Early modern Europe · 1790s – 1840s
German Idealism
Reality is not a heap of dead things but the self-unfolding activity of reason or spirit, which comes to know itself through nature and history.
If the mind shapes experience, can it also know the absolute?
Kant left two gaps: unknowable “things in themselves” behind appearances, and a split between nature ruled by necessity and humans as free moral agents. Young philosophers of the 1790s, stirred by the French Revolution and a revival of interest in Spinoza, set out to close these gaps with a single system grounded in freedom.
If the thing in itself is unknowable, we have no right even to say it exists; so the forms of thought are not merely ours but the forms of reality. Fichte began from the self’s free activity, Schelling from an absolute in which nature and mind are one, and Hegel argued that reality is a rational process that develops through contradictions, each position revealing its limits and being overcome, until spirit understands itself.
- What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational.
- Truth unfolds historically through contradiction and its resolution.
- Freedom is realised in social institutions, not in isolated individuals.
Hegel’s dialectic passed, turned upside down, to Marx, and provoked Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer; British Idealism ruled Oxford until Russell and Moore revolted against it.
Thinkers
1762–1814Johann Gottlieb FichteGerman idealist who grounded all knowledge in the self’s activity1775–1854Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph SchellingGerman idealist philosopher of nature, art and freedom1770–1831Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelGerman philosopher of spirit, history and dialecticKey texts
Where it came from
Grew out ofKant’s critical philosophyFichte, Schelling and Hegel set out to complete Kant’s critical philosophy by removing the unknowable thing in itself and deriving everything from a single principle.Grew out of
RationalismThe 1785 “pantheism controversy” over Spinoza made his one-substance monism a model for the idealists’ absolute.
What it led to
Carried on byMarxismMarx kept Hegel’s dialectic of contradiction but grounded it in material production instead of Spirit.Opposed by
ExistentialismKierkegaard rejected Hegel’s all-explaining system in the name of the single individual who must choose.Carried on by
PragmatismDewey began as a Hegelian and kept Hegel’s sense of thought as a developing, social process, recast in Darwinian terms.Opposed by
Early analytic philosophyRussell and Moore launched analytic philosophy by rejecting the Hegel-inspired British idealism of Bradley and McTaggart.Borrowed by
Kyoto SchoolHegel’s dialectic and Fichte’s self-positing ego were constant partners and foils for Nishida’s and Tanabe’s logics.