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Movement

German Idealism

The philosophy of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, which sought to overcome Kant’s division between the knower and the Absolute.

Also called Deutscher Idealismus

A movement of Modern philosophy

Introduction

German Idealism is the movement in philosophy that followed Kant, from the 1790s to the 1840s. Its central figures are Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, with the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the Romantics close to its beginnings.

Kant had argued that we know only appearances, shaped by the forms of our own minds, and that things in themselves, God and the soul lie beyond knowledge. He denied that human beings have an intellectual intuition, a knowing that would grasp reality directly. His successors sought to overcome the divisions he left between appearance and reality, freedom and nature, the finite knower and the infinite.

Fichte began from the self-positing activity of the I. Schelling taught an Absolute in which subject and object, spirit and nature, are one, grasped in intellectual intuition and shown in art. Hegel answered that the Absolute is not an undifferentiated identity but spirit, which comes to know itself through the long labour of nature, history and thought; the true, he wrote, is the whole. Few movements in Western philosophy have attempted so directly to think the unity of the knower with what is known.

History

Historical

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason appeared in 1781. In 1785 Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s letters on Spinoza began the “pantheism controversy”, which made Spinoza’s one substance a central problem for German thought. Fichte’s Science of Knowledge (1794) announced a system built on the I.

Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin had shared rooms as students at the Protestant seminary in Tübingen. Schelling, the youngest, became a professor at Jena at twenty-three, published his System of Transcendental Idealism in 1800, and worked closely with Hegel there until Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) marked their break. Hegel went on to teach at Heidelberg and, from 1818, at Berlin, where he became the most influential philosopher in Germany until his death in 1831. In 1841 Schelling was called to Berlin to counter Hegel’s influence; his audience included Kierkegaard and Engels.

After Hegel his school divided, and his thought passed through Marx on one side and British and American idealism on the other. Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche defined themselves against him. In the twentieth century theologians such as Paul Tillich returned to Schelling, and comparative philosophers to the parallels between German Idealism and Vedānta.

  1. 1781Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
  2. 1785Jacobi’s letters on Spinoza begin the pantheism controversy
  3. 1794Fichte’s Science of Knowledge
  4. 1800Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism
  5. 1807Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
  6. 1841Schelling’s lectures in Berlin

Major thinkers

Key concepts

Important texts

Convergence and divergence

Resemblance and difference, given equal room. Each note is marked with the kind of statement it makes.

Areas of convergence

  • Absolute, with Advaita Vedānta

    Scholarship

    Schelling’s Absolute, in which subject and object are one and which is known by an intuition beyond the division of knower and known, has often been compared with the Advaita teaching of Brahman as pure consciousness.

Areas of divergence

  • Māyā, with Advaita Vedānta

    Scholarship

    For Hegel the Absolute realizes itself through the world and its history, which are therefore essential to it; for Advaita the world adds nothing to Brahman and is, from the highest standpoint, an appearance.

Cite this entry
Chicago (bibliography)

“German Idealism.” Tradition. The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society. Last modified November 7, 2026. https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/german-idealism.

Chicago (note)

“German Idealism,” tradition, The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society, last modified November 7, 2026, https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/german-idealism.

MLA

“German Idealism.” The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society, 7 Nov. 2026, www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/german-idealism.

BibTeX
@misc{traditions-german-idealism,
  title = {{German Idealism}},
  howpublished = {The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society},
  note = {Tradition. Last modified November 7, 2026},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/german-idealism}
}

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