Beiser's Romantics

Having read Beiser on Fichte, I now turn to his account of the Romantics. He moves from Fichte to a new generation who thought his philosophy was powerful but still not enough. They wanted something bigger than a theory that began from the individual “I”. They wanted a picture of the whole universe, and of how our minds fit inside it. Whew. That's ambitious. That bigger picture is “absolute idealism”.

Around 1795 to 1801 there were several overlapping groups of young thinkers in German university towns. Some of them are now famous, some almost forgotten, but they were all reading Kant and Fichte, talking about Spinoza, and caught up in the new Romantic culture. One group was the early Romantics around Jena and Berlin, including people like Schelling, Novalis and Schlegel. A second group was the “Bengler circle” around Hölderlin and the young Hegel. A third was a student fraternity in Jena that took Fichte as a hero. These groups knew one another, shared ideas and quarrelled, and in that atmosphere a new kind of idealism began to form. Hegel and Schelling would later become the most famous exponents, but many of the basic intuitions were already in place in the work of Hölderlin, Novalis and their friends. What did “absolute idealism” mean for them? The key is in the word “absolute”. They use it in a very Spinozist sense. The absolute is that which is “in and through itself”, something that exists from itself and does not depend on anything else. In Spinoza’s language it is the one substance that is the whole of reality. Everything else, including individual minds and individual physical things, are just modes or aspects of this one reality.

So when the Romantics talk about “the absolute”, “the one and all”, “being”, they usually mean the universe as a single whole, not “my consciousness” or “your consciousness”. This is important. They are not saying that only my ideas exist. They are saying that everything that exists is part of a single, self sufficient reality. They then make three further claims about this single reality. First, monism. There is only one fundamental being, not many separate substances. Separate things depend on this whole and cannot exist on their own. Second, vitalism. This whole is not a dead, static block. It is alive, in the sense that it is an organised process of growth and development, like a cosmic organism. Nature is not just a collection of bits of matter; it is a living whole with inner powers and tendencies. Third, rationalism. The development of this living whole is not random. It has a form or pattern, something like an inner idea or purpose that shapes it. The absolute is linked to reason and intelligibility, not blind chaos.

Put together, absolute idealism says something like this. Reality is a single living whole, whose development follows an inner idea or rational pattern. Everything that exists, including our own minds, is a part or expression of this whole. Why call that “idealism”? Not because “everything is only in my mind”, but because everything is related to an “idea” in the older Platonic sense, an inner form or logos. The “ideal” here means archetypal and intelligible, not simply “mental”. So a mountain is “ideal” in this sense when it is seen as one appearance of the rational structure of the whole, not when it is a private hallucination. There is also a second sense of “ideal” that they sometimes use. From the standpoint of the absolute, all the sharp splits we draw between things, such as between mind and body or subject and object, are only “ideal” in the sense of conceptual. They exist for our reflective thinking, which cuts up the whole into parts, but in the absolute those oppositions are overcome. So at one moment “ideal” means “of the absolute idea”, and at another it means “only for the understanding, not ultimately real”. 

This double use can be confusing, but the basic thought is that the apparent independence of finite things is a kind of abstraction. How does this differ from Kant and Fichte? In two main ways. First, absolute idealism is more naturalistic. Kant and Fichte leave a sharp line between nature and the “noumenal” or “intelligible” realm of freedom. For them, the deepest self, as free, steps in from outside nature in some sense. The absolute idealists want to bring even that realm back within nature understood as the single living whole. The Kantian “I think” and Fichtean “I am” are now seen as ways in which the absolute expresses itself at a high level of organisation. So reason is not outside nature, it is nature come to consciousness of itself.

Second, absolute idealism is more realist about the world. If there is a single absolute that includes all things, then there is more to reality than individual finite minds. Those finite minds are only some of the parts of the whole, alongside animals, plants, stars and so on. So the absolute is definitely not “inside my head”. Yet it is also not a thing out there that has nothing to do with consciousness, because the very identity of the whole shows itself in and through its conscious parts. The universe, as it were, needs finite minds to become fully explicit. The Romantics are organic. In an organism, the whole gives each part its role and identity, but the whole itself is what it is only through the functioning of its parts. They think of the absolute in that way. My self has its character only within the web of nature and history; but the absolute is fully realised only through the thoughts and actions of selves like me. That is why they reject the old dualism which treats nature as something wholly outside consciousness. If the absolute is an organic whole, it is both in consciousness and beyond any single consciousness at the same time.

This also explains why they reject a simple “big ego” reading of the absolute. It is tempting to say that absolute idealism is just Fichte’s “I” blown up to cosmic size. The young Romantics themselves argue against this. They point out that “subject” and “object” are terms that only make sense inside experience, where something is opposed to something else. The absolute, which is the condition of experience, cannot itself be another subject on one side of an inner divide. It is prior to all such oppositions. So the highest principle of philosophy should not be “I am”, but “the whole is”. That is a sharp break with the line that runs from Descartes through Kant to Fichte, where philosophy begins from self consciousness. Hölderlin and Novalis think that self consciousness itself only becomes possible against a deeper background, a unity of subject and object that is not yet a conscious state. In their view, to treat the “I” as completely self sufficient is to forget that its identity rests on its place in a wider nature it cannot fully understand. There are, as Beiser nicely puts it, “mysterious energies and powers of nature” at work in us that we cannot entirely know or control.

