Forefathers and Other Ancestral Figures

Abstract

The biggest outrage that the malign masters perpetrated against their fathers was to return surreptitiously to their philosophical enemies, the great Idealists. The fathers believed that they had fought a long and finally victorious battle against the influence of Idealism and that it would never resurface. Russell, Husserl and Weber thought that they had put paid to Idealism in their youth. And even Croce, who belatedly came to Hegel at a late stage, held that only some limited aspects of Hegelianism could be kept alive; the rest was ‘dead’. Little did they suspect that their sons harboured hidden affinities for the Idealism which would become so patently apparent in their primary masterworks. Thus Wittgenstein revived Schopenhauer, Heidegger recovered Schelling and Lukács and Gentile reworked Left and Right Hegelianism respectively, together with relevant aspects of Fichte.