BEISER'S IDEALISM (3): Ditching Hegelian Legacies

Beiser now turns his fire most directly on what he calls the Hegelian legacy, and it is worth slowing right down over it because a lot of later misunderstanding hangs on the habits he is criticising. Up to this point he has done two things. First, he has argued that German idealism is not the glorification of the subject that many people imagine, but a long, messy struggle against subjectivism, that is, against the idea that we only ever know our own ideas and never really get outside our own heads. Second, he has warned us against reading the whole period through the myth of the absolute ego, as if everything were secretly about a cosmic Self revealing itself step by step. Now he adds a third warning. It says that we also have to liberate ourselves from Hegel’s own story about German philosophy, because that story still shapes how people think about Kant, Fichte, Schelling and the Romantics, often without realising it. 

To see what Beiser is doing here, it helps to recall that Hegel did not only write a systematic philosophy. He also wrote an enormous amount of intellectual history. In his lectures on the history of philosophy, in his prefaces, and in remarks scattered through the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Encyclopedia, he tells a very confident story about how thought has developed. That story has a clear pattern. It moves from earlier, imperfect, more abstract positions to later, richer and truer positions. It is very tempting to read that story as if it were simply the true history of philosophy written down, rather than one highly ambitious, highly partisan interpretation. Many nineteenth century readers did exactly that, and a surprising number of later scholars, even those who do not like Hegel, quietly keep his picture of the period in their heads. 

In that Hegelian picture, German idealism looks like a straight line. Kant makes a Copernican revolution by saying that objects must conform to our way of knowing them. Fichte takes away Kant’s leftover dualisms and makes the self more active. Schelling then brings nature back in as a product of the absolute. Finally, Hegel itself appears as the full, completed hero of absolute idealism, where spirit has come to know itself completely in a rational system. Everything before Hegel is preparation. Everything after him is either decline, relapse or repetition. This is what people mean when they speak of a teleological history of philosophy. Teleology means viewing history as if it were moving toward a fixed goal or end point, like an arrow aimed at a target. In the Hegelian story, the target is absolute spirit, that is, Hegel’s own system.

Beiser thinks this way of telling the story is harmful in two ways. First, it is philosophically biased. Second, it is historically false. Philosophically, it encourages us to assess earlier thinkers mainly by asking how well they anticipate Hegel. It turns Kant into an incomplete Hegelian, Fichte into a rough sketch of Hegel’s logic, Schelling into a confused transitional figure who cannot quite decide whether he is still subjective or already absolute. All of this makes it too easy to miss what these philosophers themselves thought they were doing. It turns their own projects into mere stages in a movement that they did not choose and would not recognise. Historically, it projects a later framework backwards. It treats the period from 1781 to 1801 as if it were written to supply material for lectures given decades later in Berlin, which is obviously the wrong way round. The Hegelian legacy also makes the whole movement look much more unified and inevitable than it really was. Hegel’s narrative smooths over the fights, the false starts, the competing directions. It gives the impression that German idealism really wanted what Hegel eventually supplied, namely a single, all encompassing system that explains everything. In reality, Beiser insists, the period is full of diverging attempts to solve a set of problems that were felt as urgent but had no pre given solution. There is no good reason to assume that the path that leads to Hegel is the natural or correct one. It is simply one branch among others. That is why, in his own book, Beiser does something shocking and leaves Hegel out. Beiser does not deny that Hegel is important. He simply decides that, for the specific task of understanding the struggle against subjectivism between 1781 and 1801, it is better to bracket Hegel’s retrospective story and look closely at Kant, Fichte, the early Romantics and Schelling in their own right. By stepping outside the Hegelian frame, he hopes to recover aspects of their thought that are otherwise constantly read as half finished Hegelianism. 

Beiser’s deeper target here is a certain habit in the history of philosophy that is not limited to Hegel. It is the habit of treating the past as a ladder, whose lower rungs are interesting mainly because they lead up to the place where we now stand. People sometimes do this with Plato and Kant, or with scholastic writers and Descartes, or with early modern science and Einstein. Beiser thinks that when we do this with German idealism we distort it badly. We start from the assumption that the main story is about increasing subjectivity, the inflation of the self until it becomes absolute, and then we search backwards for signs that fit this script. Anything that does not fit is ignored or dismissed as inconsistency. Take a simple example. Hegel’s reading of Fichte puts a heavy emphasis on the “I = I” formula, the idea that self consciousness begins by positing itself. This makes it easy to see Fichte as the philosopher of the absolute ego in an almost mystical sense. On that reading, Fichte is preparing the way for Hegel’s idea that spirit is the substance of reality. Beiser, by contrast, wants us to look at Fichte’s constant insistence on the reality of the external world, his struggle to make sense of resistance, nature, and the claims of other rational beings. Once we do that, Fichte starts to look less like an apprentice Hegel and more like someone fighting hard to avoid horror solipsism and to secure realism using resources that were available to him at the time. The same goes for Schelling and the Romantics. As soon as we stop viewing them as imperfect attempts at Hegel, their preoccupation with nature, with art, with the independence of the world comes into clearer view. 

