German Idealism

6 Lecture Masterclass

“Nature is visible Spirit; Spirit is invisible Nature” - Friedrich Schelling

The philosophical movement known as German Idealism is arguably one of the most important periods in modern philosophy. German Idealism roughly spans from the 1780s to the 1840s.

The study of this period as a whole is pivotal for anyone wishing to understand Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin. German Idealism is also crucial for anyone wishing to achieve a more grounded understanding of accelerationism, Marxism, and 20th century phenomenology. Marx, Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, Sartre, and Nietzsche were all in different ways heavily influenced by German Idealism. If you wish to understand what is at the heart of the crisis of modernity, this course is for you.

German Idealism begins with Kant’s critique of reason and his new conception of transcendental idealism and finds its completion in Hegel’s Absolute Idea. 

German Idealism is not grey theory. It depicts rather an epoch in which the dimension of the human stands revealed most fully in all its spiritual glory. 

Thus, to study German Idealism means to delve into the cosmic-spiritual dimension of the human being and his Spirit.

A reawakening of Spirit brought about by Kant’s critical philosophy, which was nothing short of an earthquake - the presupposed unity of being and thought that had moved and sustained Western thinking since Parmenides and Plato was all of a sudden put under scrutiny.

Kant critiqued reason and favoured the understanding. Yet, it did not take long until three youngsters took the stage to articulate the Absolute Idea.

Through the popularisation of figures like Reinhold and Fichte, these three young thinkers came upon the quest to articulate the Absolute Idea again in a post-Kantian world.

Their attempt was to be able again to articulate what seemed unattainable for Kant: the cosmic-spiritual dimension of the human being and nature.

Those three young thinkers were Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel who, by an act of fate, happened to be students and roommates in Tübingen together in the late 18th century.

In this course you will learn the trajectory from Kant to Hegel across Fichte, Schelling, and Hölderlin. Central to our investigations via the primary texts will be the possibility of human freedom.

“Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.”

- Immanuel Kant

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- Giovanna S.

“I want to get across what the impact of studying these great thinkers via your courses has been. It's beyond instrumentalism and certainly beyond self-help. It's more a change in mental outlook which then changes the way one lives. For example, my outlook towards work has changed a lot. I am now much more about seeing work as right livelihood and trying to reserve my energy for the enjoyable creative projects I'm engaged with.” – James Simpkin

"Your teaching has brought about a profound change in my belief about the ultimate nature of things. Previously, I was a thoroughgoing materialist and empiricist. No longer. Put simply, there is something else going on which is beyond us, though we are part of it." 

- David Ashton, MD, PhD

Course Curriculum

The German Idealism course is an introduction to the path from Kant to Hegel, where we consider Kant, Fichte, (also Reinhold and Maimon), Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel and also of course their epoch.

Following Liebrucks I read Kant’s Critiques not as epistemologies (or even ontologies), but as groundbreaking logic: transcendental idealism refutes empiricism and rationalism (hence Kant does not synthesise the two) and provides with transcendental idealism an entirely different approach to thought and indeed to the unity of thought and being. Logic, for the first time, becomes that which orders experience, and is no longer just organon. 

Hence for Kant we focus on the Copernican Turn, the forms of intuition and especially the Transcendental Deduction (which means Justification in Kant! And not “deriving” the categories!) of the B edition and especially §16. This more than anything determines transcendental logic hence from here we proceed. Because as we can see here, Kant saves the appearances, as it were, but at a high cost: no longer do we have access to the being of beings. From here we can understand why Fichte really means the end of transcendental idealism. By Fichte we read his “Vocation of Man” and excerpts of the later “Doctrine of Science” to trace how Fichte brings transcendental philosophy to a conclusion. 

After Fichte we move to the German Idealists more properly speaking, Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel. We read their Programmschrift to understand what they were after from the beginning. 

With Fichte access to nature finally dies. And with Hölderlin we try to regain it. We read his poem “Die Muße” and investigate his poetic I/ego, a rebuttal of Fichte, as well as his notion of Ur-Teil (judgment or original allotment).

You may have seen some of my Schelling videos already, on evil, and more recently on Monotheism. In the course we consider his lectures on University Studies, what he means by “Bildung” and learning, what the role of the university is in the world to come, and then turn to his essay on human freedom, which presents amongst other things a fusion of realism and idealism, thus a bridging of the subject-object-dichotomy, an attempt at a return to the real that remains non-available or uncontrollable to the human subject.

And then, finally, we turn to the culmination of the period, to Hegel’s Science of Logic. To its presuppositionless beginning with pure being, what Hegel means by the Good Infinite as well as what Hegel means by idealism and the Absolute Idea — we wish to see how Hegel truly completes the Kantian project, since our experience is indeed shot through with categories (“This is so because X”; “He has changed quite a bit” etc.) but Kant fails to show how these categories are inherent in what is, logically, and also where the categories come from. Also, the Idealists all in their own way turn back to nature, through their Objective Idealism.