German Idealism

Kant

Immanuel Kant's philosophy, which is generally considered to be part of German Idealism only with some reservation, had, with the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason in1781, started the movement. The French Revolution, with its attempt to universalise civil liberty and equality for its citizens, served as the historical background to the movement, and the movement ended with Hegel's death in 1831. Nevertheless, Idealism should not be understood as an outdated, self-contained phenomenon of modern philosophical thinking. Its ways of looking at problems, its ideas and theories have proved innovative to the present day.

An analysis of idealistic philosophy, mainly Kant and Hegel, can be found in the sociological discourse of Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, George Herbert Mead, Alfred Schütz, Jürgen Habermas, and Niklas Luhmann.

Kant's new foundation of philosophy takes as its starting point the tradition of the philosophy of pure reason, and at the same time contemplates its historical decline. Since Aristotle, the highest method for reasoning had been metaphysics, which was intended to examine being as such, and was understood as a philosophy of the basic structures of reality. However, the age of modern, exact, natural sciences presented this philosophical discipline with difficulties. What knowing really means was demonstrated by nonphilosophical sciences. The new foundation for philosophy was to be achieved by reason's critical self-examination, that is, by reason's critical reflection upon itself. Philosophy was to satisfy the advanced scientific paradigms of physics and mathematics. According to Kant's metaphysics, a science must cope with the question of whether human reasoning can achieve the knowledge relevant to reality without having to depend on the use of experiences. Kant calls it knowledge gained from pure reason. The addition of the word pure to reason means that reason is independent of any experience through sensual perception. Kant's aim is to test the range of human reasoning with regard to knowledge of reality but independently of information that can only be gained by using the senses.

The transcendental question is concerned not with the objects of knowledge but rather with the conditions that make knowledge possible in the first place. It must be accepted that we can only speak of real knowledge in view of the world of experience, which, on the whole, is the subject of empirical science. The world of possible objects of experience is pregiven by the intuitions of space and time (the modes in which sense perception and thinking happen), as well as by the categories of the mind that function as the unifying and ordering forms of manifold sense data. In transcendental philosophy, categories are the most general forms of reality. Categories are forms of propositions and forms of concepts from which all other concepts can be derived. They constitute ur-forms of being and of the objects of knowledge. These a priori achievements of subjectivity are examined by transcendental reflection. Transcendental reflection is about the constitutional conditions of the knowledge-conveying subject-object relationship. It comprehends objects as appearance to a subject and does not venture to formulate propositions on the things in themselves, as they would be, independently of how they appear to any cognitive subject. Neither does the analysis of our faculties of understanding warrant a concept of purely rational subjectivity without reference to the world of experience. Subject and object are meaningful only if thought of in relation to each other. Pure reason, which transcends the empirical-object-orientated understanding, and is therefore called transcendent, cannot even be understood by critiqueaspiring theoretical philosophy.

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