This is the fourth of five articles on Joseph Maréchal’s Le point de départ de la métaphysique. In the preceding articles, we traced the classical tradition of knowledge from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas (Cahier I), the conflict between Rationalism and Empiricism culminating in Hume’s scepticism (Cahier II), and the detailed analysis of Kant’s critical philosophy — the Transcendental Aesthetic, Analytic, and Dialectic (Cahier III). Now, in Cahier IV — entitled Le système idéaliste chez Kant et les postkantiens and published posthumously in 1947, three years after Maréchal’s death — we examine how post-Kantian idealism developed the transcendental turn inaugurated by Kant, carrying it to consequences that Kant himself had neither foreseen nor authorized.

The Idealist Dimension Within Kant

The Internal Tension of the Critical Philosophy

Before turning to the post-Kantians, Maréchal identifies within Kant a tension that serves as the driving force behind all subsequent idealist development. Kantian criticism simultaneously affirms two things — and they do not coexist without friction.

On the one hand, Kant maintains that knowledge is limited to the phenomenon: we know things only as they appear to us, structured by the a priori forms of sensibility (space and time) and by the categories of the understanding. The thing in itself (Ding an sich) remains unknowable — a negative limit marking the impassable boundary of human knowledge.

On the other hand, the very architecture of the Critique of Pure Reason reveals a constitutive role of the subject in knowledge that goes far beyond mere receptivity. The transcendental subject does not passively receive data: it organizes, synthesizes, and unifies them according to structures belonging to the mind itself. The categories of the understanding constitute the object of experience; transcendental apperception — the “I think” — is the supreme principle of unity for every cognitive synthesis. And in the Transcendental Dialectic, reason reveals an inescapable dynamism toward the unconditioned — toward the Ideas of the soul, the world, and God.

Maréchal observes: if the subject is this constitutive, what role remains for the thing in itself? If everything we know is the product of subjective synthesis, why retain an external reality that, by definition, never enters the field of knowledge? The tension between the criticism that restricts knowing and the constitutive activity of the subject that seems self-sufficient — this tension is the precise point from which Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel depart.

Fichte and the Wissenschaftslehre: The Ego as Absolute Principle

The Elimination of the Thing in Itself

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) is the first to draw the radical consequence of the Kantian tension. His Wissenschaftslehre (“Doctrine of Science”) begins with a direct question: if the thing in itself cannot be known, cannot be the cause of phenomena (since causality is a category valid only within experience), and performs no positive function in the system — why keep it? Fichte eliminates it. What remains is the absolute Ego as the sole principle of all cognitive reality.

The Three Fundamental Principles

The Fichtean system articulates itself through three originary acts:

  1. The Ego posits itself (Das Ich setzt sich selbst): the first principle is the self-positing of the Ego — the act by which the subject constitutes itself as subject. There is no substance prior to the act; the Ego is its own act of being.
  2. The Ego posits the Non-Ego (Das Ich setzt das Nicht-Ich): in positing itself, the Ego simultaneously posits what it is not — the objective world, nature, the other. The Non-Ego is not an independent reality imposing itself on the Ego from without; it is the Ego that, out of internal necessity, produces the opposition in order to come to know itself.
  3. The Ego and the Non-Ego mutually limit one another: within the absolute Ego, the finite ego and the finite non-ego reciprocally determine each other. Knowledge is the process by which the Ego progressively overcomes the limitations of the Non-Ego and returns to itself.

Maréchal’s Evaluation

Maréchal recognizes in Fichte a legitimate insight: the activity of the subject is constitutive of knowledge. Fichte is right to insist that knowledge is not a passive mirroring of the world but an active operation of the spirit. On this point, Fichte stands closer to Thomas Aquinas — for whom the agent intellect is an active power that illuminates and abstracts — than does the empiricism that reduces the subject to a blank slate.

But Fichte’s error, according to Maréchal, is decisive: by making the Ego the absolute principle of all reality, Fichte closes the system within immanence. The Non-Ego — the world, the other, God — is reduced to an internal moment of the Ego’s self-development. There is no longer any reality that genuinely transcends the subject. The result is a subjective idealism that, for Maréchal, contradicts the originary experience of knowledge as an encounter with something that is not the subject itself.

Schelling and the Philosophy of Identity: The Absolute as Indifference

Beyond the Subject-Object Duality

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) begins from a dissatisfaction with Fichte. If everything is posited by the Ego, how do we explain the apparent independence of nature — its regularity, its laws, its resistance to the whims of the subject? Nature does not behave like an arbitrary product of the Ego; it displays a rationality of its own, an internal organization that demands explanation.

Schelling’s solution is to posit, prior to the split between subject and object, an originary identity — the Absolute as the indifference of subject and nature. The Absolute is neither subject nor object, but the common root of both. From this identity, reality unfolds in two parallel series: the philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie) shows how the Absolute manifests itself in the progressive organization of the natural world — from inorganic matter to life, from life to consciousness; the transcendental philosophy shows how the same Absolute manifests itself in the development of human consciousness up to the intellectual intuition of itself.

Intellectual Intuition and Art

Schelling appeals to intellectual intuition — an act of immediate apprehension of the Absolute that transcends conceptual mediation — and to art as the supreme organ of philosophy: in the work of art, the conscious and the unconscious, the finite and the infinite, coincide in a living unity.

Maréchal’s Evaluation

Maréchal recognizes in Schelling a profound intuition: the necessity of thinking the Absolute as a ground that precedes and sustains the subject-object duality. On this point, Schelling touches something the classical metaphysical tradition always affirmed — that Being, as the first principle, lies beyond any particular duality.

But Maréchal’s critique is severe on methodological grounds: Schelling substitutes rigorous rational mediation with an intellectual intuition that can neither be demonstrated nor communicated discursively. The philosophy of identity proclaims the Absolute without furnishing the rational path leading to it. For Maréchal, metaphysics cannot rest on a mystical or aesthetic intuition; it requires a transcendental demonstration — an analysis of the conditions of possibility of the cognitive act that shows, with rigour, that the Absolute is implicated as a necessary condition of all knowledge.

Hegel and Absolute Idealism: Spirit Knowing Itself

The Dialectical System

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) represents, for Maréchal, the apex and consummation of post-Kantian idealism. Hegel takes seriously what was lacking in Fichte (the objectivity of the world) and what was lacking in Schelling (rational mediation), constructing the most ambitious system in the entire history of philosophy: absolute idealism.

The driving principle of the Hegelian system is the dialectic: every determination of thought (thesis) generates, through its own internal limitation, its negation (antithesis), and both are reconciled in a higher unity (synthesis or Aufhebung) that preserves what was true in each moment and elevates it to a more concrete level. This process is not merely logical — it is ontological: reality develops dialectically, and the structure of reality is identical with the structure of thought.

The Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic

In the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel traces the path of consciousness from the most immediate sensory certainty to absolute knowing — the point at which Spirit recognizes itself as the totality of the real. Each stage — consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion, absolute knowing — is a necessary moment in this self-development.

In the Science of Logic (1812–1816), Hegel sets forth the categorial structure of reality in its purity — the determinations of pure thought (being, nothing, becoming, essence, concept) that constitute the internal framework of all that is real. Logic is not an instrument prior to knowledge of reality; it is the very content of reality thought in its most universal form.

The Absolute, for Hegel, is not a static substance as in Spinoza, nor an undifferentiated identity as in Schelling. The Absolute is Spirit (Geist) — the subject that knows itself through the total process of its self-externalization in nature and its return to itself in history, art, religion, and philosophy.

Maréchal’s Evaluation

Maréchal considers Hegel the most serious and most instructive idealist interlocutor. Three Hegelian achievements are acknowledged as genuine:

  1. The seriousness with which Hegel takes the totality of the real: nothing is left outside — nature, history, art, religion, logic — everything is integrated into a unitary system. This ambition of totality corresponds to a legitimate demand of reason.
  2. Dialectical dynamism: Hegel understands that the real is not static but processual, and that reason advances through contradictions that are overcome. This echoes, in another register, the dynamism of the intellect that Maréchal identifies in Thomas Aquinas.
  3. The necessity of thinking the Absolute as subject: the Absolute is not an inert thing but activity, self-knowledge, life. This has affinities — which Maréchal explores carefully — with the Thomistic doctrine of God as Ipsum Esse Subsistens, Being that is pure act.

But Hegel’s fundamental error, for Maréchal, is the identification of the real with the rational (Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig). In declaring that “what is rational is real, and what is real is rational,” Hegel dissolves the transcendence of being into thought. Everything becomes a moment in Spirit’s self-development — and there is no room for a being that genuinely transcends thought. The Kantian thing in itself, already eliminated by Fichte, is now definitively absorbed into the dialectical process.

The consequence is that Hegel’s God is not the God of the classical metaphysical tradition — a transcendent, personal Being who exists independently of the world and of human thought. The Hegelian Absolute only realizes itself through the historical process; without nature and without human consciousness, Spirit is nothing. For Maréchal, this constitutes a panlogism that, despite its systematic grandeur, sacrifices the real transcendence of Being — and therefore the possibility of genuine metaphysics.

