Hegel\u2019s rejection of the Kantian thing-in-itself makes the \u201can sich\u201d an ingredient in experience\u2014that about a thing which is not yet present to us is what it is \u201can sich.\u201d Hegel bars thus any philosophical appeal to anything construed as atemporal, a path which I argue was also taken by Nietzsche, Foucault, Rorty, and Habermas. Unlike them, however, Hegel pursues a project of systematic philosophy, which now consists in showing how temporal things mutually support one another. The recent Continental philosophers I discuss do not share this systematic conception; hence some of their most distinctive insights and problems.

\u201cGerman Idealism\u201d means, at its broadest, post-Kantian German phi- losophy through Hegel (on whom this essay will concentrate). This tradition is, perhaps next to Neoplatonism, the least understood of phi- losophy\u2019s major traditions. Indeed, the name \u201cGerman Idealism\u201d itself is somewhat deceptive. German Idealists did not, by and large, believe that esse ist percipi\u2014and so G. E. Moore\u2019s \u201cRefutation of Idealism\u201d missed them completely.1 They are also not \u201cGerman,\u201d if only because national philosophies are not philosophies at all.

Not only is the name \u201cGerman Idealism\u201d misleading; my above characterization of it is as well. While it is true that the German Idealists, including as major \ue000gures Fichte and Schelling, as well as Hegel, came after Kant, there is an enormous gulf between them and him\u2014every bit as wide as, indeed I will argue wider than, the gulf that yawned between Descartes and the Scholastics he studied at La Fl\u00eache. No subsequent break in philosophy has been so wide; and to say that German Idealism ended with Hegel is thus as tendentious as saying that it took oV from Kant. But if German Idealism did not end with Hegel, indeed has not ended at all, then there is no \u201clegacy of German Idealism,\u201d not at least in the sense that it has died and

bequeathed something to us. We are all today German Idealists, car- rying on\u2014with diVerences\u2014the basic elements of a philosophical approach that is very much alive.

The most appropriate German Idealist for a paper undertaking to argue the thesis sketched above is the one furthest from Kant and closest to us: Hegel.

Descartes famously broke with the philosophical tradition he inherited by seeking certainty not in what is (including in Who Am), but in who thinks: thecogito, and whatever followed necessarily from it, was to be the \u201cunshakeable foundation\u201d that metaphysics had sought for so long. But in spite of the radicality of this break with previous philosophy, it has its limits: Descartes is still seeking a foundation, and he still wants it to be unshakeable.

So does Kant, though the \u201cunshakeability\u201d of his foundation has mutated into a moral dimension. In his (unusually succinct) letter to K\u00e4stner of August 5, l790, Kant puts his attitude towards metaphysics thus: \u201cmy eVorts . . . in no way aim to work against the philosophy of Leibniz and WolV.... I aim to achieve the same end, but by a detour which in my opinion those great men held to be super\ue001uous.\u201d2 The end is to retain the content of metaphysics\u2014the ideas that were traditionally exhibited in it and the moral guidance that they bring. The critical \u201cdetour\u201d is to destroy the claim that those ideas have objective referents, studying them merely insofar as they reside within the subject: as objects of critique, the systematic demarcation of the faculties.

What for Leibniz and WolV were concepts with objective referents, for Kant were Ideas of Reason, noumena. Kant thus locates his unshake- able foundation within the mind\u2014in the Ideas created by, and resi- dent within, Reason. This brings him a problem, however, because the contents of the human mind, if they are truly unshakeable, can- not be in time\u2014everything in time comes to be, passes away, and otherwise trembles. The contents of Reason\u2014the Ideas of such non- empirical entities as God, the soul, and immortality\u2014are all outside time and therefore can only be thought as possibilities, not known. Their necessity, as I said above, is moral rather than cognitive.

which are often confused, wrong-headed, and subject not only to episodic corrections but to the overall process of betterment down through history that Kant calls the \u201cculture of reason\u201d (Bildung der

Kant\u2019s search for an unshakeable foundation thus ends without clear success. What is unshakeable, and so foundational, resides in an atem- poral realm that, because it is atemporal, cannot be known. Moreover, just how such a realm could ever come to aVect the empirical realm\u2014 how the Idea of freedom and the categorical imperative, for example, could ever have causal eVects in our actions\u2014remains a mystery, even at the end of theCritique of Judgment\u2014the book that, from the \ue000rst page of its \ue000rst Introduction, was supposed to explain just this.4

Hegel\u2019s break with Kant, then, is importantly concerned with the nature and status of noumena\u2014the atemporal foundations that Kant advanced, in particular, for morality. To be sure, the break is not con- \ue000ned to that issue. It is actually a whole series of \ue000ssures, some open on the surface and others buried, treacherously, within the multiple folds of Hegel\u2019s thought. Even Hegel\u2019s speci\ue000c treatment of Kantian noumena is too large a topic for the present, because it partakes of both sorts of \ue000ssures: it runs at times on the surface and at times deep be- neath it, underlying what seem to be more super\ue000cial ruptures. On its lower levels it is a break not only with Kant but with the continuities I have noted between Kant and pre-Kantian, and even pre-modern, philosophy; it dwarfs the very split between the ancients and the moderns.

What Hegel does is reformulate the phenomenon-noumenon dis- tinction\u2014that between things as we experience them and things in themselves (Dinge an sich)\u2014so that it is no longer a distinction between two realms. This, of course, had been done before: Fichte showed the way by taking the practical dimension as basic to the cognitive:

The concept of action . . . is the only one which uni\ue000es the two worlds which are there for us, the sensible and the intellectual. What opposes my action . . . is the sensible, [and] what should come to be through my action is the intelligible world.5

Since the sensible world is de\ue000ned entirely as that which opposes my action, it is posited by, or grounded in, that action itself\u2014not in a thing in itself that is supposed to exist independently of me. In this way, the empirical realm is assimilated to the noumenal realm: the noumenal realm contains all the moral desiderata, while the empiri- cal realm is merely a resistance to their realization.