Two Traditions of Idealism

Nowadays our concept of German Idealism is firm and fixed. We seem to know very well who the German Idealists were, and when their movement began and ended. Almost all of us would say that the movement lasted some fifty years, spanning the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It begins in 1781 with the publication of Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft, and it ends in 1831 with Hegel’s death. The grand thinkers in this tradition are, most everyone would agree, Kant, Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. It is a controversial question whether we include the Romantics in this tradition; but even if we do so, it only slightly alters the dramatis personae. Kant, Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel remain the major players, while the Romantics are merely “transitional figures” or “minor players.”