The Legacy of the Idealists

Wilber's View

Where the Hegel page tracks what Wilber does with one thinker, this page is about Wilber's diagnosis of German Idealism as a movement — why, having gotten further than anyone else in the modern West toward reintegrating Ascent and Descent (see ascent-and-descent), it collapsed within decades of Hegel's death and left the field to the Descenders uncontested. Wilber's summary of the achievement is generous: Schelling and Hegel, in his reading, independently rediscover the nondual insight that Spirit is already, eternally, fully present — not a future goal but "already in full actuality accomplished" — and cast it as vision-logic, Wilber's term for postformal, dialectical reason that holds opposites together instead of splitting them. On his account the Idealists solved, at least in principle, the central modern puzzle of how a self can be both radically autonomous (the Ego's demand) and integrally whole with nature (the Eco's demand): both are true simultaneously of Spirit, and to the degree one identifies with Spirit, both are given at once.

Wilber's diagnosis of the collapse has two parts, and the first is more interesting than the second. First: the Idealists produced systems but no practice — no injunctive, reproducible discipline (he contrasts this pointedly with Zen's zazen) by which anyone else could verify the transpersonal claims for themselves, so the whole edifice was "mistaken for metaphysics" and treated, fairly on Wilber's own terms, as unfalsifiable speculation. This lands as a real methodological critique rather than mere score-settling — it's the same standard Wilber holds his own "reconstructive science" claims to elsewhere (see transpersonal-domains). Second, more historically contingent: Idealism's account of nature had no room for the second law of thermodynamics, and when 19th-century physics split biology's "winding up" from physics' "winding down," the whole structure lost its empirical foothold. The two failures don't actually support each other as well as Wilber's brisk pairing suggests — a movement with genuine contemplative practice presumably could have survived a scientific challenge to its cosmology in the same way a religion survives revisions to its physics, so the "no yoga" critique is doing most of the real explanatory work, and the thermodynamics story reads more like the occasion for the collapse than its deepest cause.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

The Idealist movement was, in the West, the last great attempt to introduce true Ascent and, most important, to integrate it believably with true Descent—the Ego and the Eco both taken up, preserved and negated, honored and released, in all-encompassing Spirit. The true heirs of Plotinus.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14

And although the great Idealist movement finally failed, its enduring contributions will, I believe, be part of any graceful unpacking of spiritual intuition for the modern and postmodern world.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14

For the moment, I think we could fairly summarize the thrust of the Idealist movement as: an intuition of the transpersonal domain expressed in vision-logic. And there was both its great strength and its fatal weakness.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14

The first was a failure to develop any truly injunctive practices—that is, any true paradigms, any reproducible exemplars. Put differently: no yoga, no contemplative practices, no meditative paradigms, no experimental methodology to reproduce in consciousness the transpersonal insights of its founders.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14

This completely undercut any sort of idealist or spiritual view of evolution or manifestation in general. The first floor of the magnificent Idealist edifice crumbled, and the higher floors almost immediately followed suit (Idealism would survive in any viable form no more than a few decades after Hegel's death).

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14

The net effect of the utter collapse of this noble attempt to escape the Cave was that, once again, Ascent was looked upon very suspiciously… The collapse of Idealism left the Descenders virtually unchallenged as the holders and molders of modernity.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 14

See Also

• Georg Hegel — the movement's culminating figure, treated individually
• ascent-and-descent — the polarity the Idealists tried, and on Wilber's account failed, to durably reunite
• The Transpersonal Domains — the injunctive-practice standard Wilber holds the Idealists to, and elsewhere argues contemplative traditions meet
• spirit-in-action — the panentheist picture Wilber says Schelling and Hegel arrived at independently
• vision-logic — the cognitive stage Wilber identifies the Idealists' insight with
• The Ego Camp and the Eco Camp — the rivalry left unchallenged once Idealism collapsed
• Karl Marx — via Feuerbach, one of the movement's own students who helped finish it off