Beiser's Idealism (1): Introductions
The first time you open Beiser’s introduction to German idealism, it feels like stumbling into week seven of a philosophy course you definitely did not sign up for. Everyone in the room clearly knows who Reinhold is, they are nodding about the Opus Postumum, and you are still trying to pronounce Fichte. Names everywhere, titles everywhere, long sentences that assume you were quietly reading Kant in your teens. You feel, very quickly, slightly despised by the book. So, naturally, you despise it back. But if you sit with it, something else starts to appear under the avalanche. That is what I am trying to do here, to slow the whole thing down, to let Beiser keep his seriousness, while translating his set up so that someone who has not been secretly living in Jena can still follow the plot.
He begins with the brand name, “German idealism”. It sounds official, like a big DVD box set, complete with special features. But what exactly is in the box? Roughly, people use the name for a philosophical run that starts with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 and continues with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and some early Romantics. So what exactly is “idealism” supposed to mean here? Does it mean everything is really mental, that the world is just one very intense mind movie. Are we all floating around inside somebody’s consciousness like a German version of The Matrix narrated by Werner Herzog? Or is it something more delicate about how thought and reality fit together like in one of those scenes where people eat and drink ferociously whilst having delicate thoughts about everything that matters in a Hong Sang Soo movie? Whew! It's a heavy question and makes you want to stop thinking about it any more and go off to the pub for a beer.
Beiser's favourite characters are Kant, Fichte, Schelling and the early Romantics, Hölderlin, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel. He points out that, in English at least, we have shelves of books on Kant’s “transcendental idealism”, some serious work on Hegel’s “absolute idealism”, and then an awkward gap in the middle where Fichte, Schelling and the Romantics sit like forgotten middle children. The shape of the story is wrong, he thinks, the spotlight is stuck at the ends. His book is an attempt to drag the lamp back to the centre. It's like we picked up a book and read the opening line and the last one and thought we'd read the book. Read it all the way through, he says. Don't be so flighty.
He is very aware that he is arguing with older guides. One of the big ones is Josiah Royce. If you were an English speaking student learning about German idealism any time in the last century, you were probably, secretly, learning Royce. Beiser is polite about him, grateful even, but Royce’s version, he says, is brilliant, influential, but seriously misleading. Who does he think he is, handing us a finished picture when half the sources were not even published yet? That's Beiser's issue. To be fair, it is not Royce’s fault that he wrote before whole archives came out. Beiser’s point is simply that the time has come to tell the story again, with better manuscripts, less hero worship and fewer neat diagrams.
There is another thing that bothers him. For decades, modern philosophers, pragmatists, phenomenologists, existentialists, analytic types, all defined themselves against German idealism. They loved to say that they had escaped the big metaphysical systems, that they had cut themselves free from world spirits and cosmic egos. It was their villain origin story, like they were Batman and Idealism was Joker. Yet since the 1960s the villain keeps coming back, just like the Joker does in all the comics and films. There has been a revival of serious work on German idealism because all these modern schools want to understand what they were reacting against and so they cannot avoid going back to the idealists. The problems that still keep them awake, scepticism, relativism, the clash between different realisms and anti realisms, are exactly the problems the idealists were chewing over. It turns out that the thing everyone thought they had heroically killed is very much alive, still wandering around Arkham Asylum asking questions about knowledge and reality.
At this point you might expect Beiser to announce that he is about to reveal a completely new interpretation that will stun the world. He doesn't use stun tactics. Quite the opposite. He keeps insisting that, after two hundred years of scholarship, no one is going to say something entirely unprecedented about Kant and company. Instead he narrows the focus. He does not try to cover everything German idealism ever said about aesthetics, morality, religion, politics and so on. Instead he chooses a single thread and pulls. That thread is the meaning of “idealism” itself and, more specifically, the way these thinkers fought against subjectivism and tried to defend some sort of realism.
Subjectivism here is one of those words that sounds easy and then, when you unpack it, turns out to be a small nightmare. On the subjectivist view, our knowledge never gets beyond our own states of mind. We only ever bump into our own ideas or representations, and there is no bridge from that inner world to an independent world outside. The subject is locked in a circle of consciousness, pacing round and round inside their own head. If you have ever had the horrible late night thought that you might be trapped in a simulation or dreaming all this, you have met subjectivism.
