The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers by Klemme Heiner Kuehn Manfred

Author:Klemme, Heiner,Kuehn, Manfred
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474256001
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

KRUG, Wilhelm Traugott (1770–1842)

Wilhelm Traugott Krug was born near Wittenberg on 22 June 1770 and died in Leipzig on 12 January 1842. He was the son of a tenant farmer. Having studied at the universities of Wittenberg, Jena and Göttingen and having habilitated with the dissertation De pace inter philosophos utrum speranda et optanda, he taught as an adjunct at the University of Wittenberg. In 1801, he was appointed professor at the University of Frankfurt/Oder, and in 1805, he became Kant’s successor at the University of Königsberg. From 1809 until his death, he served as professor and also as rector at the University of Leipzig. Krug wrote an autobiography, entitled Krug’s Lebensreise in sechs Stazionen von ihm selbst beschrieben.

Philosophically, Krug was primarily a Kantian, yet not an orthodox one. In his polemical writing against Fichte (Briefe über die Wissenschaftslehre), Schelling (Briefe über den neuesten Idealism. Eine Fortsetzung der Briefe über die Wissenschaftslehre) and Hegel (Der Widerstreit der Vernunft mit sich selbst in der Versönungslehre; Schelling und Hegel oder Die neueste Philosophie im Vernichtungskriege mit sich selbst begriffen) he largely defended the Kantian ‘new idealism’, in contrast to the ‘older idealism’ (of Descartes and Berkeley). Still, Krug also modified Kantian philosophy in certain respects by establishing a ‘system of philosophy’ which he understood as a ‘scientific totality’ (Fundamentalphilosophie, p. 32). As philosophy was for him a ‘science of the original regularity of the entire activity of the human mind, or of the archetype of the self’ (Logik oder Denklehre, p. 3), he defined philosophizing as a ‘contemplation of oneself’ (Fundamentalphilosophie, p. 13).

The complete Krugean system is composed of an ontology, as the fundamental doctrine, and theoretical and practical philosophy. His fundamental philosophy could also be named ‘transcendental philosophy, if only the use of this expression were not so vacillating and indefinite’ (Entwurf eines Neuen Organon’s der Philosophie, p. 101). In fundamental philosophy, Krug searched for the ultimate foundation of philosophy in consciousness as a ‘synthesis of being and knowledge in the self’ (Fundamentalphilosophie, p. 68). He distinguished between a principle of reality – ‘the self as object or knowledge’ (p. 60) – and a few ideal principles. He then tried to unite the material principle and the formal principle of the latter in the highest principle of philosophy: ‘I am active, and I am searching for absolute harmony in all of my actions’ (p. 93). Krug dubbed his new system transcendental ‘synthethism’, which is ‘such a kind of philosophy that adopts the real and the ideal (being and knowledge) as something prior (prius), incapable of further comprehension and explanation’ (Logik oder Denklehre, p. ix). Krug interpreted this inexplicable synthesis of the real and the ideal as an original fact of consciousness. Following the explanation of fundamental philosophy, he developed his theoretical philosophy, which included for him logic, metaphysics and aesthetics. Although his metaphysics had traditional chapters such as ontology, psychology, cosmology and rational theology, his view of metaphysics as ‘epistemology’ or ‘gnoseologia’ was quite unusual (Metaphysik oder Erkenntnislehre, p. 3.). Theoretical

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