Topic summary
Post-Kantian
Extracted from the Wikipedia article German idealism.
Post-Kantian idealism
The reception of Kant's philosophy was profoundly shaped by the French Revolution. The "all-destroying" Kant was seen as the philosophical equivalent of the Jacobins, and his call for autonomy was understood as a call for a political and social revolution in Germany. His philosophy provided a new vocabulary for expressing the "dual consciousness" of the modern subject, torn between a deterministic empirical self and a free, noumenal self. However, Kant's philosophy also left behind a crucial dualism between the phenomenal world of appearances and the unknowable noumenal world of things-in-themselves. This distinction became a central point of contention for his successors, who felt that Kant's critique was "not critical enough". If the thing-in-itself is truly unknowable, skeptics argued, then one cannot even claim that it exists or that it "affects" the senses to produce our experience. This problem threatened to collapse transcendental idealism back into a form of subjective idealism, where only minds and their ideas exist.