German idealism

German idealism (German: Deutscher Idealismus) was a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked with both Romanticism and the revolutionary politics of the Enlightenment. The most prominent German idealists were Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who is considered the most influential figure of the movement. Other thinkers, such as Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Friedrich Schlegel, and Novalis, also made major contributions. The period of German idealism is one of the most intellectually fertile in modern philosophy, and its prominence has been compared to the golden age of philosophy in ancient Athens.

The movement is best understood as a manifestation of the modern demand for rationality and freedom. It originated in Kant's attempt to reconcile the empiricism of thinkers like David Hume with the rationalism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza. Hume's skepticism had challenged the core tenets of the Enlightenment, arguing that reason was subordinate to custom and habit and that free will was an "unattainable fantasy". All forms of German idealism sought to resolve the crisis of the Enlightenment by attempting to "save criticism from skepticism, and naturalism from materialism". Kant's transcendental idealism sought to rescue philosophy by asserting that the mind is not a passive recipient of sensory information, but actively structures our experience of the world through an act of "spontaneity". Kant's work, however, limited knowledge to appearances (phenomena) and left the nature of things as they are in themselves (noumena) unknowable.