German idealism
German idealism is a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with Romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment. The period of German idealism after Kant is also known as post-Kantian idealism or simply post-Kantianism. One scheme divides German idealists into transcendental idealists, associated with Kant and Fichte, and absolute idealists, associated with Schelling and Hegel.
Meaning of idealism
As a philosophical position, idealism claims that the true objects of knowledge are "ideal," meaning mind-dependent, as opposed to material. The term stems from Plato's view that the "Ideas," the categories or concepts which our mind abstracts from our empirical experience of particular things, are more real than the particulars themselves, which depend on the Ideas rather than the Ideas depending on them. In the context of German idealism, the term is ambiguous because it was used in different ways by Kant and his successors, chief among them Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.For Kant, our knowledge of external reality must conform to how our experience of this reality is structured by our own minds in the very act of receiving information or stimuli from it. When we abstract from the particulars, for example to discover physical forces underlying them or logical laws without which speech and thought would be contradictory or impossible, we merely "discover" the categorial or conceptual scheme which our own mind necessarily supplies to all our experience. We do not peer into the structure of external reality itself, as Plato believed. It remains forever inaccessible to us.
Kant's idealism is therefore "transcendental" or "critical", in that it examines the categorial structure of possible knowledge in order to trace all knowledge claims back to their foundations in the subject's own categorial framework. For example, Kant argues that teleological interpretations of homeostasis and autopoiesis in living things, though seemingly observable and thus empirically provable, are a function of our own subjective constitution projecting certain of its notions onto organized matter. Conversely, Kant makes the same critical claim about materialist reductionism, as it too is a function of certain "regulative" ideals. For the critical idealist, it is simply not possible to know whether living things are ultimately teleological or mechanical, or something else entirely.
Kant's successors agreed with Kant that the subject in its ordinary state lacks immediate knowledge of external reality, and that empirical knowledge based on sense data ultimately tells us only about the subject's own categorial organization of this data. But they often interpreted this Kantian limitation on ordinary knowledge as a challenge, to be met by a more complete theory of knowledge. Attempts at such a theory often centered on special forms of intuition which Kant either deemed impossible or denied as appropriate foundations for knowledge in the strict and systematic sense, for example in the case of "spiritual" insights that cannot be observed, shared, and tested reliably and repeatably, and thus cannot form the basis of abstract laws about regularities in nature.
In developing these claims, philosophers like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel further argued that the mind-dependence of all possible experience entails a form of absolute idealism, the position that the ultimate nature of reality is ideal or mental, as in Platonism. They often viewed Kant's transcendental or critical idealism as a necessary and admirable critique of philosophical "dogmatism," but as leaving the critique of knowledge unfinished, in an intolerable state of dualism, agnosticism, and even nihilism. The post-Kantian German idealists have often been described as monists, emanationists, and nondualists as a result.
History
's work purports to bridge the two dominant philosophical schools in the 18th century: rationalism, which holds that knowledge could be attained by reason alone a priori, and empiricism, which holds that knowledge could be arrived at only through the senses a posteriori, as expressed by philosopher David Hume, whose skepticism Kant sought to rebut.Kant's solution was to propose that, while we depend on objects of experience to know anything about the world, we can investigate a priori the form that our thoughts can take, determining the boundaries of possible experience. Kant calls this approach "critical philosophy". It is less concerned with setting out positive doctrine than with critiquing the limits to the theories we can set out.
There is, however, a positive doctrine: "transcendental idealism", which is distinct from classical idealism and subjective idealism. On this view, the world of appearances is "empirically real and transcendentally ideal." That is, the mind plays a central role in shaping our experience of the world: we perceive phenomena in time and space according to the categories of the understanding.
Theorists
The best-known German idealist thinkers, after Kant, are J. G. Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel. Critics of Kant's project such as F. H. Jacobi, Salomon Maimon, Gottlob Ernst Schulze influenced the direction the movement would take in the philosophies of his would-be successors.Kant
According to Immanuel Kant, the human mind is not capable of directly experiencing the external world as it is in itself. Instead, our experience of the world is mediated by the a priori categories and concepts that are inherent in the human mind. Kant calls these categories and concepts "transcendental" because while they are necessary to structure and organize an experience of the world, they do not provide direct access to the thing-in-itself, which is the ultimate reality.Kant's transcendental idealism has two main components. The first is the idea that the human mind is not a passive recipient of sensory information, but is actively involved in shaping our experience of the world. The second is the idea that the nature of reality is ultimately unknowable to us, because our experience of the world is mediated by the structures of our own minds.
Kant restricted the domain of knowledge to objects of possible experience. His three most notable successors, however, would react against such stringent limits.
Reinhold
In the German Mercury, Karl Leonhard Reinhold published, in the years 1786–89, his Letters on the Kantian Philosophy. He tried to prove Kant's assertion that humans and other animals can know only phenomena, never things-in-themselves. In order to establish his proof, Reinhold stated an axiom that could not possibly be doubted. From this axiom, all knowledge of consciousness could be deduced. His axiom was: "Representation is distinguished in consciousness by the subject from the subject and object, and is referred to both."He thereby started, not from definitions, but from a principle that referred to representations in a conscious mind. In this way, he analyzed knowledge into the knowing subject, or observer, the known object, and the image or representation in the subject's mind.
Jacobi
In his David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi addressed Kant's concept of "thing-in-itself". Jacobi agreed that the objective thing-in-itself cannot be directly known. However, he stated, it must be taken on belief. A subject must believe that there is a real object in the external world that is related to its subjective representation. This belief is a result of revelation or immediately known, but logically unproved, truth. The real existence of a thing-in-itself is revealed or disclosed to the observing subject. In this way, the subject directly knows the ideal, subjective representations that appear in the mind, and strongly believes in the real, objective thing-in-itself that exists outside the mind. By presenting the external world as an object of belief, Jacobi aimed to legitimize belief – or faith – in general.Maimon
influenced German idealism by criticizing Kant's dichotomies, claiming that Kant did not explain how opposites such as sensibility and understanding could relate to each other. As he clearly saw, this presented a serious skeptical objection to the Kantian project:By thus pointing out these problematic dualisms, Maimon and the neo-Humean critics left a foothold open for skepticism within the framework of Kant’s own philosophy. For now the question arose how two such heterogeneous realms as the intellectual and the sensible could be known to correspond with one another. The problem was no longer how we know that our representations correspond with things in themselves but how we know that a priori concepts apply to a posteriori intuitions.
Maimon attempted to resolve this problem by introducing the concept of "infinite mind". For this reason, Maimon can be said to have returned to pre-Kantian transcendent speculation. In the words of Frederick C. Beiser, "by reviving metaphysical ideas from within the problematic of the critical philosophy, he gave them a new legitimacy and opened up the possibility for a critical resurrection of metaphysics.
Schulze
In his Aenesidemus, Gottlob Ernst Schulze objected to Kant's critical philosophy as self-contradictory. According to Kant himself, the law of cause and effect only applies to the phenomena, not between phenomena and things-in-themselves. Yet, Kant directly claims that the thing-in-itself is the cause of phenomena.Fichte
After Schulze had seriously criticized the notion of a thing-in-itself, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in his 1794/1795 Wissenschaftslehre, produced a philosophy similar to Kant's, but without a thing-in-itself. Fichte asserted that our representations are the productions of the "transcendental ego", that is, the knowing subject. For him, there is no external thing-in-itself. On the contrary, the subject is the source of the external thing, object, or non-ego.Fichte claimed that this truth was apparent by means of intellectual intuition. That is, the truth can be immediately seen by the use of reason.