One of the particularities of philosophy is that its own history is part of its praxis. Fields such as the social or natural sciences may evolve over time, yet they do not draw upon their historical narratives as a basis for validating their conclusions. By contrast, philosophers philosophize by reconstructing the history of their field and by juxtaposing their own ideas with that history. Narrating and rewriting the history of philosophy is part of how philosophy is done.

If one were to outline the history of philosophy as taught in Anglophone curricula and popular among philosophical audiences, it would resemble this. Modern philosophy began with Kant’s awakening from his metaphysical slumber and his overcoming of speculative metaphysics. He discovered the constitutive role that the subjective categories of our understanding play for our representation of the world. After Kant, there followed an erratic period driven by romanticism, an obsession by subjectivity and intellectuality, and the discovery of Indian philosophy, which mostly impacted philosophers outside the mainstream, such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. One of the defining philosophies of this period was German idealism, which broke apart into “left”—most importantly, Marx—and “right” Hegelians and disintegrated in the second half of the twentieth century. A new beginning of philosophy was achieved by thinkers like William James and C. S. Peirce in the US, Husserl in Europe, and, most importantly, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who provided philosophy with the tools to overcome earlier speculative paradigms and to conform to the progress of modern science and technology. All in all, the nineteenth century was a confused—or confusing century—marked by the decline of pre-Kantian metaphysics and by the rise of a new philosophical awareness and methodology.

This is the history that G. E. Moore and, most importantly, Bertrand Russell wrote for us. It is a history of the nineteenth century as a period marked by a trepidant, uncertain quest for a post-metaphysical identity. A quest that could only come to a conclusion through the breakthrough of analytic philosophy and the overcoming of idealism as the last manifestation of the metaphysical tradition.

Idealism was declared dead in the wake of Moore’s paper “The Refutation of Idealism” and Russell’s objections to British philosopher F. H. Bradley. Moore reduced idealism to its Berkeleyan articulation, epitomized by the axiom esse est percipi, and Russell focused his objections on Bradley’s theory of internal relations, from which he allegedly derived his idealist starting point. This twofold refutation of idealism represents something like a philosophical synecdoche: idealism was reduced to two key ideas—that the content of perception, not some world “out there,” is reality, and that relations aren’t real—and those key ideas came to absorb the historical reality of idealism, as well as an immense part of the nineteenth century.

Yet, while this synecdochic vision of idealism has prevailed historically and will, most probably, never be undone, it fails to represent the history of idealism in any meaningful way.

When Hegel died, idealism came to flourish in a jungle-like, uncontrollable manner. In Tübingen, where Hegel had studied, F. C. Baur founded a school of New Testament criticism that started with Hegelian premises and promoted the idea that religious history evolves according to a logic of universal reason, shifting from an ideal of salvation for a small group of people to universal salvation. Baur’s Hegelianism became one of the most influential standpoints of nineteenth-century theology and philosophy, influencing thinkers such as Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack, who played a decisive role for German intellectual history. In close vicinity to Baur stood Philipp Marheineke and Carl Daub, whose writings manifest a remarkable speculative depth. In a Hegelian manner, they believe that God is an “idea” that realizes itself in the mind that thinks it. They conceive God, not as a transcendent, unintelligible object of faith, but as the very heart of the rational constitution of the human being. God is, in a way, not different from the mind that thinks him.

David Strauss and Bruno Bauer shared similar ideas about the necessity to overcome the historical contingencies, particularisms, and ideological visions characterizing religious traditions. Strauss thought that neither supernatural nor naturalizing visions of religion could succeed, but that one must learn to observe the nature of religious myth to understand the meaning of religion. With these theses, Strauss did not at all aim to dismantle religion, as Frederick Beiser thinks, but find a way to delineate its specific dimension of meaning.

Among Catholic thinkers, Franz Anton Staudenmaier deserves particular attention. In his 1840 monograph on The Doctrine of Ideas, he develops an idealist vision of revelation, arguing that throughout the Gospel of John, patristic philosophy, and the medieval tradition, the history of Christianity presents itself as the unfolding of the divine, primordial idea, and that this idea is not a “thing” existing separately but the very element in which the human intellect is situated. Johann Baptist von Drey and Johannes von Kuhn followed similar tracks, drawing on Hegel even more openly than Staudenmaier, who was sometimes reticent to admit his reliance on Hegelian idealism.

At the same time as the Tübingen thinkers, Scottish philosopher James Hutchinson Stirling published his Secret of Hegel (1865), one of the milestones of a school that would become one of the key movements in late nineteenth-century Western philosophy: British idealism. Some of the early British idealists, such as Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, obtained first-hand knowledge of German philosophy during their studies in Göttingen, made possible by this university’s affiliation with the King of Great Britain George II.

British idealism is, to an even higher degree than German idealism, a variegated and irreducibly complex phenomenon. Some of the British idealists, such as T. H. Green, assumed idealism as a starting point without feeling the need to articulate a theoretical system that could justify it in a conclusive sense. They understood it to be an expression of common sense—for if all we have access to is thought, how could we posit a world distinct from it? Others, such as J. F. Ferrier in his Institutes of Metaphysic, followed a rigorous metaphysical logic, but tended to rely more closely on Berkeley perception-derived ideas than on Hegel’s absolute, historical idealism.

Others again, and perhaps most notably Scottish theologian John Caird, gave their idealism a historical and religious dimension, arguing, similarly to Tübingen theologians, that divine reality is implied in the constitution of the human mind in an inextricable manner. The first volume of his Fundamental Ideas of Christianity (1899) follows Hegel’s vision of history and Christianity closely. Caird’s ideas remained surprisingly unexplored by later theologians but remain one of the most convincing Christian arguments for religious idealism.

That British idealism was not an isolated phenomenon but stood in direct relation, not only with German idealism, but also with ancient Greek idealism, is shown by the work of philosophers such as A. E. Taylor and G. R. G. Mure. Taylor was one of the most important British scholars of Plato, Aristotle, and the Platonic tradition. His work on Plato in particular clarifies many of the basic idealist concepts. For example, Taylor sees Plato’s idealism as a form of “conceptual realism” rather than as a type of Berkeleyan idealism, in which ideas are states of the mind. He thus contrasts ancient idealism with modern forms of idealism. G. R. G. Mure translated Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics and wrote on Hegel extensively. He saw in idealism not only a philosophical system supported by punctual, specific arguments, but a philosophy coherent with literature and art. In his Retreat from Truth (1958), he offers various cultural arguments against the empiricist and analytic paradigms, seeing in these paradigms an extension of political liberalism, hostile to more fundamental modes of human expression.

These two types of idealism, German and British, stem from the two basic idealist intuitions: firstly, that there is a type of underlying, rational or intellectual structure in the constitution of being that corresponds to the constitution of the human intellect; and secondly, that the very nature of perception and thought—the realm of Bradleyan “appearance”—is inherently exclusive of the idea of an outside reality. Ultimately, these two intuitions can be traced back to older forms of idealism such as the Plotinian one. Plotinus, too, thinks that being and thought are ultimately identical and that this identity reveals itself in the natural world and in the structure of thought itself. Modern idealisms thus present a high degree of continuity with philosophies that dominated Western philosophy for the longest time.

In his attempt to introduce a new way of practicing philosophy and by giving that attempt a critical grounding in history, Russell has unknowingly—and perhaps unintentionally—made philosophy ahistorical. The history that he has written and that North American and British philosophers have inherited is a reductionist narrative that represents idealism like a premodern, weak, and overly speculative position. That narrative has become dominant in such a way that most of the idealist philosophers who succeeded Hegel and, in Great Britain, Stirling, have been consigned to oblivion, which, in turn, has covered a large part of the history of modern philosophy in darkness.

Idealism is, one could say, the original philosopher’s attitude. Philosophy begins with the intuition that our everyday approach to reality is wrong. Philosophical ideas cannot be verified through perception. Rather, they make perception appear like a weak, diminished form of evidence. The nineteenth century brought about some of the strongest contributions to idealist philosophy. Keeping those contributions invisible by promoting the myth that idealism is a confused, easily refutable position, and that analytic philosophy has succeeded in providing that refutation, is, in a way, an objection to philosophy itself.

Thinking philosophically begins with seeing the nothingness of what appears to be real. For the same are thinking and being–τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι.