German idealism

Lore & Background

German idealism originated in Kant's attempt to reconcile the empiricism of thinkers like David Hume with the rationalism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza. Hume's skepticism had challenged the core tenets of the Enlightenment, arguing that reason was subordinate to custom and habit and that free will was an 'unattainable fantasy'. All forms of German idealism sought to resolve the crisis of the Enlightenment by attempting to 'save criticism from skepticism, and naturalism from materialism'. Kant's transcendental idealism asserted that the mind actively structures our experience of the world through an act of 'spontaneity', but limited knowledge to appearances and left the nature of things as they are in themselves unknowable. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel attempted to overcome this dualism while defending Kant's central insight that the thinking subject is a necessary condition for all experience. They responded to renewed skeptical challenges by pursuing a more rigorously systematic philosophy than Kant, with their characteristic ambition becoming the creation of a complete, systematic philosophy derived from a single foundational principle. Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre centered on the absolute 'I' or self-consciousness as the ground of all experience. Schelling's 'identity philosophy' replaced Fichte's absolute subject with a monistic 'Absolute' as the ground of both nature and mind. Hegel's absolute idealism rejected the foundationalism of his predecessors, arguing that philosophy must be a presuppositionless system that traces the self-development of 'the concept' to reveal the rational structure of actuality itself.

Reader's Guide

German idealism is distinguished by its exploration of the relationship between reason and reality, the nature of freedom, and the contours of modernity. Its legacy shaped the development of post-Hegelian philosophy, including the work of Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, and the neo-Kantians. In the 20th century, idealism profoundly influenced continental philosophy, and it has become an increasingly significant influence in contemporary analytic philosophy. The movement is best understood as a manifestation of the modern demand for rationality and freedom. It originated in the intellectual problem of the modern split between mind and world, or subject and object, that had structured philosophy since the 17th century, rooted in a longer historical process of secularization. The broader cultural context was shaped by the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason as the basis for legitimate authority and its promise of replacing premodern acceptance of unjustified authority with a modern commitment to rational justification and freedom.

Did You Know?

• German idealism emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
• The movement developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s.
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is considered the most influential figure of the movement.
• The period of German idealism is considered one of the most intellectually fertile in modern philosophy, with some comparing its prominence to that of the golden age of philosophy in ancient Athens.