Absolute Idealism


Absolute Idealism, philosophical theory chiefly associated with G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Schelling, both German idealist philosophers of the 19th century, Josiah Royce, an American philosopher, and others, but, in its essentials, the product of Hegel. Absolute Idealism can generally be characterized as including the following principles: (1) the common everyday world of things and embodied minds is not the world as it really is but merely as it appears in terms of uncriticized categories; (2) the best reflection of the world is not found in physical and mathematical categories but in terms of a self-conscious mind; and (3) thought is the relation of each particular experience with the infinite whole of which it is an expression, rather than the imposition of ready-made forms upon given material.

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Plutarch, circa ad 100.
Western philosophy: The 19th century

…by the German school of absolute idealism, whose main representatives were Johann Fichte (1762–1814), Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). The mid-century was marked by a rebirth of interest in science and its methods, as reflected in the work of Auguste Comte (1798–1857) in France and John…

Idealism for Hegel meant that the finite world is a reflection of mind, which alone is truly real. He held that limited being (that which comes to be and passes away) presupposes infinite unlimited being, within which the finite is a dependent element. In this view, truth becomes the relationship of harmony or coherence between thoughts, rather than a correspondence between thoughts and external realities. As one proceeds from the confusing world of sense experience to the more complex and coherent categories of science, the Absolute Idea, of which all other abstract ideas are merely a part, is approached. Hegel also held that this increasing clarity is evident in the fact that later philosophy presupposes and advances from earlier philosophy, ultimately approaching that to which all things are related and which is nevertheless self-contained—i.e., the Absolute Idea.

Schelling, though similar to Hegel in that he also believed in the Absolute Idea, differed from him in identifying the Absolute as the undifferentiated, or featureless, unity of opposites. Thus, in the state of intellectual intuition, subject and object, being opposites, are lost in the anonymity of the Absolute. Hegel attacked this position in his Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; Phenomenology of Mind).

Royce proposed that human minds are fragments of the Absolute yet somehow remain separate selves and persons. He held that individual selves (as parts of the Absolute) are able, through the fundamental virtue of loyalty, to seek their ever increasing and ever widening meaning and identify with it, thus approaching the Absolute.

Hegel’s idealism formed the basis of the Absolute Idealism of many philosophers (including F.H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet), who made Absolute Idealism a dominant philosophy of the 19th century.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Brian Duignan.

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