what was taken to be the highly promising spirit of his philosophical conception from its rather poor literal expression by Kant himself, and of providing the missing premises for the conclusions of his theory. Although this project was approached from very different points of view by each of the main figures of that movement - J. G. Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel - there were some convictions that they shared.