GA61: Aristóteles, Lutero e o Idealismo alemão

[GA61  :7-8] [7] Against the scholasticism which was consolidated through the reception of Aristotle  , had passed through further transformations in Scotus and Ockham, and was simultaneously freed up in its vivacity of experience by Tauler’s mysticism, Luther   carried out his religious and theological counter-stroke. In the assimilation and development, as well as, in some cases, the dismissal of the new motives of Lutheran theology, Protestant scholasticism came to be formed. It was immediately nourished, through Melanchthon, by Aristotelian motives as interpreted in a certain way. These dogmatics, bearing essentially Aristotelian directions, constitute the root soil of German Idealism.

In that philosophical epoch, the decisive conceptual structures and the leading nexuses with regard to the apprehension and interpretation   of existence are, so to speak, laden with the just-characterized history of the spirit. Every serious investigation into German Idealism and, above all every fundamental grasp of its historical genesis   must set out from the theological situation   of the time. Fichte  , Schelling  , and Hegel   were theologians, and Kant   can be understood only in terms of theology, unless we would make of him the mere rattling skeleton of a so-called epistemologist. For any interpretation, we must remain conscious of the methodological significance of these nexuses, at least as admonitions to prudence. Here, and everywhere in the investigation of our spiritual history, Dilthey   possessed a sure instinct, but he had to work with insufficient methodological and conceptual means, and these precisely blocked his path to a radical formulation of the problems. Such nexuses in the history of the spirit must not   now seduce us to further considerations. We need to pass on to what is decisive.