Dr.

Richard Clarke LITS2002 Notes 04A

1 GERMAN IDEALISM

In the Rationalist tradition which predominated on the Continent during the seventeenth century, epitomised by Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza, the view was held that consciousness is not acquired but a given that precedes and postdates material existence. There is, they believed, an essential, rational core to humans that transcends the circumstances of our existence. Before one becomes anything else, one is a thinking, sentient being. From this point of view, mind is essentially independent of matter. In the tradition of British empiricism, epitomised by Locke, Berkeley and Hume, which had its heyday during the eighteenth century, the opposing view was shared, namely that our consciousness is entirely formed by our sensual interaction with the world around us. From this point of view, our minds and, by extension, our identity are entirely shaped or constructed by the external world. In the late eighteenth century, Kant strove to reconcile these opposing viewpoints by arguing that the mind is both partly formed from without and partly given. Our knowledge of the external world is partly a function of what we are able to absorb through our senses. However, there is also what he described as a transcendental component to the mind which is responsible for imposing certain categories or ordering principles, such as space, time, and cause and effect, on reality. Principles such as cause and effect do not inhere in the things themselves but are rather imposed on them by the inventive human mind which does not see things as they really are but solely through the lens allowed by these categories. Subsequently, Kants views have been variously interpreted. In Britain, the empiricist strands in Kants thinking have predominated: if the mind does order reality, this is due partly to certain physiological features of the brain that predisposes one to see the world in certain ways and partly to the nature of language. However, post-Kantian philosophy took a very different turn in Germany where the so-called German Idealists sought to emphasise the transcendental aspects of Kants argument. In a nutshell, thinkers like Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, the most influential of them all, believed that there is a transcendental core to humans, or spirit (geist), that precedes and postdates material existence. It forms part of Spirit (Geist), what others would call God, which, functioning akin to an anima mundi, or spirit of the world, manifests itself through the material world.