Abstract

Earlier in the century, Richard Kroner in Von Kant bis Hegel gave us an orderly reconstruction of the development from Kant to Hegel. He thematized German idealism sympathetically from the inside, aiming to present it in and for itself. But a writer such as Kroner prefers a logical march of concepts, thus paying comparatively less attention to the often strange empirical details of intellectual history. The danger is that with such a writer the school’s self-consciousness, its being-for-itself, might be a false consciousness, a being-outside-itself, a merely posited being-for-self, not a self-positing being-for-self, not a being-in-and-for-itself. Historical scholarship since Kroner has grown increasingly sensitive to the risks of over-schematization and the excessive systematization of history. It has come to be inspired by reverence for the original text, the scholarly thing in itself.