German Idealism

German Idealism ran for roughly sixty years after Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy reshaped what a system of philosophy could try to do. Kant had argued that the mind imposes categories of space, time and causality onto experience rather than reading them off a world it perceives directly, which left the deepest structure of reality permanently beyond reach. His successors read that limitation as an invitation rather than a wall. Johann Gottlieb Fichte tried to derive the whole of experience from the activity of a self positing itself, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling looked for the same activity within nature itself, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel built the most systematic and most influential answer of the three, in which an evolving Absolute Spirit comes to full self consciousness through the unfolding of logic, nature and human history together.

Hegel's system treated Christian doctrine as one of philosophy's most important case studies rather than a subject to set aside. He read the Trinity as a picture, in figurative form, of Spirit's own three stage movement of unity, division and reconciliation, and he read the Incarnation as the doctrine that finite and infinite are not, after all, permanently opposed. Liberal Protestant theology in the following century absorbed a great deal of this vocabulary even where it rejected Hegel's system outright, and conservative theologians spent just as much energy resisting it, which is its own kind of influence. Few philosophical movements have argued so directly, in either direction, over what Christian doctrine actually means.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte held the philosophy chair at Jena, the intellectual center of early German Idealism, until a controversy over a single 1798 essay ended his university career there. Fichte had argued, in an essay on the grounds of belief in a divine world governance, that God should not be conceived as a separate, personal being who exists as one object alongside others, since anything that exists in that ordinary sense is finite and conditioned, but rather as the living, moral world order itself, the very structure by which the moral law governs reality. To many readers this sounded less like a refinement of theism than a denial of a personal God altogether, an accusation Fichte's own defense, that a God who is an object among objects is not the infinite God theology actually needs, did not fully dispel. The Saxon government formally accused him of atheism, other German states threatened to bar his writings from their territories, and in 1799, after a public dispute that drew in figures across German intellectual life, Fichte resigned rather than accept a court ordered reprimand, the episode German historians call the Atheismusstreit, the atheism dispute. He continued developing his philosophy afterward with an increasingly religious vocabulary, but the Jena chair that made German Idealism's early reputation passed to Schelling, and Fichte's own path away from it shaped how carefully his successors, Hegel very much included, chose their words when writing about God.