The Idealist Path

German Idealism, following Kant's Copernican revolution, holds that mind plays a constitutive role in the structure of reality. Fichte grounded all reality in the self-positing I. Schelling sought the absolute identity of nature and spirit. Hegel presented reality as Geist — Absolute Spirit — unfolding through history in a dialectical process of contradiction and resolution. Together they produced the most ambitious system-building in Western philosophy.