German idealism
In the context of German idealism, the term is ambiguous because it was used in different ways by Kant and his successors, chief among them Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
For example, Kant argues that teleological interpretations of homeostasis and autopoiesis in living things, though seemingly observable and thus empirically provable (or at least probable), are a function of our own subjective constitution projecting certain of its notions onto organized matter.
Conversely, Kant makes the same critical claim about materialist reductionism, as it too is a function of certain "regulative" ideals (such as the drive to reduce our experience of external plurality and multiplicity to a minimum of fundamental laws, forces, and beings).
For the critical idealist, it is simply not possible to know whether living things are ultimately teleological or mechanical, or something else entirely.
Kant's successors agreed with Kant that the subject in its ordinary state lacks immediate knowledge of external reality (as in naive realism), and that empirical knowledge based on sense data ultimately tells us only about the subject's own categorial organization of this data.
Attempts at such a theory often centered on special forms of intuition which Kant either deemed impossible or denied as appropriate foundations for knowledge in the strict and systematic sense, for example in the case of "spiritual" insights that cannot be observed, shared, and tested reliably and repeatably, and thus cannot form the basis of abstract laws about regularities in nature.
Immanuel Kant's work purports to bridge the two dominant philosophical schools in the 18th century: rationalism, which holds that knowledge could be attained by reason alone a priori (prior to experience), and empiricism, which holds that knowledge could be arrived at only through the senses a posteriori (after experience), as expressed by philosopher David Hume, whose skepticism Kant sought to rebut.
That is, the mind plays a central role in shaping our experience of the world: we perceive phenomena in time and space according to the categories of the understanding.
Critics of Kant's project such as F. H. Jacobi, Gottlob Ernst Schulze, and Salomon Maimon influenced the direction the movement would take in the philosophies of his would-be successors.
The first is the idea that the human mind is not a passive recipient of sensory information, but is actively involved in shaping our experience of the world.
The second is the idea that the nature of reality is ultimately unknowable to us, because our experience of the world is mediated by the structures of our own minds.
[5] In 1787, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi addressed, in his book On Faith, or Idealism and Realism, Kant's concept of "thing-in-itself".
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) claimed that the Fichte's "I" needs the Not-I, because there is no subject without object, and vice versa.
Given that abstract thought is thus limited, he went on to consider how historical formations give rise to different philosophies and ways of thinking.
[8] Neo-Kantianism emphasizes the critical dimension of Kant's philosophy as against the perceived excesses of German Idealism.
[9] In England, during the nineteenth century, philosopher Thomas Hill Green embraced German Idealism in order to support Christian monotheism as a basis for morality.
His philosophy attempted to account for an eternal consciousness or mind that was similar to Berkeley's concept of God.
John Rodman, in the introduction to his book on Thomas Hill Green's political theory, wrote: "Green is best seen as an exponent of German idealism as an answer to the dilemma posed by the discrediting of Christianity...."[10] "German idealism was initially introduced to the broader community of American literati through a Vermont intellectual, James Marsh.
"[14] "By the early 1870s, the infiltration of German idealism was so pronounced that Walt Whitman declared in his personal notes that 'Only Hegel is fit for America — is large enough and free enough.'
