General principles of the German Idealism

German Idealism takes from Kant the idea of ​​a “Reason” master of the totality of being (God, world and man), which works to expose the coherence of Nature (or world). This mastery implies the autonomy and self-foundation of Reason vis-à-vis the sensible world and “things-in-themselves”. The mastery of the Totality is only conceived as “absolute knowledge” itself which can only be attained in an “intellectual intuition”.

It is important to distinguish between the theoretical principles common to all forms of German Idealism and its practical orientations.

Theoretical principles

The Principle of Identity

For Schelling, the world is an essential unity, there is no need to oppose the ideal world and the real world. Human and nature are only the two faces of one and the same being, the One, the Absolute. It is from the bosom of the Absolute that Nature and spirit are born, coexisting and developing in parallel in a perfect identity. The contradictories proceed from an Absolute “indifferent” to the objective and the subjective, from an undifferentiated unity. It is apparent that the rhythm of nature is the same as that of the Spirit; it is this thesis which is identified under the name of philosophy of the Identity which is neither the “I” of Fichte, nor the God of theology.

There is a difference between Schelling and Hölderlin that lies in their opposing understanding of “totality”. The first conceives it only as a simple identity while the other sees in it a living and temporal totality integrating in itself a process of internal differentiation . Nature is the name of the totality itself, of the process whole of differentiation which is at work in the universe and which includes in itself the human being and his productions.

The question of the system

Since antiquity, cosmology has called on the schema of the “system” to show the reciprocal dependence of the parts and to highlight the way in which through the idea of ​​Cosmos a coherent and whole is constituted. structured. The unveiling of this coherent totality is the business of method. A system is not defined by its completion and closure, but by the method which allows one to walk everywhere with confidence, such was for Hegel the “dialectical method. The idea of ​​system took on considerable importance in the 19th century.

With “German Idealism”, the “system” is no longer an outward ornament but “the expression of the totality of being in the totality of its truth and of the history of truth, it is the being itself” notes Martin Heidegger. What is at stake there is nothing less than the question of being, in an Idealism which is characterized by a “will” or a “claim” of System which stands out in the history of philosophy. In its formal quest, this question of the system, will confer on German Idealism, its unity, above the differences in temperaments of these protagonists.

The foundation

One of the conditions of possibility of existence of a metaphysical System resides in the highlighting of a foundation or principle self-constituted, unconditional certain and universal such as it will reveal itself in the variety of forms which the “Absolute” took in these thinkers of Idealism.

The dialectic

It is to Fichte that we owe the renewal of the dialectic which will dominate the minds for fifty years in Germany. Fichte who wonders how the unconditioned freedom he claims for the “Absolute Self” can be reconciled with the limitation imposed on it by the dynamics of the external universe. For the self to be able to posit itself as a total and infinite reality, the contradiction must be removed by the synthesis of the apparently contradictory terms by showing that each of them is true in some aspect. Far from being limited to a mechanical application of the principle of contradiction, the dialectic in all these thinkers will accompany a speculative impulse, in search of a sort of spiritual liberation, refusing to stop in the face of apparent contradictions.

In search of a total determination of the universe by the Self, Fichte describes the “human being” as pursuing his humanization through his knowing activity. Faithful in this to the Aufklärung, Fichte grants consideration to nature only as a material that can be shaped by human activity.

Constructing

With Schelling it is a question of “constructing”, which will become the common good of German Idealism, namely the different stages of history corresponding to the different “ages of the world” starting with the original age, of the world Eastern to the Greek world, from the Greek world to the Roman world and finally to the Christian world. It is not a question of an a posteriori reclassification of historical facts but of the opening in its essence of historical space and its dimensions, notes Martin Heidegger.

Practical guidance

Naturalism

Opposition to mechanicism

The attractions Newtonian mechanism experienced in the 18th century are wearing thin and giving way to a certain hostility. Against the Cartesian or Newtonian mechanism, Schelling considers nature as a whole which regulates the action of opposing forces which tend to mutual destruction: an offensive return to the ancient Ionian thought of a Logos regulating opposites. The development of experimental sciences in the field of life, electricity and magnetism raises new questions about so-called qualitative differences which it is quite impossible to give a mathematical expression.

Qualitative distinctions

Qualitative distinctions contradict mechanicistic explanations; the law no longer determines the movement. Unity no longer depends on the understanding which analyzes but on the intuition which perceives a relationship of forms.

The idea of ​​polarity and continuity of forms

The polarity is suggested by research on electricity and magnetism. The philosophy of nature learns from this that it is always to a conflict and a duplication of forces that movement and life in nature are due.

Organic principle

These thinkers, instead of presenting the things of nature as ready-made realities, waiting for experience to know them and determine their relationships, we see them as showing in themselves a demand for universality, of spirituality, which engenders its own forms by a progressive victory of interiority over the inert juxtaposition, the absolute exteriority of the parts which constitute space.

In Naturphilosophie, the earth is represented as a universal organism, mother of all others; it is with this image in particular that Hegel opens the study of organic physics; geology is, for him, a morphology of the terrestrial organism. For these thinkers, no problem is separated from other problems, no value from other values, to isolate a form of being is to condemn oneself to not understanding it.

Sense of history

The sense of history and tradition is an essential feature of this era. The thinkers seek in particular through a philosophy of nature to plunge particular beings back into the great current of universal life. From a theoretical point of view,  “we come to search throughout the history of Western philosophy for the idea of ​​system in its various outlines and its intermediate stages all centered and oriented on the absolute system” writes Heidegger. We owe to these thinkers a first perspective “on an internal articulation in the history of philosophy where the main eras will be distinguished according to their systemic character”.

From Kant to Hegel, the German idealist current has represented an astonishing flowering of philosophical systems.

Criticism

German idealism is decried by Marx and Engels for its ideological aspect: it seems to have lost all contact with the real ground of history and its practical dimension, for which they substitute those phantoms which are the categories of thought. Furthermore, and this is the problem with Idealism in general, the reduction of the real to our ‘representations’ ignores the embodied body and our relationship to the world. This last consequence was at the origin of a new criticism of which Nietzsche was the precursor.

Already the toughest disputes had taken place between the protagonists of this current. In the famous Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel lip servicedly mocks Schelling’s “absolute” beginning, either by internal revelation, faith, or intellectual intuition. He speaks about his “Absolute” of the abyss of emptiness and “night of black cows”. Schelling will reply in his Lessons in the History of Modern Philosophy, he will criticize the very rickety beginning of Hegel, and this final absolute which remains blocked, or else which condemns itself to always redo what it has already done, to turn into round, like a gyrovague, or like a noria.

(Includes texts from Wikipedia translated and adapted by Nicolae Sfetcu)