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philosophy

Apparently they like to destroy Europe

If I had to boil it down as much as possible I would say that German idealism is the combination of four basic elements, (1) the problem of scepticism, (2) the problem of primary qualities or metaphysically primary categories, (3) a logico-deductive form of emanationism or metaphysical system-building that attempts to derive all principles from as few and as simple a set of original principles as possible (often just one principle), and (4) neo-Platonism with a special emphasis on noesis and emanation.

#1, the problem of scepticism, can be identified with both renewed early modern interest in classical disputes over the possibility of true and certain knowledge. Hume was its greatest expression, and Kant was answering him directly (though probably with spotty knowledge of Hume's full body of writings).

#2, the problem of primary qualities or metaphysically primary categories, is just the age-old problem of what features of the world are really its essential properties, and what features are mere epiphenomena or results of confusion or secondary blending among these prior essential properties. For example, is causality a primary ontological feature of reality? Is matter? What kind of matter - matter as little bits of physical "stuff," or Aristotelian hyle (as deprived of form), which is actually not physical at all? What is the ontological status of our perceptions and judgments about reality as distinct from what is "really real" in reality itself? Are "forms" and "concepts" merely "secondary" subjective qualities, like sensations and feelings, while the primary nature of the world is physicalist?

In the early modern period, the problem of scepticism, drawing from revived interest in classical sources, combines with materialist and corpuscular philosophies which are also revived from classical philosophy. It increasingly becomes a standard view in natural philosophy that the only sure knowledge we can have is of the mechanically regular dynamics of physical matter, describable with mathematics. This raises questions as to the status of the "things in themselves" - we can describe matter's operations, but can we say what it is "in itself?"

Against this rising sceptico-materialism and "phenomenalism," especially associated with people like Newton and Locke (who were friends), thinkers like Leibniz tried to come up with alternative accounts of knowledge of metaphysics. This is eclectic and hard to boil down, but the Leibnizian tradition, followed by Christian Wolff and Kant himself, is basically Platonist in certain key respects, especially in positing certain objective metaphysical entities of a "conceptual" or "ideal" nature, and also positing that the physical/phenomenal world, including the "merely" dynamic properties of time and space, are the result of blurred or confused apprehension of the real, higher-order, essentially ideal realities. So physicalism, the spatio-temporal dynamics of inert objects, doesn't come first but last.

>>13491232
In addition to this, the Leibniz-Wolff tradition put enormous faith in logic and logico-deductive accounts of the objective metaphysical order of things. Rather than assuming that our thoughts about the world are "secondary," and that the world itself is inscrutable for us, they assumed that what was true in our logical deductions would be true of the world in itself as well, because the world, being ideal, participates in the same ideal framework as our own mentation. This is the cause of all the obsession over the principle of sufficient reason and so forth.

Kant, a huge fan of Newton and of the mathematical and natural-scientific accomplishments of the "Newtonian" tradition of sceptical, anti-metaphysical science, but also a Leibnizian-Wolffian philosopher, maintains the Leibnizian logical and conceptual "world," but encloses it within the subjective phenomenal bounds suggested by sceptico-materialism. So you get the best, or arguably the worst, of both worlds: We can indeed have 100% certain, logico-deductive accounts of reality in itself, just like Leibnizians and Wolffians want! Except, only within the bounds of our own (intersubjectively shared) comportment. The world in itself, just like the Newtonians (sorta?) want, remains totally inscrutable to us. Our conceptual categories, our "first metaphysical properties," like causal and logico-deductive necessity, spatio-temporal presentation of objects, and so on, are all indeed objective and inescapable - FOR US. What lies beyond them, the grounds and roots of all phenomena as they appear "for us," including our own souls/natures, is forever beyond our grasp.

