The idealist achievement

The period of German Idealism constitutes a cultural phenomenon whose stature and influence has been frequently compared to nothing less than the golden age of Athens. For this reason the era from the 1770s into the 1840s that we tend to call “the age of German Idealism” is often designated in Germany simply as the period of “classical German philosophy.” This designation is meant to indicate a level of preeminent achievement rather than to characterize a specific style or content. It thus bypasses issues such as how philosophers of this era match up with the division in German literature between classicism and romanticism, and how strong a distinction is to be made between the “Critical” or “transcendental” idealism of Kant and the so-called “absolute” idealism that culminated in the work of the three most famous philosophers who came after him: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.