Schelling says this very bluntly. When I say “I know” or “I am the knower” I am already mistaken if I think this is the full story. It is really the universe that knows through me. My thinking is one way in which the absolute comes to think and act. Finally, this helps explain why the young Romantics reacted so strongly against Fichte’s subjectivism. From their point of view his system ends in a disturbing circle. The finite I is condemned to infinite striving against a resisting non I that it can never fully comprehend. To the extent that it shapes the world it turns it into a “mere idea”; to the extent that the world resists, the world becomes an unknowable thing in itself. There is no place where nature can be both independent and intelligible. They also criticise his claim that philosophy has to start from the I. If the identity of subject and object is the highest principle, they argue, then it cannot itself be a state within consciousness, because all consciousness presupposes some difference between subject and object. So the identity must lie deeper than consciousness, and consciousness appears within it. The absolute is thus prior to, and more encompassing than, any ego.

Their ambition, in short, is to bring together what Fichte and Spinoza each saw, without accepting either alone. From Fichte they take the importance of activity, freedom, and self consciousness. From Spinoza they take the vision of a single, all inclusive nature. Absolute idealism tries to synthesise these, by treating the self as the point where the universe becomes conscious of itself, and by treating the universe as the deeper ground that makes the self possible.

So they push back hard against Fichte. Fichte’s first principle is the identity of subject and object, which he locates in the self’s immediate awareness of itself, or intellectual intuition. In that special act, I am both the one who knows and the thing that is known. Fichte then says that this structure is the basic pattern of all knowledge. That is the problem. If all knowing is really just the self grasping its own activity, then in the end the self never really reaches anything outside itself. It is like someone who spends all their time crafting virtual worlds in a headset but never takes the headset off. Everything they ever encounter is, in the end, a projection of their own system. The Romantics think this makes genuine knowledge of nature impossible. In ordinary experience you treat the world as something that does not care about your wishes. The stone you trip over does not rearrange itself because you dislike pain. If the deep principle behind all knowing is really just the self inspecting its own acts, then that stubborn otherness of the world becomes hard to explain. The principle that was supposed to underwrite objectivity seems to destroy it. 

Their way out is to relocate the identity of subject and object. Instead of saying that subject and object coincide in my act of self conscious thinking, they say that subject and object are two appearances of a deeper unity, namely the one universal substance. The same absolute reality shows itself in my conscious life and in the things I experience. On this view, when you understand something about the world you are not just reading off your own mind, yet you are also not touching a realm totally alien to you. You are grasping a structure that belongs to the universe as a whole and appears in you and in the object together.

The next criticism concerns Fichte’s attitude to nature. Fichte is famous for saying that my world is simply the field of my moral duties and nothing more. For him, the value of nature lies in its role as material for ethical action. The mountain is something to climb to develop courage, the forest is something to manage responsibly, the body is the vehicle of the will. Hölderlin and Hegel think this is a flattening of nature. It turns the entire environment into props on a moral stage. Imagine two walkers in a wood. One treats the trees as background to his exercise routine and a possible source of timber. The other sometimes simply sits and looks, or feels a sort of reverence for the sheer existence of this living system. The Romantics think the second stance is closer to the truth. Nature is not only something for us to use. It has its own intrinsic form and worth. If, as they claim, the identity of the self depends on its place in the wider universe, then nature is not the enemy of the self, something to be subdued, but the larger context that completes it. This disagreement connects to a deeper logical point. Fichte’s deduction of the external world rests on the primacy of practical reason. He argues that moral activity requires obstacles. I only act responsibly if there is something to resist and limit my will. From this he concludes that an external world must exist, because without such resistance moral agency would be impossible.

The Romantics think this is a logical slide. It moves from “I need X” to “there is X”. You can hear the structure if you make it more obvious. I need loyal friends, therefore there are loyal friends. Humanity needs a just world, therefore it exists. Trump says what he's doing is brilliant, therefore it is. A need, even a noble one, does not by itself bring its object into existence. Schelling sums this up in the simple remark that no amount of need can make the impossible possible. For them this is not just a local complaint against Fichte. It is a rejection of all appeals to faith where faith is defined purely by psychological need. Jacobi’s leap of faith in a personal God, Kant’s moral faith in freedom, Fichte’s decision to believe in freedom because morality requires it, all fall under this suspicion. They violate what the Romantics take to be a basic demand of reason, namely that beliefs about what exists must rest on sufficient grounds, not only on the fact that it would be inspiring or useful if they were true.

So they want a more theoretical justification for our belief in reality. Yet they are also wary of going back to the old rationalist habit of trying to prove everything in the style of Euclidean geometry. They have seen how Kant demolished that. Their challenge is to show how knowledge of an independent world is possible without treating the world as a collection of passive objects on one side and a detached mind on the other. At this point Beiser begins to trace the three main intellectual sources they draw on to build this new position. The first is Spinozism. Jacobi’s little book on Spinoza had revealed that Lessing, the great Enlightenment writer, privately confessed that he could only believe in the God of Spinoza, the one and all. Jacobi intended this as a warning. If you follow reason consistently, he said, you end up with a fatalistic system where everything is just modes of one substance. You must either accept that or jump by faith to a personal God and freedom.The younger generation read the same text and took the opposite lesson. They were attracted by Spinoza’s picture of the universe as a single infinite substance that is both divine and natural. They were tired of the quarrel between religion and science. Here was a way to see scientific understanding of nature as already a way of grasping the divine. For a student who had outgrown church dogma but recoiled from crude materialism, this was powerful. Novalis could call Spinoza “a man intoxicated with God” rather than an atheist. God, for Spinoza, is not a person outside the universe but the inner infinite power of nature itself. They also valued Spinoza’s solution to dualism. If mind and body are not two separate substances that must somehow interact, but two attributes of one substance, then the old puzzles of how they connect are eased. The same move can be applied, with adjustments, to the Kantian splits between noumenal and phenomenal, understanding and sensibility. The Romantics will later reinterpret these as two aspects of a single developing whole rather than two fundamentally different realms.

They do not, however, simply copy Spinoza. They are suspicious of his very strict geometric method, which feels too much like the scholastic systems Kant has criticised. They are also unhappy with the way he excludes final causes from nature. They want to reintroduce a sense of inner purposiveness, so that natural processes are not only mechanical sequences but also developments towards forms. This is where Platonism enters. The late eighteenth century saw a real revival of interest in Plato in Germany. Young thinkers like Hölderlin, Hegel and Novalis learned Greek and read the dialogues in the original. Through Plato, and through later Platonists like Hemsterhuis, they absorb ideas such as the unity of truth and beauty, the soul’s longing to return to an eternal realm of forms, and the idea that love and aesthetic experience can be modes of insight, not mere feelings. From Plato they take the conviction that there are intelligible structures, forms or ideas, which are not reducible to sensible particulars but give them their meaning. This strengthens the rationalist part of absolute idealism. The absolute is not just a lump of being, it is a structured order, something like a form of forms or an archetype in which universal and particular are united. The doctrine of intellectual intuition, which they all embrace in some way, also has Platonic roots. It is a claim that in some moments, often associated with aesthetic experience, the mind can grasp a form directly, without going step by step through arguments. This is not anti rational in their sense. It is a deeper exercise of reason.

The third source is what the text calls vital materialism. Here the basic idea is that matter is not just extension or dead stuff, but inner force and motion. Leibniz had already criticised the mechanical picture and described matter in terms of living force. Later thinkers, including Herder, take this further. Under the influence of new research in electricity, magnetism and chemistry, and experiments like Galvani’s with animal electricity, it becomes more plausible to think of nature as a network of active powers rather than inert particles pushed around. Vital materialism says that the sharp boundary between mental and physical is an illusion. There is one field of forces, which appears at different levels of organisation. At a low level you have inorganic processes like chemical reactions. At a higher level you have organised living systems. At an even higher level you have consciousness. The difference is degree of organisation, not the presence or absence of some special immaterial substance. Schelling captures this with a neat comparison. Nature is visible spirit, and spirit is invisible nature. The same living force appears outwardly in bodies and inwardly in experience.

This leads to a different model of how mind and body relate. Instead of a causal push from one distinct substance to another, you have an expressive relation inside one developing whole. The body is one way the inner powers of life express themselves; consciousness is another. When you learn to play the piano, for instance, your fingers and your conscious intention are not two things that have to push each other around from outside. They are two sides of the same acquired organisation of your whole system. So you can see that absolute idealism is what you get when you fuse Spinoza’s monism, Platonic ideas and vital materialism. You now have a single living substance, like Spinoza, but understood as a dynamic organism that develops through stages of unity, differentiation and higher unity, and guided by intelligible forms or purposes. Hegel’s later dialectic of unity, difference and unity in difference is the most famous version of that pattern, but the basic thought is already present in Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel and Schelling.

This looks exactly like the kind of metaphysical system Kant had tried to forbid. It speaks confidently about the unconditioned, about the whole as such, which is never given in a single experience. It talks of substance, form, vital powers. Kant and Fichte had both warned that such claims go beyond the limits of possible experience. So the obvious question is how the absolute idealists justify their move? Their first answer is deliberately provocative. They say that only absolute idealism actually fulfils the true spirit of Kant’s critical philosophy. Their argument is roughly this. Kant’s own project rests on the idea that subject and object unite in knowledge, but his picture of two separate faculties, understanding and sensibility, makes that unity impossible. The same applies to his split between noumenal and phenomenal. To solve the problem he has himself raised, you need a deeper unity that underlies those distinctions. Once you take that seriously you are already doing metaphysics. So, in their view, a certain kind of metaphysics is not an optional extra but the completion of critique.

