Modernity Phase II -- Estrangement

Horatio, Hamlet, and the ghost (Artist: Henry Fuseli, 1789)

Modernity Step 1: Questioning the Authority of Consciousness

1599-1601 -- Hamlet, Shakespeare
1605-1615 -- Don Quixote, Cervantes

1637 --  Discourse on the Method, Descartes




Modernity Step 2: Discovery of the Fundamental Estrangement of Consciousness from the World

1739-41 -- Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume.

Considered by many to be Hume's most important work and one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy.  

a classic statement of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Hume also offers a skeptical theory of personal identity.

Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon 

Hume introduces the famous problem of induction, arguing that inductive reasoning and our beliefs regarding cause and effect cannot be justified by reason; instead, our faith in induction and causation is the result of mental habit and custom. [WP]

Title page of the 1781 edition. Kant would later say that reading Hume "woke him from his dogmatic slumber."

1781 -- Critique of Pure Reason, first edition, Kant, 

the unknowable noumenon is often identified with or associated with the unknowable "thing-in-itself" (in Kant's German, Ding an sich).

1787 -- Critique of Pure Reason, second edition, Kant
1788 -- Critique of Practical Reason, Kant
1789 -- Beginning of the French Revolution
1790 -- Critique of Judgment, Kant
1793-94 -- The Terror 1804 -- Napoleon is crowned Emperor
1806 -- Napoleon invasion of Prussia

Hegel was putting the finishing touches to this book as Napoleon engaged Prussian troops on October 14, 1806, in the Battle of Jena on a plateau outside the city. On the day before the battle, Napoleon entered the city of Jena. 

1807 -- The Phenomenology of the Mind/Spirit,  Hegel. (Geistes="of the mind" or "of the spirit"). 

Spirit/Mind is the protagonist of this literary work, which is a history of consciousness

[one commentaor] famously interpreted the work as a Bildungsroman that follows the progression of its protagonist, Spirit/Mind, through the history of consciousness, a characterization that remains prevalent among literary theorists.

two distinct German terms: Entfremdung (‘estrangement’) and Entäußerung (‘externalization’) both originated in this work  [source]