This is where #4, the Platonist and neo-Platonist element, comes in, as a modification of #3, the logico-deductive element. Whereas for the earlier Leibniz-style philosophers the world could be "derived" (or, in a way, emanated) from certain fundamental principles or self-evidently true axioms, like the principle of sufficient reason, the post-Kantian philosophers like Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and so forth tend to go beyond these discursive logical schemes and identify the first principle of the world with a really-existing Absolute or One, which can normally only be apprehended noetically, meaning it can't be given in simple logical form: Fichte makes a very firm point that the primal experience of the "I" (or Ego, or Subject), the world-constituting primordial One which throws out (in a sense, emanates) the objective world as an obstacle for itself to interact with, is a kind of experience radically distinct from logical deduction. If you begin with a merely discursive "objective" principle, you end up with an atheistic, dead, "mechanical" world, like Fichte says Spinoza did. You have to begin with the spontaneously creative subject.

>>13491238
Schelling takes Fichte even more in the direction of neo-Platonism by turning the primordial subject into a supra-subjective Absolute or "world-subject," of which we as individual subjects are elements or parts. He does this in various ways throughout the course of his development but he starts out by straight-up deriving natural physical laws and properties, like gravity and electricity, in a (hypothetical? sketchy?) emanationist account of reality. He moves away from this fairly early, and away from Fichte's teaching even earlier than that. Hegel likewise starts out quite Schellingean, then breaks away from Schelling and famously criticizes him in the introduction to the Phenomenology.

These are just some of the major players. At each stage of the process there are "splinter" movements or thinkers who take inspiration from these projects. Goethe (mis)appropriates Kant's phenomenalist theory of teleological forms in the third Critique as a theory of real metaphysical archetypes. Schiller uses Kant's ideas in his aesthetic theory and discussion of the Spieltrieb. The Schlegels experiment with Kant's "critical" turn and various shades of post-Kantian idealism in various ways, while the von Humboldts are Naturphilosophical like Schelling in many ways. A generation of young men under the spell of the French Revolution and German/Prussian nationalism was influenced by Fichte's focus on world-creating "spontaneity," in ways probably not followed by Fichte, and it's not clear what Fichte thought exactly at many stages. Kant himself disapproved or would have disapproved of almost all of these thinkers. Schleiermacher arguably founds modern theology on the basis of a perennialist platonist account of primary experience of the divine, as filtered through pietistic Protestantism.

>>13491245
Schelling I already mentioned as extremely protean; influential on Goethe and many many others in his early Naturphilosophie (which he rather quickly moved beyond), he was also influential on pretty much all subsequent developments of philosophy, for example in his own theories of primordial archetypes/symbolism. Hegelian thought becomes extremely dominant after the 1820s, then declines massively in the mid-19th century, so that even the reaction against it should be seen as part of his enormous influence (in Germany and abroad, e.g., as the British idealists are hated by subsequent positivists). Right-Hegelians make for metaphysicians and theologians while left-Hegelians influence the historico-critical method and a new sort of scepticism associated with it, for example through George Eliot and her translations of Bruno Bauer and Feuerbach in Britain, and of course through the Young Hegelians, and Marx himself. Even people who attempt to radically upend and invert the German idealist system are still under the influence of its "immanent" and "dialectical" conceptual frameworks/strategies for thinking, as well as its massive set of core concepts like the role of living or primordial symbols, as well as the many older concepts it rehabilitated or reemphasized like noesis, emanation, and holism.

>>13491252
>Schelling I already mentioned as extremely protean; influential on Goethe

lol

>>13491285
Are you reacting to their relative ages, meaning, you don't think the younger Schelling could have influenced the elder Goethe?

Schelling was already writing his Naturphilosophie when he came to Weimar-Jena. Goethe was at this time just starting with his own archetype theory of Naturphilosophie. The two collaborated, and Goethe was extremely impressed by Schelling, who was by far more of a "philosopher." Goethe was obvious a genius polymath but fundamentally a dabbler and a sort of participatory nature mystic.

>>13491306
How do you educate yourself to achieve this broad knowledge? Which books, aside from the classics, do you read?

>>13491232
>>13491238
>>13491245
>>13491252
Based anon.

>>13491232
>>13491238
>>13491245
>>13491252
Nice

>>13491380
fault in our stars and milk & honey

>>13491232
>>13491238
>>13491245
>>13491252
based effortposter

>>13490986
>What the fuck even is German Idealism?
"It was real in my mind"

>>13492612
filtered.

>>13491232
based

I don't know what it is but I'm gonna complete it.

>>13492685
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOk6HB609po