They point out that some early critics of Kant, like Platner and Jacobi, had already complained that the transcendental deduction does not really explain how a priori concepts link up with the given manifold of sense. If understanding and sensibility are as sharply distinct as Kant says, then it is hard to see how they cooperate. Kant tries to soften this in the third Critique by suggesting that we must judge nature as if it were organised like an organism, with a kind of inner purposiveness. That already points in the direction the Romantics will take. They take the organism not just as a useful way of thinking about nature but as the basic reality. Once you do that, the separation of faculties, and the sharp moral faith that pushes freedom completely outside nature, begin to look like halfway measures.

So, the Romantics read Fichte and Kant as half completing an important shift, away from a picture of the world as a set of dead things and a separate thinking substance, towards a picture where mind and world belong to one order. But because Fichte keeps the principle of subject object identity inside the ego, and because he deduces the world from moral need, his system tends toward solipsism and a purely instrumental attitude to nature. The Romantics respond by pushing the unity deeper, so that the identity of subject and object is a feature of the whole universe and not just of my consciousness. They then use Spinoza, Plato and vitalist science to flesh out that whole as a living, purposive reality. From this point, Hegel and Schelling will try to turn that vision into a systematic philosophy.

Oddly, this Romantic vision doesn't seem too far away from what contemporary biologist Michael Levin as been thinking. If you think about the Romantics’ picture of nature as “one living whole” and Michael Levin’s view of biology as a swarm of goal-directed, semi-intelligent tissues, they start to look like two very different languages for a surprisingly similar intuition. Let me unpack that step by step and keep it as concrete as possible. First, recall what the early Romantics and absolute idealists were saying. They take over from Spinoza and Herder the idea that there is one universal “substance” or living power that shows up both as matter and as mind. Nature is not dead stuff pushed around by external forces. It is a self organising, self developing organism. The mental and the physical are just different levels of organisation of the same living forces. Herder already talks about nature as a hierarchy running from rocks up through plants and animals to human reason, all as different expressions of one underlying power.

They also insist that the usual split between “subject” and “object” between a thinking inner self and an external world is secondary. At the deepest level there is an “absolute” which is neither simply subjective nor simply objective. Individual minds and individual bodies are parts or modes of this absolute. That is why they like the slogan that nature is “visible spirit” and spirit is “invisible nature”. Now jump to Levin. Levin’s lab studies “morphogenesis”, which simply means how tissues and organs get their shape during development and repair. He focuses on bioelectric signals in and between cells, and he treats them as a kind of information process. Sheets of cells use voltage gradients across their membranes to communicate and coordinate, in order to reach and maintain a target anatomical form.

A standard textbook picture would say something like this. Genes specify proteins, proteins interact chemically, and that chain of cause and effect produces a body. Levin does not deny any of that, but he adds another level. He says that groups of cells behave like problem solvers. They store a “goal shape” and then use electrical communication to minimise the difference between the current shape and that goal, even when the system is disturbed. In his models and experiments, cells behave like little agents navigating a “shape space” so that a limb regrows correctly, or a flat collection of frog skin cells self assembles into a xenobot that moves around and repairs itself.

He then generalises this into what he calls a “multi-scale competency architecture”. Different levels of organisation in biology, from single cells up to whole animals, have their own partial kind of “cognitive” competence. They sense, remember and act in ways that push their world toward particular preferred states, such as “having this pattern of connections” or “having this overall body plan”. Groups of cells share decisions in a way that looks very different from our personal experience of thought, but still counts as a basic kind of intelligence.

If you now place that picture next to the early Romantic one, several speculative links suggest themselves. First, monism and “one living force”. The Romantic monist says that nature is one continuous living process, with no sharp break between physics, life and mind. Levin’s work does not make the same grand metaphysical claim, but scientifically it does something structurally similar. He pushes cognitive and informational language down into basic biology. He does not say that only brains think. He says that tissues and cell groups do something like thinking when they collectively regulate their morphology, meaning their shape. They compute in order to hold their place in an anatomical space. So where a Romantic would talk about “the absolute life of nature” unfolding in different degrees, Levin talks about competency at different scales, from protein networks, to cells, to organs, to nervous systems. Both pictures resist a simple dualism where matter is one thing and mind is a completely separate kind of stuff. In both, mind-like properties are seen as higher order organisation of the same underlying physical processes.

Second, purposiveness and teleology. The Romantics insist that nature is intrinsically purposive. It is not that we project purposes onto a meaningless process. Rather, the growth and self repair of organisms already expresses a kind of internal aim. That is why they love the idea of an organic whole, and why they read Plato’s talk of forms and ends back into nature itself. Levin, speaking as an experimental biologist, will not talk about “forms” in the Platonic sense, but his work is strikingly teleological in its structure. His models of morphogenesis explicitly use target states and error correction. For instance, in mathematical work on reaction diffusion systems, he and collaborators add a feedback loop that compares the current chemical pattern with a goal pattern, and adjusts production to reduce the error. This provides a model of “anatomical homeostasis” where tissues keep trying to reach the correct body plan.

In Romantic language, that looks very much like an “immanent telos” inside the tissue. The point is not that Levin is secretly a Romantic, but that his way of formalising development does justice to something the Romantics insisted on and many mechanists ignored. Biological systems do not just roll downhill along fixed laws. They regulate themselves relative to preferred outcomes across time. 

Third, the mental and the physical as two aspects. Spinoza and the Romantics say that mind and body are two aspects of one substance, or two “sides” of the same living force. Schelling captures this with the slogan “nature is visible spirit, spirit is invisible nature”. The idea is that what we call matter shows us spirit under one description, and what we call mind shows us nature under another. Levin’s picture gives a naturalistic version of that. At the level of biophysics, you have voltages across cell membranes, ion channels, and gap junctions. These are very ordinary physical processes. At the level of information, the same dynamics implement computations over shapes and goals. The pattern of electrical states can be read as a map that the cells use to decide where they are in the body and what they should become. So you can describe the same system either as a physical network or as a cognitive agent solving a problem in a space of possible forms. That is not yet full Romantic monism, but structurally it is similar. The same activity can be understood as “matter doing its thing” or as “a mindlike system navigating a space of options”. The difference is a matter of level of description and explanatory interest.

Fourth, the critique of Fichte and respect for nature.The Romantics criticise Fichte for making nature merely the stage and instrument of moral will. In Fichte’s more aggressive formulations, “my world is the sphere of my duties and absolutely nothing else”. Nature is something to be overcome and reshaped by the ethical subject. The Romantic response is that this misses the intrinsic value and autonomy of nature. Nature is not just raw stuff. It has its own inner life and deserves aesthetic and perhaps ethical regard. Levin’s work does not argue about value in the same way, but it quietly supports a more respectful view of non human systems. If a cancer suppressing tissue acts like an agent maintaining a body plan, and if a xenobot made of frog cells can explore and modify its environment in open ended ways, then these systems have a primitive kind of agency. They are not just puppets of human designers, nor just lumps of tissue. They are partners in a joint project of building and maintaining bodies. From a Romantic perspective, that is a vindication. Nature is not a dumb background. It is a community of agents at many scales. Education and bioengineering, on this view, should be more like conversation with a partly independent partner and less like brute control of an object. 

Finally, subject object identity and distributed selves. The Romantics argue that subject and object are ultimately united in the absolute. Individual subjects are not self enclosed islands. They are nodes where the universal life of nature becomes conscious of itself. Shelling puts it provocatively by saying that it is not really “I” who know, but the universe that knows through me. Levin’s multi scale picture lets you make a more modest but related claim. A human being, on his view, is already a society of agents. Our personal mind sits on top of layers of cellular and tissue level “minds” that solve their own problems. When you raise your arm, you issue a rough command, but the details are filled in by spinal circuits, muscle fibres and bone remodelling cells. Your single subjectivity is an emergent summary of many smaller competencies. When he then asks what counts as “an individual” and what counts as “a mind” in such a nested architecture, we find ourselves in a position that early idealists would recognise. There is no simple boundary where subject stops and object begins. Instead there are overlapping centres of perspective and control within a continuous living process.

So in speculative summary, you might say this. The Romantic absolute idealist, if transported into a modern lab, would probably find Levin’s biology more congenial than a strict gene centred or purely mechanistic picture. A world of goal seeking tissues, distributed intelligence and nested agents sounds closer to their organic, monistic and teleological universe than a world of passive particles pushed by blind laws. Levin, for his part, provides mathematical and experimental tools to talk about exactly the themes that mattered to them, such as purposiveness in nature, the continuity of mind and matter, and the idea that individuality is a graded and relational phenomenon. Of course, Levin remains a scientist who works hard to keep his claims testable, while the Romantics were quite happy to wander off into metaphysics. The link between them is not identity but resonance. His work gives us a way to rephrase some of their more daring intuitions in the language of bioelectric circuits, error correcting feedback and collective computation.

Anyway, Beiser's story so far is this. Kant and Fichte both want to explain how knowledge is possible, but they get stuck with very hard splits that they cannot really heal. Kant says that the mind has its own a priori forms and concepts, and that nature somehow fits them. To help with this “somehow”, he introduces the idea that we should judge nature as if it were organised like an organism designed by intelligence. But, he insists, this is only a “regulative” idea. In simple terms, we are allowed to use the idea as a guide for research, but we are not allowed to claim that reality itself is really like that. For the young Romantics and later absolute idealists this is half hearted. If the interaction between our concepts and the world is real, then whatever mediates them must also be real, not just “as if”. If the organic unity of nature is only a useful fiction, the basic mystery remains. We still have no explanation of how understanding and sensibility, or noumenal and phenomenal, can actually belong together.

Fichte promises more, but in practice seems to repeat the problem. He makes the grand claim that subject and object are ultimately identical because the subject knows in advance only what it actively produces according to its own laws. Yet in his system we still find strong dualisms. There is the ego, striving, and the “check” or obstacle that resists it and looks suspiciously like Kant’s thing in itself. There is also the split between pure rational activity and the given sensible material that it must shape. Infinite striving never really closes the gap. To be honest nobody can see how the story even starts. So by the mid 1790s it looks as if all the standard options fail. Subjective idealism cannot explain how we ever reach anything beyond our own activity. Materialism cannot explain the special character of consciousness, and so ends with mind as a powerless side effect. Transcendental realism assumes some ready made external world but cannot show how we know that our representations match it.

What is left is what these writers call “absolute idealism”. They keep Fichte’s core thought that knowledge requires some identity between subject and object, but they reinterpret what that identity is. The change has two main steps. First, they universalise it. Subject object identity is no longer just an act inside an individual self. It is a feature of the single infinite reality, the “absolute”, of which both “subjective” and “objective” are only aspects. Individual minds and individual things are partial ways in which an underlying whole appears. Second, they vitalise it. The absolute is not a dead block. It is a single living force, a kind of world organism, that develops itself in different degrees of organisation. The physical world is one mode of that force. Conscious subjects are another, more complex mode of that same force. Seen like this, the split between understanding and sensibility softens. Intellectual activity and empirical content are not alien to each other. They are different levels of one living process. When the subject comes to know an object, this is not a jump between two independent realms. It is the same underlying reality becoming explicit. In their favourite phrase, the object, as part of the whole, is “knowing itself” through the subject’s thinking.

This gives a very different picture of knowledge. Knowing is not a private mind trying to reach out to a foreign world. It is an episode in the self articulation of nature as a whole. The subject and object are interdependent parts of one organism. Each gets its definite character through the other. Because of that, the subject’s grasp of the object is not something added from outside. It is part of the way the object’s nature unfolds. The absolute idealists think that by “absolutising” Fichte’s principle in this way they have actually been more faithful to the deepest aim of Kant’s critical philosophy. They argue that Kant already needs something like an organic unity of nature to solve his own deduction problem, but he refuses to admit that this unity is real. They simply “take the as if away” and say: the unity and living force of nature are not just regulative ideas. They are necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. In their language, the absolute and vital force themselves have earned a kind of transcendental justification. However, a further question appears: even if such a picture would explain knowledge, how do we know that there is such an absolute? How do we know that anything exists beyond our own representations at all?

Here the young Romantics adopt a very strict line. They accept much of Kant’s and Jacobi’s criticism of reason. Conceptual thinking always works by contrasts and conditions. It says “this, not that” and “this, given that”. The absolute by definition is the unconditioned whole. It cannot be set over against anything else or made to depend on something. So discursive reason will always distort it. If we stay with concepts, we will never know more than finite things. That sounds very sceptical, but it is only half the story. They then argue that there is another path: aesthetic experience. By this they mean not just looking at paintings and arty stuff, but the whole sphere of feeling in which we encounter unity and limitlessness. The feeling of the sublime in nature, a powerful sense of belonging to something greater, the experience of love where I see myself in another and another in myself, all of these are taken as obscure but genuine contacts with the infinite. In such moments we are aware, they say, that our little circle of consciousness is not all that exists. They fully admit that no proof can be built on this. A sceptic can always say “all that shows is how you feel”. But they answer that the sceptic cannot prove these experiences false either. They are like the experience of colour or music. They cannot be captured in definitions and arguments. You either have the sensitivity for them or you do not. The only way to express them, even indirectly, is through art. This is why they give art such a central place. For them, to see nature as a living organism and to see it as a work of art amount to the same thing. The universe is a kind of natural artwork, and a great artwork is a kind of artificial organism or even an artificial orgasm. Both are wholes where every part hangs together with every other according to an inner plan. The true unity that science presupposes when it looks for laws is, in the end, an aesthetic unity.

Kant had already moved a long way in this direction when he used organic and artistic analogies. But he still refused to let aesthetic experience say anything about reality. For him, beauty tells us about our own pleasure, not about the structure of things. That is precisely the limit that Hölderlin and the others want to cross. Hölderlin, who studied and argued with both Schelling and Hegel when they were young, is often seen as the first to take all these steps clearly. He is convinced that the basic principle of subject object identity cannot be confined to the ego. It belongs to a universal living whole from which ego and world both emerge. He insists that nature is not just material for duty or a mere projection of our activity. It is an independent, rational, beautiful order in its own right. At the same time he lives with a double vocation. He is deeply serious about philosophy, reading Kant, Spinoza, Plato, Schiller and Fichte. But he remains convinced that his true calling is poetry. For him, poetry is not philosophy written prettily. It is the primary way in which the whole announces itself. Philosophy, with its careful concepts, is important as a discipline. It keeps imagination honest. But it also depends, silently, on a more basic, intuitive grasp of the unity of things, which can only be shown in concrete images, metaphors and stories. So Hölderlin reaches a bold conclusion. Poetry has a kind of priority over philosophy. The great conflicts of thought for example, between Fichte’s idealism and Spinoza’s naturalism are not simply puzzles for argument. They are experiences lived through by people, embedded in their loves, their losses and their spiritual development. That is why, in his eyes, they are best explored in the form of a novel like Hyperion or a tragedy like Empedocles, where a character’s inner journey mirrors and tests the philosophies in question.

