All Scholars

Karl Joël’s father and uncle, David (1815-82), were rabbis with a deep training in philosophy and many contacts within the intellectual circles of Düsseldorf. Karl took an early interest in Plato and began his studies in philosophy in Breslau under the philosophers Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) and Jacob Freudenthal (1839-1907).  For any student interested in philosophy at this time, Leipzig was the center of the discipline, still influenced by the system of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) and carried on by Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch (1802-96). Joël’s dissertation, written under the philosopher-psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), already showed his deep familiarity with Plato’s intellectual development and literary motifs. After 1887 he spent periods of time in Berlin, where he met the future sociologist George Simmel (1858-1918).  Joël completed his habilitation in Basel in 1892–93, supported by the archaeologist Ferdinand Dümmler (1859-1896), who admired Joël’s two-volume work on the two radically different views of Socrates presented by Plato and Xenophon. Joël proposed that the two portraits reflected on the one hand Xenophon’s practical unphilosophical approach while Plato’s is more true-to-life but affected by Plato’s own philosophy. In the year after Dümmler’s early death, Joël was appointed extraordinarius at Basel and in 1902 ordinarius. Though he was happy in Switzerland, he applied five times for positions in Germany to no effects, since Jews could not hold university professorships there. 

        At Basel Joël maintained the now outdated idealism of the Romantic era, which had by his time been replaced by Positivism and Determinism. This came forth in his early work on Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who had left Basel in 1879. The Romantic view of Greece formulated by Goethe and others at the time of the Greek War of Independence (1821-9), maintained that fifth-century Athens produced extraordinary citizens because of the cultural milieu, the high standards of achievement, and the opportunities to demonstrate excellence through competition. This model of independent thought, personal freedom, and excellence has never been repeated and was tragically lost, largely, in Nietzsche’s view, by the emergence of reason as promoted by Socrates and Euripides. For Joël, it was Nietzsche’s Romanticism that led him to insights into tragedy and the philosophy of Heraclitus. This comported with Joël’s adherence to the “Philosophy of Life” (Lebensphilosophie) movement that developed in Germany during his lifetime. It drew from Nietzsche’s and Arthur Schoepenhauer’s (1788-1860) rejection of rationalism and mechanistic approaches to epistemology. Joël traced this notion of philosophy back to the Pre-Socratics and stressed the importance of the freedom of the will against the prevailing determinism. 

         Joël’s lasting contribution was his history of ancient philosophy which was not a linear history but a Romantic interpretation based on parallels between Greek philosophy finds the mind and nature not opposed but continuous. He Idealism ran against the grain of his contemporaries and in an age of increasing specialization he used his philological and philosophical training to examine his field in broad terms. He opposed the then burgeoning study of psychology d on the Cynics. His final book, left unfinished at his death, was Wandlungen der Weltanschauung, whose subtitle translates as “A History of Philosophy as Philosophy of History” shows an alternating pattern in European philosophy between rationalism and naturalism or as he called it, “binding” and “dissolution.” His “New Idealism” as expressed in Seele und Welt (1912) stressed an organic, comprehensive approach to the understanding of organic life as the conjunction of nature and thought.  

        Joël wrote an early account of another Basel cultural historian (1843-55), Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97) in which he sets Burckhardt’s pessimistic conservatism within the context of nineteenth-century German philosophy. Ultimately Joël was seen as a forefather of the Neo-Romanticism of the early twentieth century.