German idealism

German idealism (German: Deutscher Idealismus) was 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 with both Romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment. The most prominent German idealists were Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who is considered the most influential figure of the movement. Other thinkers, such as Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Friedrich Schlegel, and Novalis, also made major contributions. 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.

The movement is best understood as a manifestation of the modern demand for rationality and freedom. It 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 is not a passive recipient of sensory information, but actively structures our experience of the world through an act of "spontaneity". His work, however, limited knowledge to appearances (phenomena) and left the nature of things as they are in themselves (noumena) 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.

German idealism is distinguished by its exploration of the relationship between reason and reality, the nature of freedom, and the contours of modernity. The movement effectively ended with Hegel's death in 1831, but its influence was profound and enduring. 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.