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.

Schelling

With regard to the experience of objects, Schelling (1775 - 1854) claimed that the ideas or mental images in the mind are identical to the extended objects which are external to the mind. Schelling's "absolute identity" asserted that there is no difference between the subjective and the objective, that is, the ideal and the real. In the book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, philosopher Ken Wilber called Schelling's thought "Plotinus temporalized". That is, Schelling transformed Plotinus' Neo-Platonic emanationist metaphysics into an evolutionary ontology.

Related Topics:
1775 - 1854 - Sex, Ecology, Spirituality - Ken Wilber - Plotinus - Neo-Platonic - Emanationist - Metaphysics - Evolutionary - Ontology

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In 1851, Schopenhauer criticized Schelling's absolute identity of the subjective and the objective, or of the ideal and the real. "...verything that rare minds like Locke and Kant had separated after an incredible amount of reflection and judgment, was to be again poured into the pap of that absolute identity. For the teaching of those two thinkers may be very appropriately described as the doctrine of the absolute diversity of the ideal and the real, or of the subjective and the objective." (Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. I, "Fragments for the History of Philosophy," § 13)

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