German Idealism

Kant's successors — Fichte, Schelling, and above all Hegel — pushed his insight that mind constitutes reality to its radical conclusion: reality itself is the self-development of rational spirit (Geist). Hegel's dialectic traces this development through history — contradiction driving progress — making German Idealism the most ambitious philosophical system ever constructed, and the direct ancestor of Marx, Kierkegaard, and twentieth-century existentialism.

Core Ideas

Reality is the self-realisation of Absolute Spirit (Geist) through history

The dialectical method: thesis and antithesis are resolved in a higher synthesis

Freedom is the telos of history — its progressive realisation is history's meaning

The rational is actual, and the actual is rational

Received From

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Passed Forward

Existentialism & Nihilism →

Philosophers