Main Philosophical Directions

Directions of Epistemological Theory

Transcendental Idealism

The relationship of transcendental idealism to all other idealistic movements, particularly to its two preceding forms, objective and subjective idealism, is fundamentally characterized by three moments:

Transcendental idealism borrows from objective idealism the assumption of the existence of an objectively real being, to which all experiential content is but a "phenomenon." However, grounded in the critique of knowledge, it concurrently adds the premise that the world of being or things-in-themselves is unknowable, with phenomena merely indicating such being.

Transcendental idealism agrees with subjective idealism in that all knowledge cannot transcend the limits of subjective experience. Nevertheless, it recognizes that the content of this experience can be analyzed into a given material, the matter of sensations, and the forms that distribute this material—space, time, and categories. The material is given to us empirically, as it changes according to contingent conditions; the forms, on the other hand, being necessary conditions for any experience, are given a priori to the knowing subject. The necessity of connecting categories with intuition, particularly the form of the intuition of time, implies that all these a priori forms, as well as categories, can only be applied within the realm of sensory experience.

Thus, transcendental idealism theoretically occupies a middle position between subjective and objective idealism: like the former, it restricts knowledge to our representations, and like the latter, it acknowledges these representations not as the being of things but merely as a world of phenomena, which, through sensation contained in each phenomenon, points to an existence independent of us, the "thing-in-itself." Consequently, Kant regards his transcendental idealism as "empirical realism," mistakenly considering Berkeley's doctrine as "empirical idealism." In truth, Berkeley's doctrine, like Kant's, represents "empirical realism," differing from Kant's only in that it is not transcendental but rather transcendent idealism, as it establishes, by analogy with the content of subjective spiritual being, the idea of a supersensory unity of all existence.

In contrast to both subjective and objective idealism, transcendental idealism acknowledges that being, corresponding to the world of phenomena, is theoretically unknowable but is necessary for practical interests and thus defined by their content. While in both earlier forms of idealism, transcendental ideas were regarded as knowable and provable, transcendental idealism recognizes only the theoretical provability of the possibility of these ideas: on one hand, the matter of sensation, and on the other, the striving of our reason to ascend from the conditioned to its conditions and ultimately to the unconditional leads to these ideas. The true content of these ideas, however, is provided to us in the realm of will, which, as an original free volitional activity, is not subject to the forms of intuition and categories, and which simultaneously, in the moral law revealed in human conscience, demands the complement of the sensory world of phenomena with an intellectual world of being. For Kant, the moral law contains three postulates: for its existence, it requires freedom of will; for its realization, the unlimited perfection of humanity, hence immortality; and for its origin, a supreme legislator, God.

Thus, for transcendental idealism, the world of true being is not the world of knowable reality but the world of religious faith. The realm of morality occupies a middle position between the sensory and supersensory worlds: morality constantly urges the ascent from the sensory to the supersensory, thereby transforming the religious content of faith into religious convictions. In this conception of the relationship between the supersensory world and the sensory, Kant's idealism, far more than its preceding forms, approaches again the original form of idealism, Platonism. What in Plato was an external cosmic process transforms, in Kant, into an internal moral process; accordingly, the connection between the two worlds forms not an aesthetic principle but an ethical one. The aesthetic, considered as a product of one of the spiritual forces that occupy a middle position between practical and theoretical reason, represents, in a certain sense, a secondary connective link between the sensory and supersensory worlds.

While maintaining the distinction between phenomenon and being established by objective idealism, transcendental idealism accepts this opposition not within theoretical knowledge itself but in the relationship between knowledge and will, theoretical and practical. Thus, transcendental idealism restricts knowledge to the world of phenomena. Consequently, the previous opposition in the realm of knowledge between phenomenon and being, as established by objective idealism, does not entirely vanish but rather acquires a different content. This opposition naturally becomes the opposition between a priori and empirical knowledge, with both objects lying within the world of phenomena. A priori knowledge contains the formal laws of phenomena, resulting from the combination of categories with pure forms of intuition. This a priori knowledge finds its place in pure mathematics, in the mathematical doctrine of nature, or in that part of physics that establishes the laws of nature arising from the concepts of substantiality and causality. Empirical knowledge encompasses the entirety of other, in the narrow sense of the word, empirical sciences. Thus, the relationship between a priori and empirical knowledge, differing from the relationship of being and phenomenon associated with it in objective idealism, resembles the relationship of form and matter, or, since mathematics can be regarded as a typical formal science, the relationship between mathematical and empirical sciences.

This point is primarily connected to attempts at further foundational development and a new substantiation of idealism that emerged in philosophy following Kant, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. In response to the claims of empirical sciences, to which Kant assigned little significance, and, on the other hand, attempting to derive many of the principles that Kant laid as the foundation of his investigation through a unified method, post-Kantian philosophy elevates logical principles to the forefront instead of mathematical forms of knowledge. The distinctive feature of these logical principles is their uniform applicability, indeed, their necessity of application to the content of knowledge in its entirety. Thus, the fundamental logical laws of identity, contradiction, and foundation in the form of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, presented through the panlogical method, form the basis of new philosophical systems. Each of these systems claims to be a self-contained system of concepts, methodically articulated through the self-development of thought, encompassing as branches of a single foundational concept the principles that appeared in Kant as completely distinct roots of knowledge. Therefore, in the panlogical systems, the distinctions established by transcendental idealism between concept and intuition, between form and matter, and ultimately between knowledge and will lose their significance: the same immanent law of thought that creates concepts such as relation, causality, etc., must develop as its necessary products space, time, and the general capacity for sensation, even particular modifications thereof, such as light sensations, auditory sensations, olfactory sensations, etc.; finally, the rules of will and products stemming from spiritual communion, religion, art, and philosophy. Although this all-encompassing application of the panlogical method found its most comprehensive expression in the last of the mentioned systems, Hegel's system, this tendency was present from the very beginning. Fichte, in his science of knowledge, consciously rejected the Kantian distinctions between concept, intuition, sensation, knowledge, and will, even though his science of knowledge initially sought only a more consistent execution of transcendental idealism.

Since post-Kantian philosophy aimed to comprehend the entire real world as a strictly logical and necessary development of thought, all systems within this framework can collectively be referred to as ideal-realistic, following the example of Fichte, who characterized his own system using this term. This expression primarily points to a distinctive feature that characterizes this new form of idealism in relation to all its preceding forms—from Plato to Kant: a complete renunciation of the opposition between being and appearance. This denial manifests negatively in the rejection of Kant's established notion of the "thing-in-itself," and positively in the principle that underlies all these systems and is clearly proclaimed primarily in the last of them, Hegel's system, which posits that the world of phenomena, in its entirety, is nothing other than the unfolding of being itself.

In agreement on this principle, as well as in essential characteristics and method, the ideal-realistic systems correspondingly divide into three main directions: subjective, objective, and absolute ideal-realism. In subjective ideal-realism, which Fichte articulated in the early forms of his "science of knowledge" and which is most closely aligned with Kant's transcendental idealism, pure self-consciousness— the identity of "I = I"—constitutes the first necessary and unconditional principle. In objective ideal-realism, which Schelling elaborated in various forms during the first period of his activity, the guiding thought is that the objective world is governed by the same laws of proposition, negation, and the preservation of both within a higher unity that dominate our thought. This system primarily represents a natural philosophy constructed according to a panlogical method. Finally, Hegel's absolute ideal-realism arises from the concept of being and attempts to derive from it the world in all its totality, encompassing both the realm of concepts and the world of phenomena, thereby constructing the abstract-logical movement of concepts, the real movement that gradually unfolds in nature, and ultimately the real and ideal as they coexist in the spiritual development of subjective consciousness and the objective spiritual world. Alongside this, ideal-realism acquires the character of evolutionary pantheism. The resting being of Spinoza is replaced by a gradual unfolding of developmental moments. However, this development represents an ideal progression, not a real one. Only in the idea, in the self-development of the concept, do these moments flow into one another; in reality, all of them exist simultaneously. Hegel warns against the inclination to regard this ideal order of concepts as a real development, considering it a naïve representation akin to Thales' view that all things emerged from water.

In the transition from objective and subjective idealism to transcendental idealism, and subsequently to ideal-realism, there is a clear indication of the gradual convergence of the idealist direction with realism. In ideal-realism, it is only the method of concept distribution and the self-development of "ideas" dependent on it that confer an idealistic character upon the systems. However, since this method itself, as previously noted, is entirely an artificial formal schematic method, what remains valuable in these systems is primarily the content to which this method is applied—a content that should encompass all concrete reality and should be identical in its immediate reality to the true being of things. Thus, in the elimination of the specific opposition between the suprasensory and sensory worlds, or being and appearance, characteristic of earlier forms of idealism, the transition to realism is already implicitly present. Ideal-realism, therefore, is in fact nothing more than realism in an idealistic form, which, once the inadequacy of this form has been demonstrated, becomes a realistic worldview.

Since ideal-realism, which cannot be considered true idealism in practice, has left the stage or continues to exist in systems that are either entirely related to realism or amount to fruitless attempts to revive the systems of Fichte or Hegel, idealism has not presented itself in any new original form. All attempts to restore idealism, as just indicated, revert to its old forms: neokantianism returns to transcendental idealism, Lotze to the objective idealism of Leibniz, and finally, the so-called "immanent philosophy" seeks to revive the subjective idealism of Berkeley. Yet even these attempts at restoring idealistic systems typically, in their transformations, increasingly draw closer to realism, which, as the most recently emerging direction, seems still capable of further development.

The systems of ideal-realism, which attempt to unite idealistic principles with their realistic application, have generally met with failure due to the inadequacy of their method; however, this does not preclude the fact that, by advancing certain ideas, they could significantly influence the development of philosophical thought. In this regard, apart from other productive ideas, two principles established by Fichte and Hegel played a tremendous role. The first of these amounts to the complete elimination of the opposition between being and appearance, which played a dubious and partially contradictory role even in Kant's thought—a dichotomy that echoed Plato's idea of the sensory world falling away from the purity of ideas. The second principle relates to the concept of the actuality of spirit, which had indeed been noted by Hume and Kant, but only approached from an empirical-psychological perspective. Fichte and Hegel extended the application of this concept to all domains of spiritual life and opposed it to the earlier notion of the substantiality of the spiritual, which had found a place in both idealistic and realistic systems. In contrast, the "idea of development," closely linked to the principle of actuality just mentioned and typically attributed to these systems in modern times, can only be conditionally regarded as their genuine discovery: Hegel and Fichte, due to their idealistic principle, could only conceive of an ideal development—development consisting of a certain correlation of phenomena within concepts, but not a real development, in the true sense of the word.