Maréchal’s Assessment: Achievements and Limits of Idealism

What Idealism Achieved

Maréchal does not reject post-Kantian idealism as a mere deviation. On the contrary, he acknowledges that Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel made explicit certain dimensions of the problem of knowledge that the classical tradition had treated only implicitly:

  • The constitutive activity of the subject: knowledge is not passive mirroring; the subject actively contributes to the form of knowledge. For Maréchal, this is compatible with — and even demanded by — the Thomistic doctrine of the agent intellect.
  • The dynamism of reason: the human spirit does not rest in any finite object; it is structurally oriented toward the Absolute. The idealists developed this insight with a depth that late Scholasticism had lost.
  • The necessity of thinking the Absolute: reason cannot function without reference to an unconditioned horizon. Attempting to construct a purely finite philosophy — with no reference to the Absolute whatsoever — is, as the idealists demonstrated, impossible.

Where Idealism Failed

But the idealist achievements are compromised by a fundamental error that repeats itself from Fichte to Hegel in ever more sophisticated variations:

  • Immanentist closure: by eliminating the thing in itself and making the subject (or Spirit) the absolute principle of all reality, idealism denies that anything genuinely transcends thought. The otherness of the real — the fact that things are independently of being thought — is sacrificed.
  • The dissolution of real being into thought: insofar as the real is identified with the rational (Hegel), or with the Ego’s self-positing (Fichte), or with the Absolute’s manifestation in intuition (Schelling), being — the Thomistic esse, the act by which things exist — loses its proper consistency. It becomes a moment of thought rather than an act irreducible to thought.
  • The denial of genuine transcendence: the God of the idealists is not transcendent to the world and to thought; he is immanent to the process of Spirit’s self-development. For Maréchal, a philosophy that cannot affirm the real transcendence of Absolute Being is not metaphysics — it is a logic or a phenomenology of spirit, however grand it may be.

The Involuntary Lesson of Idealism

The most important conclusion Maréchal draws from the idealist trajectory is paradoxical: idealism demonstrated, involuntarily, that human reason cannot function without reference to the Absolute. Fichte needed the absolute Ego; Schelling, the originary Identity; Hegel, absolute Spirit. None of them managed to build a philosophy without positing an unconditioned principle. But all of them erred in identifying that Absolute with thought itself — with the subject, with spirit, with reason.

The question that remains open is: can reason reach the Absolute without absorbing it into the immanence of thought? Can one affirm transcendent Being as a condition of possibility of knowledge — respecting Kant’s critical demands — without falling into idealist immanentism?

This is precisely the question that Cahier V sets out to answer.

Transition to Book V: The Thomistic Synthesis

Cahier V — Le thomisme devant la philosophie critique — is the heart of Maréchal’s entire work and the point toward which all previous cahiers converge. In it, Maréchal will carry out the synthesis that the historical journey has made both possible and necessary: he will show that the dynamism of the human intellect toward Absolute Being — the same dynamism that Kant acknowledged as regulative and that the idealists attempted to ground in immanence — is, when analysed from a Thomistic standpoint, a constitutive transcendental structure of every act of knowledge. The intellect can affirm any finite object only because it is structurally open to infinite Being as the horizon and condition of possibility of every affirmation. And this openness is not a projection of the subject — it is the recognition of a Being that transcends thought and that, precisely by transcending it, makes thought possible.

This is what we shall examine in the final article of this series.

Capa do livro O ponto de partida da metafísica - Caderno 1: Da Antiguidade ao fim da Idade Média: a crítica antiga do conhecimento O ponto de partida da metafísica - Caderno 1: Da Antiguidade ao fim da Idade Média: a crítica antiga do conhecimento Ver na Amazon → Capa do livro O ponto de partida da metafísica - Caderno 2: O conflito entre racionalismo e empirismo na filosofia moderna, antes de Kant O ponto de partida da metafísica - Caderno 2: O conflito entre racionalismo e empirismo na filosofia moderna, antes de Kant Ver na Amazon → Capa do livro O ponto de partida da metafísica - Caderno 3: A crítica de Kant O ponto de partida da metafísica - Caderno 3: A crítica de Kant Ver na Amazon → Capa do livro O ponto de partida da metafísica - Caderno 4: O sistema idealista em Kant e nos pós-kantianos O ponto de partida da metafísica - Caderno 4: O sistema idealista em Kant e nos pós-kantianos Ver na Amazon → Capa do livro O ponto de partida da metafísica - Caderno 5: O tomismo diante da filosofia crítica O ponto de partida da metafísica - Caderno 5: O tomismo diante da filosofia crítica Ver na Amazon →

← Articles