Philosophy in the second half of the 19th century

The middle of the century saw the end of all the hopes, more or less sincere, that were placed in the great philosophical and social constructions. The second period opened which lasted until around 1890.

The general theme of thought in the preceding period had been a sort of justification of nature and history as conditions for the advent of a higher reality, whether called Spirit, Geist, Liberty, Humanity, Harmony or by any other name: determinism, rigorous, or , if you like, the law of uncontrollable development that a Count, a Hegel, even a Schopenhauer admit in things is compensated in their eyes by the freedom which is its origin; freedom indissolubly linked to necessity, whether it is awareness of this necessity, as with Hegel and to some extent with Comte, except whether it is the negation and deliverance of it, according to Schopenhauer. The conventional romantic hero is a passionate person who finds in his fatal ardor hell and heaven, damnation and redemption; philosophical thought at that time felt the same fever, an ultimate expression of which is found in the letter, so singularly literary, from Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendpnck: “When your magical, sacred eyes are fixed on me and I absorbed in them, at this moment there is no longer either subject or object, at this moment everything merges and forms only an infinite and profound harmony.”

In this harmony, we now feel a break; we seem to have lost the intuition of this profound unity; thought, more sober, poses alternatives whose terms is no longer a question of uniting, between which the understanding is forced to choose. For example, the living wing of the Hegelian part, left Hegelianism, that of Feuerbach and Karl Marx, retains above all from the master the idea of the necessity of the social process, and ends in materialism; and we must not accuse Taine of incomprehension when he brings back from his reading of Hegel the idea of a determinism where all the phenomena of the mind are reduced to a Volksgeist, and this one itself to the influence of the physical environment; Taine does not read Hegel differently than he was read in his time. Conversely, this era saw the birth, with the end of the desire for conciliation at all costs, the philosophy of freedom, in two very different forms, with Renouvier and with Secrétan; in the first especially, freedom, as free will, far from consummating necessity, from being a necessity which accepts itself, is a rupture of determinism defined in short by a pure negation; and the historical work of humanity is made up of all the unpredictable initiatives of individuals who have no other law than that which reason gives to their free will.