Realism, as Beiser uses the word, is the opposite. It says that there really is a world existing independently of our minds and that we can know it, at least to some decent extent. It may not be transparent, but it is there full of resisting, and our knowledge can hook onto it. Beiser’s central claim is that German idealism is driven from the beginning by a reaction against subjectivism. Far from rejoicing in the circle of consciousness, these people are obsessed with getting out. They are trying to prove that there is an external world and to break out of the egocentric predicament, that eerie feeling of being stuck inside your own viewpoint with no exit. Escape the ego, they cry.
One of his bolder moves is what he does with the early Romantics. Usually Hölderlin, Novalis and Schlegel are pushed to the side, either as literary decoration or as a fuzzy bridge between Fichte and Hegel. Beiser more or less storms in and drags them centre stage. The Romantics, he says, are not a side show, they are crucial to the main plot. They are the real founders of what later becomes absolute idealism, with its talk of the infinite, its fascination with art, and its big claims about the unity of nature and spirit. Beiser says things that looked like side roads suddenly become the main path.
Then comes the really mischievous thing. Beiser does not discuss Hegel in this book at all. Not a page. For many people, “German idealism” basically means “Hegel plus a warm up act”, so this is like writing a history of rock music without mentioning The Beatles. It is not an accident. Beiser is deliberately turning his back on the “Hegelian legacy” which is Hegel’s own very self-flattering way of telling the story.
In Hegel’s version, everything leads up to him. The grand systems of the past are all steps towards his own absolute knowing, and once he arrives the curtain more or less falls. Beiser finds this both philosophically biased and historically lazy. He does not think German idealism should be read as a slow march up to a single peak, nor as a sad decline. No more “rise and fall” plot for him.
This is why he makes a big deal about teleology. Teleology is the idea that history is secretly moving towards a pre set goal, so that earlier periods matter mostly in terms of how close they come to that end point. Beiser refuses to play this game. He wants to look at each thinker on his own terms, to ask what each one gets right and what each one messes up, and to admit that the result is not a neat ladder of winners and losers. Sometimes a later thinker solves a problem and creates a worse one, sometimes an earlier position turns out to have a strength that the later ones lose. At the end, he says, all we get is what he calls an aporia or an invitation to eclecticism. We end up in a situation where no single solution clearly wins and where careful borrowing and mixing might be the only sane response.
Another important decision is his treatment of Kant’s late work, the Opus Postumum. These final writings are famously dense and often treated as an unread appendix, the sort of thing only specialists who can take density read. Beiser insists that this is a mistake. Kant’s last phase, he argues, shows such a big shift in his thinking that you have to face the density. For Beiser, the Opus Postumum is a bridge between Kant and the later idealists, which means it belongs inside the main story, not out in the footnotes with the hardcore Kantologists.
Beiser is very “historical and hermeneutical”. He wants to reconstruct what these authors were actually trying to do in their own time, with their own problems. Hermeneutics is the art of interpretation, and Beiser is on the side of slow reading. He prefers detailed textual exegesis to quick philosophical drive- by shootings. Because the texts have been read in such wildly different ways, he thinks fair criticism has to rest on the most patient and sympathetic understanding. He also says, quite firmly, that he is not going to plunge into wider cultural and political readings in this book. Not because he thinks culture and politics are unimportant, but because he thinks the basic philosophical content is still too disputed for those readings to be safe. If you do not really grasp what Fichte means by the absolute ego, any attempt to connect it to, say, nationalism, will probably go off in the wrong direction. So, for once, the politics can wait.
So far this is all set up. Then the introduction proper begins, and Beiser goes straight for a very popular story about German idealism, a story loved by both its worst enemies and its fans. According to this picture, German idealism is the final stage of the Cartesian tradition. Descartes makes the self and its ideas central, he makes epistemology, the theory of knowledge, the first philosophy. We know our own ideas for sure and then we have to fight our way out to the external world with careful arguments somehow. The standard story says that Kant and then Fichte, Schelling and Hegel simply push this pattern further. German idealism becomes the tale of the subject gradually inflating until it fills the world. Obsessed with self consciousness, it ends up turning everything into a function of the mind. Subjectivism becomes the hero of the story.
