German idealism is the name of a movement in German philosophy that began in the 1780s and lasted until the 1840s. The most famous representatives of this movement are Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. While there are important differences between these figures, they all share a commitment to idealism. Kant’s transcendental idealism was a modest philosophical doctrine about the difference between appearances and things in themselves, which claimed that the objects of human cognition are appearances and not things in themselves. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel radicalized this view, transforming Kant’s transcendental idealism into absolute idealism, which holds that things in themselves are a contradiction in terms, because a thing must be an object of our consciousness if it is to be an object at all.
German idealism is notable for its systematic treatment of all major philosophical topics, such as logic, metaphysics and epistemology, moral and political philosophy, and aesthetics. All of the representatives of German idealism believed that these aspects of philosophy would find a place in a larger philosophical system. This system, according to Kant, could be derived from a small set of interdependent principles. Again, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were more radical. They attempted, inspired by Karl Leonhard Reinhold, to derive all aspects of philosophy from a single, first principle. Because the absolute, or unconditional, must precede all the principles that are conditioned by the difference between one principle and another, this first principle became known as the absolute.
Historical Background
German idealism can be traced back to Immanuel Kant’s “critical” or “transcendental” idealism (1724-1804). Kant’s idealism rose to prominence during the pantheism debate in 1785-1786. Kant had already published the first (A) edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1781) when the controversy arose (1783). Both works had their supporters, but they were met with unsympathetic and generally unintelligible reviews that conflated Kant’s “transcendental” idealism with Berkeley’s “dogmatic” idealism (Allison and Heath 2002, 160-166). Thus, Kant was interpreted as believing that space and time are “not actual” and that understanding “creates” the objects of our cognition (Sassen 2000, 53-54).
Kant insisted that this interpretation was incorrect. While the dogmatic idealist denies the existence of space and time, Kant considers them to be forms of intuition. Forms of intuition, according to Kant, are the subjective conditions that allow all of our sense perception to exist. Kant believes we can perceive anything at all because space and time are a priori forms that determine the content of our sensations. Kant’s “critical” or “transcendental” idealism merely identifies the a priori conditions, such as space and time, that allow experience to occur. It in no way implies that space and time are unreal, or that understanding produces the objects of our cognition on its own.
Logic
Because of the length and complexity of many of their works, the German idealists have earned a reputation for obscurity. As a result, they are frequently regarded as obscurantists and irrationalists. The German idealists, on the other hand, were neither obscurantists nor irrationalists. Their contributions to logic are sincere efforts to develop a modern logic consistent with the idealism of their metaphysics and epistemology.
Kant was among the first German idealists to make significant contributions to logic. In the Preface to the second (B) edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that logic has nothing to do with metaphysics, psychology, or anthropology, because logic is “the science that exhaustively presents and strictly proves nothing but the formal rules of all thinking” (Guyer and Wood 1998, 106-107/Bviii-Bix). Kant came to refer to this purely formal logic as “general” logic, in contrast to the “Transcendental Logic” that he develops in the Critique of Pure Reason’s second part of the “Transcendental Doctrine of Elements.” Transcendental logic differs from general logic in that, like the principles of a priori sensibility presented by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason’s “Transcendental Aesthetic,” it is part of metaphysics. Transcendental logic differs from general logic in that it does not abstract from cognition’s content. The laws of pure thinking as they apply to object cognition are contained in transcendental logic. This does not imply that transcendental logic is concerned with empirical objects in and of themselves, but rather with the a priori conditions of object cognition. Kant’s famous “Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding” is intended to demonstrate that the concepts presented by transcendental logic as a priori conditions of the possibility of object cognition do, in fact, make object cognition possible and are necessary conditions for any and all object cognition.
Reinhold claims in The Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge that Kant’s transcendental logic assumed general logic because transcendental logic is a “particular” logic from which general logic, or “logic proper, without surnames,” cannot be derived. Reinhold insisted that the laws of general logic must be derived from the principle of consciousness if philosophy is to become systematic and scientific, but Schulze disputed this possibility in Aenesidemus. Schulze’s critique of Reinhold’s Elementarphilosophie is centered on the importance Reinhold places on the principle of consciousness. Schulze concluded that the principle of consciousness could not be considered a first principle because it must be consistent with basic logical principles such as the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of the excluded middle. The laws of general logic appeared to be prior to the principle of consciousness, so that even Elementarphilosophie assumed general logic.
Following the rise of empiricism and positivism in the nineteenth century, as well as the logic revolutions at the beginning of the twentieth century, German idealism’s contributions to logic were largely dismissed. Today, however, there is renewed interest in this aspect of the idealist tradition, as evidenced by the attention paid to Kant’s logic lectures and the new editions and translations of Hegel’s writings and logic lectures.
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