From the Introduction to “Kahldorf on the Nobility in Letters to Count M. von Moltke” (1831)

Summary

The Gallic rooster has now crowed for the second time, and in Germany, too, day is coming. Ghosts and sinister shadows flee into distant cloisters, castles, Hanseatic cities and other remaining hiding places of the Middle Ages. Sunlight glitters, we rub our eyes, sweet light stirs our souls; life, awakened, rustles around us. We are amazed, we ask each other: – What were we doing in the night that just ended?

Well, we were dreaming in German fashion, that is, we were philosophizing. Not, to be sure, about the things which are of most direct consequence to us or that directly happened to us, but rather we philosophized about the reality of things in and for themselves, the ultimate principles of things, and similar metaphysical and transcendental dreams. The murderous spectacle of our neighbors to the west was at times really quite distracting, even vexing, since quite often French musket shot whistled into our philosophical systems and tore away whole pieces of them.

Curiously, the practical actions of our neighbors on the other side of the Rhine nevertheless had a certain elective affinity with our philosophical dreams here in tranquil Germany. Just compare the history of the French Revolution with that of German philosophy and you might really begin to believe: the French, who, having so many real responsibilities, needed to remain completely awake, asked us Germans to sleep and dream for them in the meantime, and thus our German philosophy is nothing but the dream of the French Revolution.