On this reading, German idealism happily accepts several key Cartesian assumptions. First, that self knowledge is absolutely certain. Second, that the immediate objects of cognition are our ideas, inner items in consciousness. Third, that knowing is essentially a kind of inner looking, a passive contemplation of mental content. Once you swallow all that, the conclusion is supposed to be inevitable. You end up with subjectivism, the view that the subject has direct access only to its own ideas and none to anything in a world outside the circle of consciousness. And the idealists, so the story goes, embrace this as the “ultimate bitter conclusion” of a hard truth, that we can never get beyond our representations to reality itself.
Solipsism appears here too, like a horror version of subjectivism. Solipsism says that I can only know my own mind, not other people or a shared world. The standard story says the idealists reject solipsism because they are not complete monsters but they do it in a very special way. They expand the subject into something bigger, a transcendental mind or universal spirit, which lives in all of us. This move widens the circle of consciousness to include everyone, but it does not break the circle. There is still no contact with anything beyond consciousness itself.
Usually this picture comes packaged with a neat historical narrative. Kant launches a second Copernican revolution, the shift from thinking that our concepts must conform to objects, to thinking that objects, as knowable by us, must conform to our concepts. This is transcendental idealism. The old opponent, transcendental realism, says that things are what they are in themselves, quite independent of how we know them. In the neat story, Kant half accepts his own revolution and half backs away. He keeps the thing in itself, an object outside our conditions of knowing, and he holds on to a dualism between understanding and sensibility. On his view, the mind supplies only the form of experience, the structure, while the matter, the raw content, comes from somewhere outside and remains stubborn and opaque. Then, according to the standard narrative, Kant’s great successors, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, come in to finish the job properly. They strip off the old metaphysical leftovers, the thing in itself, the given manifold, and they radicalise the creative powers of the subject. The modest Kantian I that simply unifies experience is blown up into an absolute I that creates nature and history. The history of German idealism becomes the story of the transcendental subject gradually taking over the universe.
Beiser looks at this whole structure, shrugs, and basically says, no. Attractive though it is, he thinks it gets the movement fundamentally wrong. His counter claim is the mirror image. The development of German idealism is not the completion of Cartesianism, it is its undoing. Instead of quietly accepting Descartes’s assumptions and pushing them further, the German idealists explicitly criticise them. They challenge the idea that self consciousness is immediate and infallible, that we know ourselves better than we know external objects. They attack the picture of knowledge as inner contemplation, and they reject the view that meaning lives in private ideas. They also contest the claim that we know ourselves first and others later. This anti Cartesian shift is not just a late Hegelian twist. It starts with the young Kant, becomes sharper with his first critics, and intensifies with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Instead of a triumph of subjectivism, Beiser sees an increasingly determined effort to escape subjectivism and to break out of the circle of consciousness once and for all. So for Beiser the Idealists are escape artists from the horror of subectivism. Their slogan is 'back to realism.'
To make this convincing he zooms out to the broader context. Since the 1760s, German philosophers had already been reacting against the “way of ideas”, that whole tradition from Locke to Hume which places ideas between mind and world. The Scottish philosophers were important here because of their common sense that said that our basic beliefs in an external world and other minds are immediate and should not be endlessly doubted. The way of ideas, with its insistence that we meet only our own ideas, seemed to slide into a sceptical abyss. If you only ever touch your own representations, how do you justify belief in anything beyond them?
Long before the high drama of post Kantian idealism, German thinkers were already trying to refute egoism and nihilism, doctrines which treat only our own ideas as real. Beiser’s claim is that German idealism continues and deepens this anti ideas movement. For Beiser's post Kantian idealists, proving the reality of the external world is a major, sometimes obsessive, aim. They hold that some form of external reality must be as certain as self knowledge itself. In this sense these Germans became Scottish.