Beiser also worries that the Hegelian legacy encourages a kind of lazy confidence. If you already believe that history necessarily moves toward greater rationality, it is tempting to think that whatever comes later must be better or richer than what came before. On that view, Kant’s pre critical writings must be inferior to his Critique of Pure Reason, and anything written before the Phenomenology must be, by definition, less adequate than what Hegel later produced. But actual intellectual history is rarely like that. Philosophers often abandon insights that later turn out to be important. They sometimes take wrong turns that obscure problems rather than solve them. Progress, where it occurs, is patchy and uneven. By rejecting Hegelian teleology, Beiser reminds us not to assume progress where it has not been earned. There is another, more specific problem with the Hegelian legacy that Beiser underlines too. It makes it look as if the defining feature of German idealism is the idea of absolute spirit. That is, it suggests that what holds the period together is a shared belief in a single, all encompassing mind or self that somehow underlies both nature and thought. This leads to the image of German idealism as a kind of secularised theology, where God has been replaced by spirit. Beiser thinks this is exactly backwards. He argues that if you look closely at the debates of the time, what unites the idealists is not a shared doctrine of spirit but a shared problem, namely how to avoid both sceptical subjectivism and naive realism. The talk of spirit or absolute ego is one way of addressing that problem, but it is not the only way, and it is certainly not the whole story. Paying attention to this point matters because it changes how we place German idealism in the broader history of philosophy. The standard Hegelian picture makes it look like the last flowering of a subject centred tradition that begins with Descartes and ends with a cosmic self. In that story, the next big development is the reaction against idealism, in which people turn back to the world, to language, to science, to existence. Beiser proposes a very different map. For him, German idealism is already a break with the Cartesian heritage, because it contests the very assumptions about self knowledge, ideas and representation that led Descartes’ successors into deep scepticism. Far from being the last stage in subjectivism, it is the place where subjectivism is most forcefully challenged. 

This also prepares the way for Beiser’s taxonomy of different kinds of idealism, which he develops. Once you release yourself from the Hegelian idea that everything is moving toward one final system, it becomes natural to recognise that “idealism” between 1781 and 1801 comes in several distinct forms. There is Kant’s critical or formal idealism, which tries to combine a modest role for the subject with a strong defence of empirical realism. There is Fichte’s more dynamic idealism, where the self’s practical activity plays a central role. There are the Romantic thinkers, who move toward absolute idealism, but with a strong emphasis on nature and art. There is Schelling, whose position keeps shifting and who experiments with several different blends of realism and idealism. On a Hegelian map these would all look like blurred steps on the way to one destination. On Beiser’s map they are different, often incompatible strategies for answering the same set of questions. 

Imagine you arrive in a town where there has been a long dispute about how to cross a fast river. One famous engineer has written a book claiming that there is really only one solution, namely a great suspension bridge downstream. In his story, all earlier experiments with rafts, ferries, small stone bridges and so on are merely confused attempts to move toward his grand design. If you accept that story, you will tend to look at every earlier structure only in terms of how well it resembles a suspension bridge. You will probably miss the fact that some people never wanted to cross at that point, or that some thought ferries were better because the river flooded, or that some insisted on staying on their own side of the river for good reasons of safety or principle. Beiser is saying that Hegel is like the engineer of the great suspension bridge, and that we shouldn't let that engineer’s pride control our whole picture of the town.

Once you grasp this methodological point, a lot of the detail in the rest of Beiser’s book makes more sense. For example, he spends a surprising amount of time on Kant’s pre critical writings, on obscure debates with followers of Leibniz and Wolff, and on little known figures like Jacobi or Reinhold. To someone raised on the Hegelian story, this may look like antiquarianism. Why bother with all these minor names when you could move quickly to the main characters in the so called great chain Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. The answer is that Beiser is not interested in the chain. He is interested in the network of arguments, in the variety of ways in which people attacked and defended the reality of the external world. Those lesser known figures are often the ones who make the problems most vivid. They supply ideas, objections and counter examples that force Kant and Fichte to refine their own positions. You cannot see that if you only care about how each position anticipates Hegel.

Another consequence is that Beiser’s history ends not in triumph but in what he frankly calls an aporia, that is, a kind of impasse. He does not pretend that one of the positions he describes solves all the problems. He thinks each of them has strengths and weaknesses, gains and losses. This is the opposite of the Hegelian spirit, which seeks a final synthesis in which every earlier position is preserved yet overcome. In Beiser’s view, what we actually get after two decades of intense work is a set of powerful but incomplete attempts to do justice to both mind and world. That is why his approach is an “invitation to eclecticism”. 

For contemporary philosophy, this reorientation has several payoffs. It frees analytic philosophers, for example, from the idea that engaging with German idealism means signing up to a full blown Hegelian system. Many analytic thinkers are interested in questions about realism, anti realism, the role of concepts in experience and the limits of self knowledge, but they are wary of grand historical metaphysics. Beiser’s narrative allows them to mine the period for arguments and insights without taking on a teleological package that they find suspicious. At the same time, it encourages those working in more historical or continental traditions to revisit familiar figures with fresh eyes, no longer assuming that their main meaning lies in how they prefigure Hegel. Most importantly, Beiser is a reminder to be suspicious of the very neatness of any familiar story. If a narrative of philosophical history looks too smooth, if everything seems to lead naturally and inevitably to one heroic climax, that is usually a sign that someone has done a lot of trimming. Beiser is inviting us to resist that trimming, to accept that the past was messy and that some of that messiness is philosophically fruitful. Far from making German idealism less interesting, this makes it more alive. It becomes not the tale of a great subject inflating itself to fill the universe, or of the emergence of a great Napoleon philosophy figure, but a crowded, argumentative conversation about how finite beings might know and inhabit a world that does not depend on them, yet somehow bears the imprint of their thought.