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An Unnatural Attitude traces a style of musical thought that coalesced in the intellectual milieu of the Weimar Republic—a phenomenological style that sought to renew contact with music as a worldly circumstance. Deeply critical of the influence of naturalism in aesthetics and ethics, proponents of this new style argued for the description of music as something accessible neither through introspection nor through experimental research, but rather in an attitude of outward, open orientation toward the world. With this approach, music acquires meaning in particular when the act of listening is understood to be shared with others.
 
Benjamin Steege interprets this discourse as the response of a young, post–World War I generation amid a virtually uninterrupted experience of war, actual or imminent—a cohort for whom disenchantment with scientific achievement was to be answered by reasserting the value of imaginative thought. Steege draws on a wide range of published and unpublished texts from music theory, pedagogy, criticism, and philosophy of music, some of which appear for the first time in English translation in the book’s appendixes. An Unnatural Attitude considers the question: What are we thinking about when we think about music in non-naturalistic terms?

This book offers a bold rethinking of how modern ideas of life, nature, and subjectivity took shape in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century German thought. Moving beyond familiar narratives based on Kantian autonomy or Romantic irrationalism, it uncovers a vitalist tradition stretching from Herder to Schiller and Goethe, one that understood nature as dynamic, self-forming, and internally animated by life-force. Drawing on philosophy, the life sciences, and aesthetics, this innovative study reveals how these thinkers challenged mechanistic models of matter and resisted strict divisions between mind and nature. In doing so, they developed a historically contingent and embodied concept of subjectivity in which reason emerges from natural, cultural, and physiological processes rather than standing outside them. By situating this tradition within debates about epigenesis, form, and development, the book not only reshapes our understanding of German intellectual history but also sheds new light on contemporary debates about naturalism, posthumanism, and theories of life.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

An accessible reconstruction of Hegel’s attempt to derive all reality from a single concept.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, G. W. F. Hegel came to believe that philosophy was finally in a position to achieve something it had striven for since ancient Greece: becoming an objective, demonstrative science. But to achieve this aim, he thought philosophical knowledge needed to be reconceived in a radically new way—as content contained in a single concept just as the oak tree is hidden in the acorn.  In Hegel’s Sole Idea, Mark Alznauer reads Hegel’s mature philosophical system as the unprecedented attempt to comprehend the entire world as the full unfolding of that single concept, which he mysteriously calls “the absolute idea.” 

Ever since Hegel set out this program in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, Hegel’s system has been regarded as the last best hope of philosophy as an autonomous, fully rational science. But while Hegel’s followers regarded the Encyclopedia as the successful realization of the traditional aims of philosophy, his most influential successors thought it instead showed the exhaustion and collapse of that project. Hegel’s Sole Idea offers a comprehensive interpretation of Hegelian philosophy that allows a fair confrontation with its most provocative and ambitious claims.

Though many well-known German philosophers have devoted considerable attention to music and its aesthetics, surprisingly few of their writings on the subject have been translated into English. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, a philosopher, and Oliver Fürbeth, a musicologist, here fill this important gap for musical scholars and students alike with this compelling guide to the musical discourse of ten of the most important German philosophers, from Kant to Adorno.

Music in German Philosophy includes contributions from a renowned group of ten scholars, including some of today’s most prominent German thinkers, all of whom are specialists in the writers they treat. Each chapter consists of a short biographical sketch of the philosopher concerned, a summary of his writings on aesthetics, and finally a detailed exploration of his thoughts on music. The book is prefaced by the editors’ original introduction, presenting music philosophy in Germany before and after Kant, as well as a new introduction and foreword to this English-language addition, which places contemplations on music by these German philosophers within a broader intellectual climate.

Offering an innovative and illuminating new reading of Spinoza and Novalis

This rigorously researched study reframes our understanding of the intellectual currents in Germany around 1800 through a careful reinterpretation of its key thinker, Novalis, in conversation with Spinoza’s philosophy. Siarhei Biareishyk presents an alternative to the standard narrative that resolutely links emergent modernity and secularization to philosophical “idealism” by showing how Spinozan materialism informs the scientific experiments, metaphysical inquiries, and political debates of Novalis and his contemporaries. Shifting our focus away from the historical interpretation of Novalis as a mystic and theorist of subjectivity, Biareishyk elaborates on the Spinozan materialist strain in Novalis in three key domains: ontology and the conception of nature, theories of singularity and individuation, and the concept of the political. He brings current romanticist scholarship into conversation with contemporary discussions of Spinoza in continental philosophy, in the Marxist tradition particularly, demonstrating that the Spinoza–Novalis encounter provides a viable alternative—in its articulation of causality, dialectics, and the political—to the dominant conceptual apparatuses of both Kant and Hegel.

Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno both turned to canonical literary narratives to determine why the Enlightenment project was derailed and how this failure might be remedied. The resultant works, Benjamin’s major essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities and Adorno’s meditation on the Odyssey in Dialectic of Enlightenment, are centrally concerned with the very act of narration. Márton Dornbach’s groundbreaking book reconstructs a hitherto unnoticed, wide-ranging dialogue between these foundational texts of the Frankfurt School.

At the heart of Dornbach’s argument is a critical model that Benjamin built around the concept of caesura, a model Adorno subsequently reworked. Countering an obscurantism that would become complicit in the rise of fascism, the two theorists aligned moments of arrest in narratives mired in unreason. Although this model responded to a specific historical emergency, it can be adapted to identify utopian impulses in a variety of works.

The Saving Line throws fresh light on the intellectual exchange and disagreements between Benjamin and Adorno, the problematic conjunction of secular reason and negative theology in their thinking, and their appropriations of ancient and modern legacies. It will interest scholars of philosophy and literature, critical theory, German Jewish thought, classical reception studies, and narratology.

A masterful, nuanced, and novel examination of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is Nietzsche’s most famous and most puzzling work, one in which he makes the greatest use of poetry to explore the questions posed by philosophy. But in order to understand the movement of this drama, we must first understand the character of its protagonist: we must ask, What Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?

Heinrich Meier attempts to penetrate the core of the drama, following as a guiding thread the question of whether Zarathustra is a philosopher or a prophet, or, if he is meant to be both, whether Zarathustra is able to unite philosopher and prophet in himself. Via a close reading that uncovers the book’s hidden structure, Meier develops a highly stimulating and original interpretation of this much-discussed but still ill-understood masterwork of German poetic prose. In the process, he carefully overturns long-established canons in the academic discourse of Nietzsche interpretation. The result is a fresh and surprising grasp of Nietzsche’s well-known teachings of the overman, the will to power, and the eternal return.