Begin assessment
Tradition

German Idealism

Late 18th-early 19th century

The early 19th century philosophical tradition centered in Germany, focused on the relationship between mind and reality, the nature of self-consciousness, and the conditions of freedom.

German idealism ran from roughly 1780 to 1830 and concerned the relationship between mind and reality, the structure of self-consciousness, and the conditions under which freedom is possible.

Kant began it with what he called his Copernican turn. Instead of assuming that knowledge must conform to objects, he argued that objects as we can know them conform to the structure of our understanding, which explains how necessary knowledge is possible while leaving things as they are in themselves beyond reach. That last reservation is what his successors could not accept. Fichte tried to derive everything from the self-positing I. Schelling gave nature an equal standing. Hegel argued that the very idea of a limit to knowledge is incoherent, since to mark a boundary is already to have crossed it, and reconstructed the whole of thought as a developmental process arriving at self-knowledge.

The political stakes are larger than the metaphysics suggests. The tradition's central claim about freedom is that it consists in self-determination according to reason and not in the absence of external constraint. A person driven by unexamined impulse is not free merely because nobody is stopping them. Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1821) built an account of ethical life in which freedom is realized through institutions, through family, civil society and state, instead of against them.

After Hegel died in 1831 his school split, and the split mattered enormously. Right Hegelians read the system as underwriting the existing Prussian order. Left Hegelians, among them Feuerbach, Bauer, Stirner and then Marx, read the method as a solvent for it. The tradition's twentieth-century reputation suffered from Popper's charge that Hegel was an apologist for state power and an ancestor of totalitarianism, a reading most specialists now regard as caricature but which shaped a generation of Anglophone opinion.

Lineage

Descends from

  • Enlightenment Philosophy18th century

    Kant began it, and his successors pressed his critical turn past the limit he had set on knowledge of things in themselves.

  • Rationalism17th-18th century

    Kant was trained in the Leibniz–Wolff school and framed the critical philosophy as the settlement of its quarrel with empiricism.

Gave rise to

  • Aesthetic Philosophy18th century to present

    Kant's third Critique made the judgment of taste a philosophical problem; Schiller drew the political conclusion about aesthetic education.

  • British IdealismLate 19th-early 20th century

    Green, Bradley and Bosanquet drew on Hegel to build a distinctively British account of freedom, the common good and the state.

  • Critical Theory20th century

    The Frankfurt School read Marx through Hegel; dialectic, alienation and the critique of positivism come from that reading.

  • Dialectical Philosophy19th century to present

    Hegel's determinate negation and Aufhebung are the method, and everything later called dialectical works from or against them.

  • Marxism19th century to present

    Marx came out of the Left Hegelian split after 1831, which read Hegel's method as a solvent for the existing order rather than its justification.

  • PragmatismLate 19th century to present

    Peirce built on Kant's architectonic and Dewey was a working Hegelian for a decade before he was a pragmatist; the debt is structural, not incidental.

  • Phenomenology20th century

    Husserl's transcendental turn works in the space Kant opened: the structures the mind brings to any possible experience, described rather than deduced.

Provoked a reaction in

  • Existentialism19th-20th century

    Kierkegaard formed his position against Hegel — the insistence that the decisive questions are faced in the first person and cannot be settled by system.

Thinkers7
Thinker

G.W.F. Hegel

1770–1831

G.W.F. Hegel was a German idealist philosopher who saw the modern constitutional state as the highest realization of freedom — a dialectical vision claimed by Marxists, conservatives, and liberals alike

Thinker

Immanuel Kant

1724–1804

Immanuel Kant was the Prussian philosopher whose ethic of universal human dignity grounds modern human rights and whose case for republican government and a federation of free states inspired the League of Nations and the UN

Thinker

Giovanni Gentile

Giovanni Gentile was the philosopher of Italian Fascism whose 'actual idealism' fused individual and state, giving the movement its most systematic intellectual foundation

Thinker

Ludwig Feuerbach

1804–1872

The Young Hegelian who argued that God is humanity's own nature projected outward, and whose inversion of Hegel gave Marx his method.

Thinker

Friedrich Schiller

1759–1805

Dramatist and theorist of the aesthetic state, who concluded from the Terror that political freedom must wait on an education of feeling through beauty.

Thinker

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

1762–1814

The philosopher of the self-positing I, who lost his chair for atheism and then gave the Addresses to the German Nation that made education a weapon of national revival.

Thinker

Friedrich Schelling

1775–1854

The prodigy of German idealism, who made nature a form of spirit rather than its opposite, and whose late attack on Hegel opened the way to existentialism.

Related through shared thinkers6
Archetype

Social Liberal

2 shared thinkers

Archetype

Vanguard Collectivist

1 shared thinker

Archetype

Reactionary Strongman

1 shared thinker

Archetype

Civil Libertarian

1 shared thinker

Archetype

Classical Liberal

1 shared thinker

Archetype

Democratic Socialist

1 shared thinker

Back to traditions