Of course they do not all agree on what this reality is. For some it is the universal and necessary structure of space. For others it is the thing in itself, or a single substance, or eternal archetypes in a Platonic sense, or nature understood as an absolute. They disagree violently over the details, but they share the conviction that whatever this reality is, it exists independently of any individual human consciousness.
Seen in this light, the internal history of German idealism looks different. One form of idealism gives way to another not because the later one is more subjective, but because its less. Kant rejects the empirical idealism of Leibniz and Berkeley because it makes objects in space too shadowy. Fichte becomes dissatisfied with Kant’s transcendental idealism because he thinks it still does not secure empirical realism firmly enough. The Romantics and Schelling then criticise Fichte’s ethical idealism because they see it as still trapping the ego inside the circle. At each stage, the driving impulse is the search for more realism and, in later stages, for a richer naturalism, a view in which nature has its own robust reality and dynamism. Here Beiser introduces one of his more technical distinctions. He separates critical or formal idealism, on the one hand, from absolute idealism, on the other. Critical or formal idealism, which he finds in Kant and Fichte, insists on the empirical reality of objects in space but limits the understanding to giving form, the structural framework of experience. It postulates some independent reality as the source of the matter, the content. This may be Kant’s thing in itself or Fichte’s resisting not I.
The absolute idealists, Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel, Schelling, Hegel, think this halfway position is unstable. They offer what Beiser calls a higher realism that postulates the absolute, the infinite reality of nature. Instead of treating nature as a projection of the subject, they reverse the relation. The subject is derived from nature, not the other way round. Human reason becomes the highest manifestation of powers already at work in nature itself. The Kantian subject is no longer the sovereign creator but a late, sophisticated expression of something older and larger in nature.
After this, Beiser turns to his second big target, which he labels “exorcising the spirit” like he's a version of one of those Catholic priests battling a demon that's invaded a person. The “spirit” in question is the idea of an infinite self, a universal spirit or absolute ego that has often been treated as the sacred key to German philosophy. Many commentators have read the whole of German idealism as the slow unveiling of this absolute self, the story of how it becomes fully aware of itself. Some theologians have taken this to be a description of how God works too. The inner drama of self consciousness is supposed to repeat itself in the outer history of the movement. On that reading, the plot begins with Kant saying we must have a unity of apperception, so that “I think” must be able to accompany all my representations. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are then said to uncover the deeper metaphysical meaning of this rather dry principle. They strip away all individual features, argue that the self which is the condition of experience cannot itself be just one object in the world, then they turn the transcendental self into an underlying entity or activity, and finally they transform it into the creator of both form and content in reality. The modest Kantian “I” becomes a kind of world creating agent, a single universal self that generates nature and history. On this account, German idealism looks like Christian theology in a sexy black dress. Where theology spoke of an infinite divine mind that creates and governs the world, philosophy now speaks of the absolute ego. The history of the absolute self replaces the history of salvation. God has been rebranded as a transcendental subject.
Beiser thinks this whole myth has to be expelled if we want to understand what the idealists were really doing. He does not deny that the language of the infinite self and absolute spirit appears all over their texts. It does. He does not deny that Fichte, Schelling and Hegel sometimes tell grand stories about self consciousness either. They do. His point is that if you put those passages back into their historical context and read them alongside the constant concern with getting realism and naturalism, the meaning of idealism changes. Instead of a religion of the subject, German idealism looks more like a very ambitious attempt to reconcile self consciousness with a robust, independent world, to heal the split between mind and nature without flattening one into the other.
In the end, Beiser is inviting us to let go of the easy clichés. Idealism does not mean that everything is “in the head”. It can mean that the world is intelligible, that there is a rational structure shared by thought and reality, and that this shared structure allows for genuine knowledge of an independent world. At the same time, he keeps reminding us that there is no single doctrine called “German idealism”. There is a family of related, often quarrelling positions, all obsessed with the same deep problems. If we follow Beiser’s lead, we stop treating them as characters in a tidy drama that ends with Hegel and collapse. Instead we see a set of serious, often surprising attempts to work out what it means for finite subjects like us to know and live in a world that does not depend on us.