Absolute idealism is chiefly associated with Friedrich Schelling and G. W. F. Hegel, both of whom were German idealist philosophers in the 19th century. The label has also been attached to others such as Josiah Royce, an American philosopher who was greatly influenced by Hegel's work, and the British idealists.
According to Hegel, being is ultimately comprehensible only as an all-inclusive whole (das Absolute). Hegel asserted that in order for the thinking subject (human reason or consciousness) to be able to know its object (the world) at all, there must be in some sense an identity of thought and being. Otherwise, the subject would never have access to the object and we would have no certainty about any of our knowledge of the world.
The absolute idealist position dominated philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain and Germany, while exerting significantly less influence in the United States. The absolute idealist position should be distinguished from the subjective idealism of Berkeley, the transcendental idealism of Kant, or the post-Kantian transcendental idealism (also known as "critical idealism") of Fichte and of the early Schelling.
Schelling and Hegel's concepts of the absolute
According to the scholar Andrew Bowie, Hegel's system depends upon showing how each view and positing of how the world is really has an internal contradiction: "This necessarily leads thought to more comprehensive ways of grasping the world, until the point where there can be no more comprehensive way because there is no longer any contradiction to give rise to it."
For Hegel, the interaction of opposites generates, in a dialectical fashion, all concepts necessary to comprehend what is.
For Kant, reason was only for us, and the categories only emerged within the subject. However, for Hegel, reason is fully immanent. Spirit emerges from nature in history and, in art, religion, and philosophy, knows itself in its truth.
Hegel shows that the world is not other than self. With the realization that mind and world are, by logical necessity, meaningfully coherent, our access to the world is made secure, a security that was lost in Kant's proclamation that the thing-in-itself was ultimately inaccessible.
Hegel's position is a critical transformation of the concept of the absolute advanced by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854), who argued for a philosophy of Identity:
‘Absolute identity’ is, then, the link of the two aspects of being, which, on the one hand, is the universe, and, on the other, is the changing multiplicity which the knowable universe also is. Schelling insists now that “The I think, I am, is, since Descartes, the basic mistake of all knowledge; thinking is not my thinking, and being is not my being, for everything is only of God or the totality” (SW I/7, p. 148), so the I is ‘affirmed’ as a predicate of the being by which it is preceded.
For Schelling, the absolute is a causeless 'ground' upon which relativity (difference and similarity) can be discerned by human judgement (and thus permit 'freedom' itself) and this ground must be simultaneously not of the 'particular' world of finites, but also not wholly different from them (or else there would be no commensurability with empirical reality, objects, sense data, etc. to be compared as 'relative' or otherwise).
In both Schelling and Hegel's systems (especially the latter), the project aims towards a completion of metaphysics. As Redding describes it: "While opinions divide as to how Hegel's approach to logic relates to that of Kant, it is important to grasp that for Hegel logic is not simply a science of the form of our thoughts. It is also a science of actual content as well, and as such has an ontological dimension."
For Schelling, reason was an organic 'striving' in nature, and this striving was one in which the subject and the object approached an identity. Schelling saw reason as the link between spirit and the phenomenal world, as Lauer explains: "For Schelling [...] nature is not the negative of reason, to be submitted to it as reason makes the world its home, but has since its inception been turning itself into a home for reason."
Hegel's doubts about intellectual intuition's ability to prove or legitimate that the particular is in identity with whole led him to progressively formulate a speculative dialectic in which concepts like Aufhebung came to be articulated. Beiser summarizes the early formulation as follows: