Introduction

In its philosophical and political aspects the romantic movement is firmly linked to German Idealism. Like idealism, the philosophy of the romantics counts terms such as “organism,” “individuality,” and “imagination” as part of its systematic basis and distances itself from terms such as “mechanism,” “division,” and “atomism.” Even though German Idealism and the early romantic movement are characterized by a decidedly critical reaction to the Enlightenment, they agree with several of its key political convictions.

The turn of the century represents a break in romantic philosophy. The end of collaboration on the journal Athenaeum by Novalis and the brothers Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel marks the transition to the later romantic period. The Berlin circle (1810–15) and the Vienna circle that formed around Joseph Görres after 1820 are important stages of this later period. Even though Fichte and Schelling still pursued ambitious speculative projects, the main figures of Late Romanticism lost interest in philosophical projects. Instead, the examination of the history of Christian and German culture, speculation on nature, projects in aesthetics, and, above all, a new formulation of concepts of the state and politics moved into the center of attention.

It is well known that transcendental idealism for Kant simply represents a critical idealism, one that draws the limits of knowledge in terms of the distinction between phenomena on the one hand and things in themselves on the other. According to Kant, the transcendental idealist can also be understood as an empirical realist who refuses to dissolve the duality between our experience and objects of our experience, and concedes the existence of objects independent of the subject. The Kantian doctrine of transcendental idealism, irrespective of its various possible forms and modifications, is specifically characterized by a fundamental dualist structure with regard to the distinction between the “given” and the “constituted.” It was precisely this dualism that represented the skandalon of philosophy for the post-Kantian idealists, one that had at all costs to be overcome, despite their recognition of the positive aspects of Kant's contribution.

The early German idealist attempts to articulate a philosophical system are all essentially monistic in character, expressly designed to translate the Kantian dualism into the terms of a monist theoretical model. Nonetheless, with his System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800 – conceived at a time when that dualism was already widely regarded as having been transcended – Schelling took up and modified the question concerning the relative opposition between idealism and realism. For according to Schelling, the concept of transcendental idealism is capable of opening up a perspective from which the opposition between realism and idealism can be seen to derive from a third moment or dimension.