ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Philosophical Instructions Lesson Three: A Glance at the Course of Philosophical Thought (in the last two centuries) Objective Idealism As was indicated earlier, after the Renaissance, no stable philosophical system came into existence, but rather different philosophical schools and views constantly have been and are being born and dying. The number and variety of schools and “-isms” has increased since the nineteenth century.

In this brief overview there is no occasion to mention all of them, and we shall merely provide a brief mention of some of them: After Kant (from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century) a number of German philosophers became famous, whose ideas more or less found their source in the thought of Kant.

They sought to compensate for the weak points in his philosophy by using mystical sources, and although there were differences among their views, what they had in common was that they began from an individual viewpoint and paid heed to the explanation of being and the appearance of multiplicity from unity in a poetic way, and they were called “Romantic philosophers”.

Among them, Fichte, who personally was a student of Kant, was extremely interested in free will, and among the views of Kant, he emphasized the fundamentality of morals and practical reason. He said, “Theoretical reason observes the system of nature as necessary, but within ourselves we find freedom and a desire for voluntary actions, and the our consciences design a system that we must attempt to realize.

Hence we must consider nature to be subordinate to the ego, and not independent and unrelated to it.” It is this tendency towards freedom which drove him and other romantics such as Schelling to accept a kind of idealism and the fundamentality of the spirit (a characteristic of which was considered to be freedom). This school of thought was further developed by Hegel, and it took the form of a relatively coherent system of philosophy, and was called objective idealism.

Hegel, who was a contemporary of Schelling, imagined the world to be the thoughts and ideas of the absolute spirit, and that between them [the spirit and its thoughts and ideas] there are logical relations rather than causal relations, as held by other philosophers. According to Hegel, the course of the appearance of ideas is from unity to multiplicity, from the general to the specific.