German idealism

German idealism was a philosophical movement in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with romanticism and revolutionary politics. The predominant philosophers in the movement were Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Lesser lights include Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Schleiermacher. It is generally taken to have culminated with Hegel.

Background

Kant's work purported to bridge the two dominant philosophical schools in the eighteenth century: rationalism, which held that knowledge could be attained by reason alone –a priori, or prior to experience – and empiricism, which held that knowledge could be arrived at only through the senses. Kant's solution was to propose that while we could know particular facts about the world only via sensory experience, we could know the form they must take prior to any experience. That is, we cannot know what objects we will encounter, but we can know that they will be located in space, obey Euclidean geometry, and so forth. Kant called his mode of philosophising "critical philosophy," in that it was supposedly less concerned with setting out positive doctrine than with critiquing the limits to the theories we can set out. The conclusion he presented, as above, he called "Transcendental idealism". This distinguished it from earlier dogmatic "idealism", such as George Berkeley's, which held that we can only directly know the sensations and ideas in our minds, not the objects that they represent. Kant claimed that we know more. He said that we also directly know that there possibly are things-in-themselves, that is, things that exist other than being merely sensations and ideas in our minds. Kant held that the world of appearances is empirically real and transcendentally ideal. The world of things-in-themselves cannot be known as being actual, only possible. The mind plays a central role in influencing the way that the world is experienced. It is this notion that was taken to heart by Kant's philosophical successors.

Related Topics:
Eighteenth century - Rationalism - A priori - Empiricism - Space - Euclidean geometry - Critical - Transcendental idealism - George Berkeley

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Kant (1724 - 1804) is sometimes considered the first of the German idealists. At the other end of the movement, Arthur Schopenhauer is not normally classed among them, although he considered himself a German idealist and his work reflects similar themes. The Young Hegelians, a number of philosophers who developed Hegel's work in various directions, were in some cases idealists. On the other hand, Karl Marx numbered among them, and he professed to be anti-idealist, though history seems to speak otherwise.

Related Topics:
1724 - 1804 - Arthur Schopenhauer - Young Hegelians - Karl Marx

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Kant's Transcendental idealism consisted of taking a point of view outside of and above oneself (transcendentally) and understanding that the mind directly knows only phenomena or ideas. Whatever exists other than mental phenomena, or ideas that appear to the mind, is a thing-in-itself and cannot be directly and immediately known.

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