It might almost seem as though Hume’s destructive analysis of the concept of mind had effectively abolished the way of ideas and with it the whole conception of human personality based on a philosophy of mind. That was not the case, however, and in the years that followed Hume’s death in 1776 a new and powerful conception of the human mind developed under the auspices of philosophical idealism. Idealism is commonly known as the view that everything is somehow “mental” or “spiritual,” but this description gives little hint of its real and considerable strengths. It is true that in the thought of Immanuel Kant there were still vestiges of the old dualistic contrasts, most notably in his commitment to “things-in-themselves” behind sensible appearances, even though they proved to be quite unknowable. Nevertheless, the distinguishing feature of this new departure in the philosophy of mind was the effective abandonment, by Kant and those who continued his work, of what may be called the “copy” theory of knowledge—the idea that knowledge consists of the reception in the mind of a representation of some object in the world. In contrast to this view of the mind as essentially passive, Kant’s theory treated the mind as actively setting the conditions that make knowledge possible and as, in effect, ordering the domain of objects constituting the world. At the same time, the standing conception of the soul-mind as a mental substance that receives its contents from without gradually yielded to one in which mind is understood as a function of what Kant called “synthesis”: the establishing of the conditions of a common intelligibility and, most notably, of the categories of “thing” and “cause.”
This ordering function has often been confused with the claim that the mind somehow produces or creates its world—a claim that has been subsequently attributed to idealism as a proof of its extravagant absurdity. What idealism does stand for is the attenuation of a number of dichotomies that had become well established in philosophy as well as in everyday ways of thinking. Of these, the most significant is the distinction between “mind’ and “world” as formulated in terms of a contrast between mental and material substances. What idealism actually brought about was a momentous reversal of the priority assigned to the “inner” world of the mind over the “outer” world of nature. Where Descartes had claimed that an absolute certainty characterizes one’s apprehension of oneself as a thinking being, Kant insisted that the very notion of this inner mental life presupposes an apprehension of the outer reality of a world of stable, reidentifiable things.
This thesis held extensive implications for the whole culture of the inner life that had played such an important role in the Christian tradition and had been greatly reinforced by the inward focus of Cartesian thought. Equally significant was the overcoming of established conceptions of the relation between different selves (different human beings) as one of an independence in principle that was qualified only by the contingent need for cooperation but without altering the separateness of the goals and purposes of the one from those of the other. In this area of thought as well, Kant abandoned the copy theory of knowledge and replaced it with a conception of moral autonomy—the capacity of rational human beings to be their own moral legislators—that became the model for a new understanding of moral personality and the standard for a deeply moralized humanism.
The issue of the relation of one self to another was of fundamental importance to idealism and represented a major theme in the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In a philosophical setting like that of idealism, in which the fact of society is accepted and is not simply an occasion for skeptical exercises, it becomes much harder to maintain Hume’s thesis of the irreducibility of “ought” to “is”—the claim that judgments of morality cannot be logically inferred solely from statements of matters of fact. The reason is, quite simply, that in a milieu that comprises a multiplicity of selves and thus of minds, the idea of justifying what one does, not just to oneself but to others who may be affected by one’s actions, assumes an importance that it cannot have when such matters are considered by persons in the privacy of their own conscience.
Perhaps the most significant achievement of idealism from the standpoint of philosophical anthropology was its replacement of the concept of an individual mind with that of Geist. Although this word is usually translated in English as “spirit,” it was never intended to convey something mystical but rather the essentially social and intersubjective character of knowledge and thought. Yet because idealism developed principally in Germany, the authoritarian traditions of that society have often been read into the doctrine of Geist, even when other interpretations were possible that would have been more compatible with the ideal of a liberal society. Hegel’s writings in particular have suffered under this kind of hermeneutic treatment, with the result that the extraordinary breadth and depth of his vision of the human world have been largely missed. Perhaps the greatest achievement of idealism was Hegel’s conception of the human world as what he called “objective spirit,” a world of shared practices and institutions that must not be identified either with the way the natural world is ordered or with the inwardness and privacy of an individual subject.
Nevertheless, it has been charged that idealism carries the embedding of human lives in their social and historical contexts too far and leaves scant room for individual choice and self-determination. There has recently been a strong polemic in the English-speaking world against the “positive” freedom that supposedly accrues to individual human beings through their identification with institutions and traditions of thought and practice. This kind of freedom is unfavourably contrasted with the “negative” freedom that is, in essence, the ability and the right to say “no,” and to disaffiliate from the institutional contexts into which one may have been born. It should, of course, be kept in mind that the liberal tradition from which these objections derive is itself a historical context in which individuals are formed.
Hegel has also been accused of portraying non-Western cultures in grossly over-simplified terms. The idealistic conception of human history as, at its deepest level, Geistesgeschichte (the movement of “spirit,” or, in contemporary terms, the concept of cultural history) nonetheless inspired a great deal of historical work that made the history of non-Western societies available in a way it had never been before. The ultimately fatal weakness of the Hegelian conception of world history as the history of mind was its presupposition of a teleological pattern in this succession of cultures, by which full human self-knowledge and, ultimately, the unity of the self and its world would be realized. Although that idea has provoked intense criticism and has been decisively discredited, it has nonetheless influenced a great deal of historical work. It is now commonplace among educated people to be at least somewhat familiar with the sensibilities and the outlook on life of people who are remote in time and space from their own lives. The human world has become, as the French author André Malraux observed, a kind of “museum without walls,” in which humans are able to make the most varied comparisons and contrasts between with their own lives and senses of selfhood.
All this would have been unimaginable in other historical periods. It is the fruit of what the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) disapprovingly referred to as “historical humanism.” That kind of humanism, very different from the rhetorical and civic humanism of the Renaissance, itself developed out of idealistic traditions of thought and has until recently dominated the conception of liberal education in Western societies.
To mention the name of Nietzsche is to touch on a strain of 19th-century European thought that resisted the absorption of individual human existence into the wider syntheses of idealism. The other great name in this constellation of thinkers is that of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), to whom the orthodox Christianity of his day seemed as lifeless as it did to Nietzsche but who reacted against it in a quite different manner. For Kierkegaard, an intensified consciousness of the incommensurateness of finite human life with the being of an infinite God—the very consciousness that had led so many into skepticism and religious despair—was the key to a revitalization of authentic religious faith understood as a “leap” into another dimension of reality. For Nietzsche, by contrast, the great task for human beings was to fill the gap left by what he called “the death of God,” and he held that the emergence of human beings who would be capable of creating for themselves whatever norms were to govern their lives would require as great an evolutionary leap as had the movement from apes to modern humans. In their different ways, both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were to contribute to that ultimate form of philosophical individualism that went by the name of existentialism.