German Idealism

Few philosophers have been as decisive — and at the same time as badly misunderstood — as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. His name instantly evokes a formula, “thesis, antithesis, synthesis,” that he almost never used, and a vocabulary so dense that generations of readers gave up on the first page. Yet behind the difficulty lies one of the most ambitious ideas in the history of thought: that reality, history, and thinking itself obey a single movement, and that this movement can be understood. To understand Hegel is to understand what it means to think dialectically — and why, two centuries later, Marxists, existentialists, critical theorists, and political philosophers are still arguing with him. ...

Few philosophical traditions traverse the history of Western thought as persistently as idealism. From Plato’s Theory of Forms to Hegel’s absolute system, passing through Berkeley’s immaterialism and Kant’s critical philosophy, the claim that reality is ultimately constituted or conditioned by thought, mind, or spirit resurfaces in radically diverse guises. This article examines the major strands of philosophical idealism — their premises, arguments, and internal differences — and the decisive critiques levelled against them by Marx, Russell, and Moore. ...

What is the structure of reality? What truly exists — and what is illusion, appearance, or a construction of our minds? This is the oldest, most persistent, and most vertiginous question in all of philosophy. From Thales of Miletus, who in the sixth century BC declared that everything is water, to quantum physicists who now debate whether the universe is made of vibrating strings in eleven dimensions, humanity has never stopped asking: what is this thing we call reality? ...

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. ...

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling The most versatile of the German idealists; his thought passed through multiple radically distinct phases. He directly influenced Romanticism and anticipated Existentialism. Born in Leonberg, Württemberg, in 1775, Schelling studied at the Tübingen Stift alongside Hegel and Hölderlin, where enthusiasm for the French Revolution and Kantian philosophy shaped an entire generation. By his early twenties he was already publishing works of remarkable originality, and in 1798 he accepted a professorship in Jena — then the intellectual epicenter of German Idealism and Romanticism. That milieu made him a direct interlocutor of Fichte, Goethe, and the Schlegel brothers, cementing his reputation as the most promising philosopher of his age. ...

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770 and studied at the Tübingen seminary alongside Hölderlin and Schelling. A young enthusiast of the French Revolution, he saw in Napoleon — whom he glimpsed on horseback at Jena in 1806 — the “world-soul” on the march. After years as a private tutor, journalist, and school headmaster, he reached the chairs of Heidelberg and, above all, Berlin, where he became the most influential philosopher in the Germany of his time, until his death in 1831. His work is the most ambitious system in the history of philosophy: logic, nature, spirit, history, art, and religion articulated as moments of a single process. ...

George Berkeley An Irish philosopher born in 1685 and later the Anglican Bishop of Cloyne, George Berkeley produced his most important philosophical works while still very young, before the age of thirty. A man of faith and action, he even crossed the Atlantic with a project to found a college in Bermuda for the American colonies. He is remembered as the second great name of British empiricism, between Locke and Hume — and the most surprising of the three, for pushing empiricism to a radical conclusion: that matter does not exist. ...

Johann Gottlieb Fichte First post-Kantian to overcome the thing-in-itself. Founder of German Idealism; first rector of the University of Berlin (1811). The Addresses to the German Nation (1808) made him a symbol of German cultural nationalism. Of humble origins, Fichte came to philosophy through his reading of Kant, which he described as an intellectual liberation. His first work, published anonymously in 1792, was taken by the public to be a writing of Kant himself; once the misunderstanding was cleared up, his reputation was secured, and in 1794 he took the chair of philosophy at Jena, then the most vibrant center of German thought. There he developed the Doctrine of Science (Wissenschaftslehre), an attempt to refound the whole of critical philosophy upon a single unconditioned principle — the Ego — and to eliminate the dogmatic residue that, in his view, the Kantian thing-in-itself still retained. ...

Vladímir Soloviov Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (28 January 1853, Moscow — 13 August 1900, the Uzkoye estate near Moscow) was a philosopher, theologian, poet, and critic — the first Russian thinker to build a comprehensive metaphysical system and the founder of the tradition of Russian religious philosophy. The son of the great historian Sergei Solovyov, he was a friend of Dostoevsky and a central figure in the intellectual life of his time. His work cast its shadow over the entire following generation — from Berdyaev and Bulgakov to Russian poetic Symbolism. ...