A brief introduction to the German Idealism
by Prof. Anders Moe Rasmussen, Philosopher at University of Aarhus¹

The main works of German Idealism, labelling the philosophical tradition from Fichte over Schelling to Hegel, lies more than 200 years behind us. Moreover German Idealism has been severely criticized by nearly all important philosophical schools in the past 150 years. We all speak about a decisive break in history of philosophy in the works of post- Hegelian thinkers ending a long metaphysical tradition. So not only has the texts, the motives, the concepts and the way of thinking of German Idealism become strange to us they have also become high philosophically dubious. This I think is the real situation of German Idealism within the international philosophical community today (maybe even in Germany) and to relive it is surely not an easy task but certainly requires hard interpretative work. Actualizing the philosophy of the German Idealist at least requires two things. First of all we must try to regain the common motives and urges of the German Idealists, that is the questions and problems that determined the way they thought and the way they deployed new concepts and new forms of argumentation. Secondly we must simply abolish some of the key notions and key methodologically aspirations of the German Idealists without giving up upon the general project. I will come back to this point a bit later.

The German Idealists were driven by many different motives, problems and questions as the philosophical systems of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel all are systems in their own right each with a very specific profile. Nevertheless it is possible to sort out some key motives common to all. That is the reason why German Idealism has been portrayed as a sequence of solutions to some common key problems and questions starting with Fichte and ending in Hegel speculative philosophy. I have absolutely no ambitions of engaging in the sport of the “From Kant to Hegel” literature, some of which are rather dubious. I just want to point to two problems or questions which I hold to of most vital importance to the Idealists.

Coming to the first of these problems we must recall that all of the idealists began their careers as students of theology. That is true of Fichte as well as of Schelling and Hegel. All of them were highly concerned about how to overcome religious dogmatism, religious life congealed in the dead rituals of the clerical institutions without thereby destroying religion. This revolutionary project of renewing religion and faith, imposing religion back into public life was an urgent issue for all of the young students and eventually the reason why Kant could be become the absolute hero for this new generation of philosophers. In Kant’s groundbreaking thoughts of freedom, autonomy and self.-legislation they discovered a decisive new way of thinking, a philosophy exactly suited to their ideas and projects of a new form of religious life. If anything had to be done after Kant it had to be about how to transform the Kantian notions of autonomy and freedom into practical life. Convinced about the overwhelming success of Kant’s overcoming of traditional theoretical philosophy all their energy was put into the ideas about freedom and autonomy and how to bring these ideas to realization. Now this was the project of the young idealist movement and up until this very day there are people who think that they should have stuck to that project. But they did not. Why didn´t they? Now to answer this question we must move to the second crucial motive in German Idealism.

As the young idealist movement grew older the call for a systematic and scientific philosophical outlook got more and more outspoken. While the key issue, that of freedom, remained the same the objective shifted from that of realization to that of justification or defence. This shift, I think, is due to a new awareness, a dark and gloomy awareness of the utterly unimportance of human life. Unfortunately I can´t go any further into this issue, but I really think that the possibility that the universe and we ourselves are ruled by anonymous forces totally insensitive to our most precious aspirations gradually became more and more real to the idealist thereby transforming the philosophical agenda. Justification and defence of freedom eventually became the new target of philosophical enterprise. To be sure Kant also had struggled with the justification of freedom as he, for years, tried to produce a deduction of freedom. Eventually this effort failed. The failure however was not fatal. All that mattered to Kant was the impossibility of a refutation of freedom and the so-called fact of reason, that is; the immediate moral awareness of a binding practical law. According to the idealists however such a solution to the problem of justification was simply too weak, in fact it was no solution at all and a solution had to be found and so they took up the very same project, that Kant years earlier had deemed unfeasible, that is the project of deducing and demonstrating freedom or, to phrase it another way, the project establishing a system of freedom (System der Freiheit). To the production of that end all of the Idealists allied with philosophies that Kant thought of himself once and for all to have conquered, e.g. ancient Greek philosophy but first all the monism of Spinoza’s rational philosophy delivered to idealists through the German poet and philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. In many ways German Idealism could be considered as an amalgam of Spinoza and Kant.

