German Idealists
Kant had bought peace between science and religion at a strange price: he split the world in two. There is the world as the mind structures it, which we can know with certainty, and there is the world as it is in itself, which we can never reach at all. For roughly sixty years a chain of brilliant Germans found that unreachable half intolerable and tried, each in turn, to close the gap. Fichte threw the unknowable thing out and grounded everything in the free, active self. Schelling made nature and mind two faces of one Absolute. Hegel made the Absolute a Spirit that develops through all of history toward knowing itself, with nothing left over and nothing unknowable beyond it. It was the most ambitious construction in the history of philosophy, and when it cracked it cracked spectacularly: into Marx, who kept the engine and threw out the Spirit, into Kierkegaard, who said no system could ever hold a single living person, and into a long backlash that treated the whole edifice as a cautionary tale. This is the story of the tradition as one connected arc, the handoffs from mind to mind.
