German Turn
in brief
Most Anglo-Saxons believe in a mechanical world of mechanical causation and logic and reason -- whereas the other guys are led by their feelings. But the Germans, following the British David Hume, realized that this was not so. We are all governed by our feelings, including the feelings that we don't even feel.
With Kant, the Germans believed that we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances that get processed by our brains into a theory of reality.
I maintain that Kant leads directly, do not pass Go, to the modern physics of relativity and quantum mechanics -- developed mainly by Germans.
I believe that Kant leads directly to German psychology, with Schopenhauer, Freud, and Jung and the theory of the unconscious. As I wrote
[Freud's] psychology develops naturally out of Kant's conscious ego, Fichte's impulsive ego, Hegel's stage theory of consciousness, and Schopenhauer's theory of repression.
What? Schopenhauer invented "repression?"
Then there is Wagner. His operas were all about characters in medieval romances, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Parsifal, and a rehash of the Nordic myths in The Ring of the Nibelung. Wagner was a fan of Schopenhauer.
And Nietzsche, who is often dismissed as "the Nazis' favorite intellectual." Nietzsche argued that for moderns, God had Died, and this meant a brutal process of decadence -- the dying off of the old order -- followed by nihilism, the terror of the eternal recurrence, as in the movie Groundhog Day, and finally the birth of a new god with the revaluation of all values.
Nietzsche's most famous work is Also Sprach Zarathustra, which is philosophy presented as a prophetic narrative.
Nietzsche imagined the Übermensch but I think that the new man will be a Sacrificial Hero rather than his egoistical hero.
Why is that? Because the German that came after Nietzsche was Jung. And Jung, along with Freud, reckoned that if we wanted to understand human nature it would help to look at the ancient myths in a new light: not as superstitions but as universal human experiences. Jung talked about archetypes and the collective unconscious. And one ancient archetype is the Sacrificial Hero. You know: Jesus Christ.
After Jung? The Frankfurt School, in particular Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. They recast the Marxian oppression binary of bourgeois over proletarians and made it bigger: mankind over the world. "Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards men."
Finally, there is Jürgen Habermas. He was a leftist, but one that had climbed out of the Marxian materialist world.
Thus, for Habermas, humans are not merely rational actors pursuing their strategic ends through the use of instrumental reason, as the Enlightenment and his teacher Theodor Adorno supposed. They also live in community in the world, the lifeworld of Husserl, with other humans with whom they communicate and develop moral agreement.