Philosophers after Kant avoided the word "metaphysics" as a characterization of their philosophies. Fichte preferred to speak of “science of knowledge” (Wissenschaftslehre), Schelling spoke of a philosophy of nature, of a philosophy of identity or of a system of transcendental idealism, and Hegel published books with such titles as Phenomenology of Spirit, The Science of Logic, and The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences.

The usage of the word shows a strange inversion: Kant argued a resolutely anti-metaphysical philosophy, but used the term metaphysics without difficulties. German Idealism elaborated strongly metaphysical philosophies without ever using the title metaphysics.

Metaphysics thus remained identified with pre-Kantian, or “pre-critical” philosophy. If Kant had destroyed metaphysics, then the new post-Kantian philosophy could not be “metaphysics.” So what should we call it? One of the suggested names was transcendental idealism. Kant had already used it, and post-Kantian idealism radicalized it. For Kant, who still thought it through the Leibnizian tradition, the expression meant that the conditions of possibility of our intuition—space and time—did not belong to the things-in-themselves, but were only forms belonging to our mind, which it used to make sense of phenomena.

What inspired the Idealists was the idea of an original activity of the “transcendental subject,” which had first appeared in the Critique of Pure Reason. But the Idealists claimed Kant’s presentation of it was incomplete because he was still ensnared by traditional “dogmatic” metaphysics for which objects must always enter consciousness from the outside.

Transcendental philosophy was for them a systematic and deductive philosophy founded upon the activity of the knowing and acting subject, which they erected into an “absolute subject” in which all otherness was either to be integrated to itself or overcome. If reality is not yet fully suffused with the I, then so it must become. This is the great imperative of practical philosophy: the world must be made to conform to the requirements of the I. Practical philosophy, in the spirit of the Revolution, hoped to transform reality and the so-called things-in-themselves that seemed to limit the I.

The culmination of metaphysics in German Idealism provoked two resolutely anti-metaphysical reactions. On the one hand, the Young Hegelians and the anti-idealists condemned the abstract metaphysical concepts in the name of concrete existence and aesthetics; and on the other, neo-Kantianism lived on in institutional philosophy and replaced metaphysics with epistemology. This anti-metaphysical movement continued into the twentieth century in two important philosophical schools of thought. First, Husserl’s phenomenology whose “return to the things themselves” and his “Life-world” (Lebenswelt) both connote strong anti-metaphysical leanings; and second, analytic philosophy denounces metaphysical discourse as an abusive use of language and considers itself as a form of therapy.

Timeline of German Idealism

Background

1770s

1780s

1790s

1800s

1810s

1820s

1830s

1840s

1850s

1860s

1870s

1880s

Later