The Notion of Spirit
The concept of Spirit is often specifically associated with the philosophy of Hegel. And rightly so, as the concept plays a key role from his early writings up to his last works. Throughout all these years the concept of Spirit keeps a rather firm kernel of theological connotations unique of Hegel’s philosophy. It is often neglected but Hegel stands in a long tradition of critical theology including very different positions such as Reimarus´ vote for the teaching of Jesus, called “original Christianity” over and against the teaching of the apostles and Lessing’s attempts to transform the doctrine of trinity into speculative philosophical prose. However as important as the theological strand really is, the concept of Spirit in Hegel’s philosophy cannot be reduced to this theological background. One should rather say that the theological connotations are embedded in a wider meaning of the concept of Spirit operating in Hegelian thought.

Now what do I mean by talking about a wider meaning of Spirit? By this I mean a conglomerate of three concepts covering the core of all the German Idealists philosophy, a conglomerate of freedom, monism or systematicity and subjectivity or mind. While the programme of justifying and defending freedom should have the general outlook of a Spinoza-like monism the way to arrive at the system of freedom should be through the means of an investigation of the mind. As much as the idealists admired Spinoza’s system of immanence they radically rejected his traditional metaphysical vocabulary, thereby replacing the concept of “substance” with the new concept of subjectivity. So one of the fundamental accomplishments of post-Kantian idealism is that of introducing monistic philosophy into a philosophy of mind. This change, completely incompatible with Kantian philosophy, was made possible through Fichte’s new theory of the mind. While Kant thought combining to be the fundamental act of the mind Fichte introduced the act of opposing as the original act of the mind. This idea of Fichte came to be extremely influential both in Schelling’s philosophy and in Hegel’s philosophy despite their vehement criticism of and polemics against Fichte. Out of this enterprise of fusing monism with subjectivity three different monistic theories of the mind arise corresponding to three different systems of freedom. According to Fichte everything can be explained in terms of the mind thereby placing human spontaneity at the centre of the world. According to Schelling we should attend to the structure of mind by means of which it is possible to develop a new theory of nature being sensitive to human aspirations. According to Hegel we need to develop a method or a logical device to conceive of the peculiar structure of mind, a method capable of being universally applied to nature, society and history.

What About Kierkegaard?
Kierkegaard spent most of his life on attacking, criticizing and ridiculing the German Idealists. The project of Kierkegaard’s thinking seems in every possible way to be in the most strict opposition to that of the German Idealist an oppositions that may be illustrated most precisely by comparing the battle cry of the idealists “immanence and freedom” with that of Kierkegaard “transcendence and freedom”. According to Kierkegaard the idealist project of a system of freedom is not only a contradiction in terms by also the final defeat of all human aspirations.

Now the reason why Kierkegaard bothered so much and so deeply about German Idealism is that he himself was deeply involved in a project of freedom, but contrary to the German idealists Kierkegaard did not think that freedom was to be defended by means of a scientific demonstration, but rather by means of an illumination of the motions of subjectivity. Through an interpretation of the different courses of human life Kierkegaard wants to reveal freedom as the very essence of human existence. In Kierkegaard’s writings the notion of subjectivity and the notion of freedom are intimately linked as it is the case in German Idealism. Furthermore this linkage between subjectivity and freedom makes up what Kierkegaard denotes as Spirit. What separates Kierkegaard from the idealists is the idea of a scientific monism, in the eyes of Kierkegaard, representing the total lack of Spirit.

There is another striking parallel between Kierkegaard and the German Idealist. This parallel concerns the motives of their philosophical enterprises. As it is the case with the German Idealists Kierkegaard is opposing both dogmatic religion and the view according to which nothing in the world echoes human aspirations. As you know Kierkegaard had his troubles with the teachings of the official church being influenced by the same ideas of “original Christianity” that moved the young Hegel. The other threat came from a nihilistic attitude towards human life, in Kierkegaard’s words called the attitude of “Indifference” or lack of Spirit, a state of mind where the person entertains no relation whatsoever to himself, and characteristically enough Kierkegaard identified this attitude with the philosophies of the idealists.

Luckily we don´t necessarily have to choose between the idealists and Kierkegaard, or between Hegel and Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard makes a decisive point as he attacks the strict explanatory monism of the mind. We simply cannot repeat the idea about subjectivity being the universal programme of explanation and justification. That however does not mean skipping altogether the idealists investigations of the mind rather than we have to look for lines of thought where epistemological investigations of the mind correspond to ways of human living as it is the case not only in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” but also in Fichte’s philosophy where structures of the mind correspond to different courses of life. Here is a link to Kierkegaard’s existential investigations giving these a stronger theoretical foundation.