From this angle, his move toward absolute idealism, his belief in an independent, rational, beautiful nature and in an absolute that is not just “as if” is not an abstract leap. It is the philosophical translation of his deepest aesthetic sense. Beauty, for him, is not a mere feeling about appearances. It is the harmonic structure of reality itself. To say that is to take the “as if” away from Kant’s third Critique. The aesthetic is no longer only a way of looking at things. It becomes a clue to what things are.

Self consciousness, Hölderlin thinks, always has two sides at once. On the one hand there is a kind of unity. When I say “I”, the one who knows and the one who is known are, in some sense, the same. I do not look at myself the way I look at a table. I am already “inside” the thing I am talking about. On the other hand there is also a split. To be conscious of myself as this person, I must in some way stand back from myself. I have to be able to distinguish “me now” from “what is not me”, or from “me as object of reflection”. Even in very simple awareness “I am angry” there is a faint gap between the I that notices and the anger that is noticed. Fichte himself had said that every determinate awareness needs such an opposition. If that is right, then pure subject object identity cannot simply be an act of self consciousness. Even the most intense “I am” involves a tension between identity and difference. It is not the absolutely simple unity Hölderlin is looking for. So the absolute, if it is really the place where all opposition disappears, must be deeper than any act of an ego reflecting on itself. It cannot be a gigantic subject. This is why Hölderlin says that the absolute is being rather than “the I”. He does not mean it is more “thing like” or more “realistic” in a crude way. He means that being is a name for the level where subjective and objective are not yet split apart, but also not yet preferred one over the other. Being is not “more mental” or “more material”. Both mind and nature are expressions of it.

Imagine a single ocean. Individual waves are like particular subjects and particular objects. A wave can look at another wave, and it can even “turn back” in a sense and crash on itself. In those interactions there is both unity and difference. But the absolute in Hölderlin’s sense is more like the whole ocean, the continuous body of water that is present in every wave. The ocean is not “this” wave or “that” wave. It is the medium in which every difference arises. Seen this way, Hölderlin is not simply taking the side of old dogmatic metaphysics against critical philosophy. He is trying to step outside the very fight between “idealism” and “realism”. Spinoza attracts him because “substance” or “God or nature” looks like a model of such unity. Jacobi attracts him because he insists on the primacy of existence, the simple “there is”, over any construction of thought. Plato attracts him because in the ideas and in beauty he sees patterns that reality itself follows, not just forms we project. By weaving these strands together, Hölderlin reaches a new basic picture. The ultimate ground of consciousness is not a self that makes the world, and not a world that leaves self behind, but a prior being in which both self and world have their root. Self consciousness and knowledge are still crucial, but they are no longer first. They are later stages in the unfolding of something more basic, a living unity that shows itself in nature, in love and in beauty before it ever becomes a theory.

You can think of this whole Romantic story as a long argument about three questions. First, what is really real. Second, how mind and world fit together. Third, where beauty, love and nature belong in that picture. The different thinkers answer these three questions in different ways. 
Kant says that we never meet the world “as it is in itself”. We meet the world through certain basic ways of organising experience. These are things like cause and effect, and the idea that objects persist through time. He calls them categories. They are like the core rules of a video game engine. You cannot play outside them, and you never see the engine directly, but without the engine there is no game at all. For Kant, there is always a gap. On one side, there is our way of organising things, like the game engine. On the other side, there is whatever “feeds” the engine, which he calls the thing in itself. He thinks we need both, but he refuses to claim any direct knowledge of the thing in itself. That is his critical stance. Reason must know its limits.

Fichte agrees with Kant that knowledge involves our activity. Then he pushes this idea very far. He says the basic fact is the I that says “I am”. From this I, we can “deduce” a world, other objects and other people as limits and tasks for the I. Think of Fichte as someone who says: the important thing is not the game map, it is the player’s project. The world is there as a set of obstacles and challenges that let the player become moral, courageous and free. Nature becomes like a training ground. It has value because it lets the I exercise its freedom. This is why he sometimes sounds as if the world is a giant obstacle course for moral self improvement. He is also very concerned with other people, and with rights. He tries to argue, in a careful way, that you can only be a free agent if you recognise other free agents and treat them as ends in themselves. He imagines something like a rule of mutual recognition. If my freedom is to count, I must respect yours too. In modern terms, you might picture a multiplayer game where it only works properly if everyone agrees that the others are real players and not mere non player characters. Still, in Fichte everything centres on the subject, the I. Nature is secondary, and so is art. Beauty is admirable, but the final authority lies with moral reason.

Spinoza is earlier than all of this, but he becomes their secret companion. He imagines the universe as a single substance, which he calls “God or nature”. Mind and body are two aspects, or “attributes”, of this one thing. Imagine a huge computer simulation. The entire simulation, with every process and every perspective, is the one substance. Different parts of the code can be described in “physical” terms or in “mental” terms, but they are aspects of the same underlying structure. Many later thinkers read Spinoza as cold and geometric. For them he is impressive but severe. Yet his vision of a single infinite reality attracts the Romantics, who want unity and depth.

The Romantics and absolute idealists pick up pieces from Kant, Fichte and Spinoza, and they also bring in Plato and new biology. Their shared picture has a few key features. They think there is one living whole, which they call the absolute. It is like Spinoza’s substance, but vital instead of mechanical. Imagine the universe as an immense growing organism, or as a forest where everything, from fungi to trees to animals, is part of one life system. They think mind and nature are different grades or expressions of the same living force. Schelling’s slogan is often quoted here: nature is visible spirit, spirit is invisible nature. If you want a more modern image, think of a very complex neural network that can appear as brain activity from one angle and as conscious thought from another. The underlying dynamics are one, though the appearances differ. They think reason is not just our private thinking, but a kind of deep pattern in reality itself. The “ideal” in their idealism means this rational pattern, rather than “only in my mind”. So when they say “everything is ideal”, they mean everything shows, in its own way, the shape of this underlying pattern.

They reject hard dualisms. They are tired of sharp splits such as mind against body, freedom against nature, appearance against reality. In their organic model, these oppositions are like different functions in one body, or different voices in one orchestra. There can be real tension, but the parts do not belong to separate worlds.They give a new status to art and beauty. For them, art is not decoration. It is a privileged way in which the absolute becomes visible. A powerful poem, symphony or painting is like a local crystallisation of the pattern of the whole. The feeling of the sublime, or of a deep harmony with the world, is taken seriously as a kind of obscure awareness of the absolute.

Hölderlin stands right at the hinge. He has absorbed Kant, Fichte, Plato, Spinoza, Schiller and Jacobi. He is also a poet, and he refuses to let philosophy flatten the value of beauty and nature. He accepts that subject and object must somehow be identical if knowledge is possible. He also accepts that self consciousness is a special form of this identity. Yet he notices something simple and powerful. Every act of self awareness contains both unity and difference. When I am conscious of myself, I join subject and object, yet I also separate them. The “I” that reflects stands over against the “I” reflected on. So, he argues, the deepest identity of subject and object cannot be an act of self consciousness. It must lie deeper, in something that does not yet split into subject and object at all. He calls this deeper reality being. It is not “the subject” and not “the object”, but the living unity of which both are aspects. You might think of it as the whole ocean beneath and within the waves of particular conscious acts and particular things.

Because he is a poet, Hölderlin links this being very closely with beauty, love and nature. For him, nature is not training material for morality, as in Fichte. It is a partner and mirror. Standing on a hillside or beside a river, feeling both small and at home, is already a way in which being shows itself. He also thinks poetry can hint at, and sometimes embody, this unity more effectively than abstract theory can. A novel like his Hyperion can show how philosophical conflicts live inside a person’s life, and how reconciliation with nature or another person gives a glimpse of the absolute.

Schelling and Hegel take many of these ideas and build vast systems. Schelling starts from nature. He is fascinated by electricity, magnetism and new life sciences, and he reads them as signs that matter is dynamic and self organising, not dead stuff. He then tries to show how mind grows out of nature, as nature becomes aware of itself. Hegel starts more from social and historical life, but he shares the underlying view. For him the absolute is reason unfolding through history, nature and mind. Each conflict, such as freedom versus necessity or individual versus community, is partly a clash and partly a step in the self understanding of the whole. His dialectic is like watching a very complex argument where each side reveals a one sided truth, and the deeper truth appears in the tension and its resolution.

Novalis and Schlegel move more in literary circles, but they are part of the same shift. They like the thought of the absolute, yet they are suspicious of closed systems. They write aphorisms, fragments and experimental texts, in part to show that our relation to the whole is always incomplete and ironic. They still share the core view. The absolute is a living unity of mind and nature. Art is a privileged gateway to it. Everyday reality and personal experience are infused with hints of this deeper level.

If you stand back, you can see a simple movement. Kant says: our mind has a basic rulebook that structures any possible experience. There is a gap between this and reality in itself.
Fichte says: start from the active I that sets its own tasks and creates its own world of duty. The outside world is there as a moral challenge. The Romantics say: this still leaves nature thin and other people shadowy. We need a more generous picture where mind, nature and value are woven together in one living whole.

Absolute idealism is their attempt to do that. It treats the universe like a single living process, in which mind and world are two strands, and art is one of the clearest places where their unity shines. Beiser presents this as a great ensemble performance. Kant studies the score and the rules of harmony. Fichte concentrates on the commitment of each player to do their part, even when the piece is hard. The Romantics and absolute idealists listen for the music as a whole. They pay attention to the way the entire performance, including the audience and hall, forms a living unity, and they think that this unity is not just something we project. It is something real, to which our minds belong and which our best arts briefly reveal.