Richard Schacht

Richard Schacht is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), where he taught for 40 years (18 of them as Chair of its Philosophy Department).  Born in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1941, and raised in Madison, he now resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His philosophical interests revolve around the general topic of human reality, and related issues in social, normative and value theory.   

Schacht has written extensively on Nietzsche and other figures and developments in European philosophy after Kant.  His books include Hegel and After; Alienation; The Future of Alienation; Nietzsche; Making Sense of Nietzsche; and, most recently, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy.  His edited books include three relating to Nietzsche and The Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy After Kant: The Interpretive Tradition.

Philosophical Biography

Schacht began his studies in philosophy as an undergraduate at Harvard, from which he graduated in 1963, with an honors thesis on “The Feeling of Guilt.”  (John Rawls was one of his examiners.)  They continued at Princeton, from which he received his doctorate in 1967, with a dissertation on “The Concept of Alienation.”  Prior to going to Illinois that fall, he spent a year at Tübingen University acquainting himself first-hand with his specialty, German philosophy, returning there during his first sabbatical.

His introduction to philosophy was through its history, and was the beginning of his enduring interest in the history of philosophy.  He taught the “Early Modern” course at Illinois for a time; and that resulted in one of his early books, Classical Modern Philosophers: Descartes to Kant (1975).  For most of his Harvard and Princeton philosophy professors, the history of early modern philosophy ended with Kant, and contemporary philosophy began with the advent of analytic philosophy a century later.

However, Schacht was also introduced to something else – post-Kantian European philosophy – by two of its most prominent (and very few) exponents in America at the time: Paul Tillich, at Harvard, and Walter Kaufmann, at Princeton.  Existentialism had attracted his interest early on; but he learned from them that there was much more to European philosophy after Kant than that and the neo-Kantian beginnings of analytic philosophy.  

With Hegel, a new and different tradition had begun.  Commonly referred to first (and derisively by analytic philosophers) in Britain and subsequently in America as “Continental philosophy,” Tillich called it the “interpretive” tradition.  Schacht was drawn strongly to it – and eventually to that way of referring to it.  As he soon learned, it was then little known but intensely disparaged in Anglo-American mainstream analytic circles.  It was to deepen and expand his knowledge and understanding of that tradition in particular that he went to Tübingen (where, as elsewhere in Europe, it was the mainstream of modern philosophy, and analytic philosophy the novelty).

 Hegel was disdained in existentialist circles; but Tillich had high regard for Hegel, Kaufmann did as well, and Schacht came to share it.  In the 1960s the concept of “alienation” – a key concept for both Hegel and Marx, and also existentialism – loomed as large in popular-intellectual circles as the idea of authenticity.  Kaufmann persuaded Schacht to make that the topic of his dissertation, which became his first book, Alienation (1970).  Alienation theory remained a major interest of his in the years that followed, and is an important concept in his thinking relating to the social dimension of human reality.  The result was a second book on that topic: The Future of Alienation (1994).  His interest in Hegel also broadened and deepened, as his appreciation of other aspects of Hegel’s thought grew.  That is reflected in the title of Schacht’s Hegel and After (1975), and in Hegel’s prominence in his Norton Anthology (2017).  

Thinkers and developments in the “interpretive tradition” in post-Kantian European philosophy have been Schacht’s primary focus in his teaching and much of his writing.  Hegel, Nietzsche, post-Hegelian naturalism, existential philosophy, and its rival “philosophical anthropology” are among the developments of particular interest to him.  But his own thinking, and his manner of dealing with these figures and developments, reflect his long exposure to and appreciation of aspects of the analytic tradition.

Concerns and Aims

Schacht’s appreciation of both traditions, and his conviction that they are deserving of parity in the history of Western philosophy after Kant, have long been evident in his work.  They culminated in his General Editorship of the Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy After Kant (2017) in two 2000-page volumes: The Interpretive Tradition and The Analytic Tradition.

Schacht’s fundamental aspiration throughout his career, beyond his own particular philosophical interests, has been to overcome the schism and mutual hostility within the philosophical community of partisans of these two traditions, that prevailed during much of the last century, and to some extent still endures.  

One of his challenges in the first decades of his career – that of “legitimizing” – was to convince philosophers in the Anglo-American analytic mainstream that at least some of what thinkers like Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger were doing should not be denied the name of philosophy, and has philosophical worth.  This has involved trying to show that and how it is possible to articulate aspects of it in an analytically comprehensible way.

This has remained among Schacht’s aims and efforts.  But it has been accompanied by the even more challenging and persisting task of an of (as he sees it) “rescuing.”  That for him means resisting the recasting of aspects of the thought of such figures in the interpretive tradition that turn them into something quite different than they significantly were, either to vilify them or to assimilate them to the philosophical fashions and interests of the day. His career-spanning work on Nietzsche is a case in point.