Pursuing such lines of thought it might be possible to combine subjectivity and freedom in a new way; to give a new answer to Kierkegaard’s question “What is Spirit?”; to develop a different kind of Philosophy of Spirit so badly needed in a time like ours, which tends to drift either in the direction of a nihilistic worldview supported by hard scientific evidence or in the direction of a new religious dogmatism.

G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831)
Hegel attempted, throughout his published writings as well as in his lectures, to elaborate a comprehensive and systematic ontology from a “logical” starting point. He is perhaps most well-known for his teleological account of history, an account which was later taken over by Marx and “inverted” into a materialist theory of an historical development culminating in communism. For most of the twentieth century, the “logical” side of Hegel’s thought had been largely forgotten, but his political and social philosophy continued to find interest and support. However, since the 1970s, a degree of more general philosophical interest in Hegel’s systematic thought has also been revived.

As an introduction I point to this reading² about Hegel. Another resource on Hegel is (in Danish) my own master-thesis, Identity and Reconciliation in Hegel, which is a good contribution to the understanding of the fundamental role religion plays in Hegel’s system (for download click here).

Other resources  on German Idealism

1. 1. Fichte
   1. 1. The North American Fichte Society http://www.phil.upenn.edu/~cubowman/fichte/
      2. Internationale Johann Gottlieb Fichte Gesellschaft http://www.fichte-gesellschaft.de/phpfusion/news.php
      3. PhilWeb: extensive list of primary, secondary sources; with links to Fichte-related websites http://www.phillwebb.net/History/NineteenthCentury/Fichte/Fichte.htm
   1. Hegel
      1. Collection of Hegel texts online http://www.hegel.net/en/etexts.htm
      2. http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/sefd0/bib/hegel.htm
      3. Hegel Society of America http://www.hegel.org/
      4. Hegel glossary: http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/texts/Hegel%20Glossary.htm
      5. Hegel by HyperText: primary, secondary texts, links http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/texts/Hegel%20Glossary.htm
      6. Hegel on Philosophy Pages: biography, list of primary and secondary texts, links to internet sources http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/hege.htm
   1. Hölderlin
      1. Zeno.org: biography, lots of online texts http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/H%C3%B6lderlin,+Friedrich
      2. Hölderlin Gesellschaft: www.hoelderlin-gesellschaft.de/
      3. Mythos and logos: biography, links, some primary and secondary online texts http://mythosandlogos.com/Holderlin.html
   1. Kant
      1. North American Kant Society  http://www.sandiego.edu/naks/
      2. Kant Gesellschaft http://www.kant-gesellschaft.de/en/
      3. Kant on the Web  http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/Kant.html
      4. “Immanuel Kant: Links” http://comp.uark.edu/~rlee/semiau96/kantlink.html
      5. Kant online: EpistemeLinks http://www.epistemelinks.com/Main/TextName.aspx?PhilCode=Kant
      6. Kant on philosophy pages: biography, list of primary and secondary sources, online links http://www.philosophypages.com/ph/kant.htm
   1. Schelling
      1. Schelling Gesellschaft  http://www.schelling-gesellschaft.de/
      2. PhilWeb: extensive list of primary, secondary sources; links to Schelling-related websites http://www.phillwebb.net/History/NineteenthCentury/Schelling/Schelling.htm
   1. Schiller
      1. Schiller Gesellschaft  http://www.dla-marbach.de/dla/dsg/index.html
      2. Schiller on Projekt Gutenberg: biography, lots of online texts http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/index.php?id=19&autorid=518&autor_vorname=+Friedrich&autor_nachname=Schiller&cHash=b31bbae2c6
      3. Schillers Werke in WWW: all of Schiller’s works, but requires subscription http://schiller.chadwyck.com/
      4. PhilWeb: extensive list of primary, secondary sources; links to Schiller-related websites http://www.phillwebb.net/history/NineteenthCentury/Schiller/Schiller.htm

1. This introduction was given at the NNGI conference March 2009 in Aarhus. The text can also be found on www.nngi.org [↩]
2. Its really not a video, I know. And by the way, don’t laugh when the english-speaking people – or not-german-speaking people – try to pronounce german names or words, they really try their best. [↩]