German idealism is the theory of the French Revolution, not because they wrote an interpretation of those events of 1789, but because they wrote their philosophy in response to the openings and possibilities presented by the revolution. The French Revolution suggested the possibility of self-mastery, individual and collective, that people that could use reason to govern their relations with state and society, they didn’t simply need to be subservient to these God-like forces and institutions with total power over them, that were unchangeable and inhuman. Germany, however, lagged behind France and England, it lacked France’s political development of revolutionary action, and it lacked England’s economic development of industrial growth. So the Germans waged a struggle in the mind that could not be fought in politics or economics; philosophy would do what the weak middle classes could not do in real life. Germans would have to imagine possibilities for self-mastery, in the absence of real opportunities to fulfill them. The possibility of fusing subject and object would be presented for the first time in history, but only in the realm of thought. The prevailing order and values did not need to carry such oppressive, inevitable weight over the individual or society in general. Reality could be reorganized around the principles of reason, universal norms and values. But the Germans couldn’t do this just yet. The Reformation had set free these ideas in thought and religion, humanity could decide for themselves rather than having arbitrary authorities decide for them, but without a middle class to realize these ideals in real life, liberty could only be an ideal to be imagined, an internal value that was independent of external conditions.  could only be a spiritual value, without opportunity to be realized as a social and political value.

The subject is a process of self-consciousness and existence. It is a process of becoming, which humanity is unique in its capacity to be aware of, to be reflexively self-conscious about. The subject moves forward, grows and develops and is in a constant process of change, by confronting internal contradictions and overcoming them in time. This process of movement defines the subject, it is not a thing but a process in constant motion. Humanity, unlike all other forces of nature and animals, has the capacity to be self-conscious about this process. The ultimate end of this process is freedom, a freedom realized by overcoming an opposition to the object. For humanity, this freedom entails the capacity to shape the object of society and thought and values in accordance with their own potential, needs. The realization of freedom means being the ability to be the master of one’s own development, shaper of one’s environment, overcoming the opposition to an alien object, understanding our own potential and realizing it. And so reason is a historical force, in the mind it is called Geist. 

Dialectical philosophy took a different approach to empirical forms of philosophy in regard to notions of truth, reason, knowledge. For the German idealists, what is true is not simply a matter of is, of “the facts,” as it is for the empiricists, who mainly come from the Anglo tradition. The goal was reason was to go beyond the brute facts of what is, instead to realize what ought to be or what is possible or what is our potential, and this is the criteria of truth. We must be able to act against what is currently accepted as true and normal and customary, in the name of that which is not yet accepted or not yet believed or established. The split between subject and object is a the sign of this conflict, the sign of alienation in which humanity is living under the sway of realities that they created but have come to take on an alien power over them. Our labor and knowledge created these objects, but then these objects took on an independent existence that we become subservient to, the object become uncontrollable. This unity of opposition between subject and object is alienation. Reason strives to reunite the subject and object, forming a unity and universality in which we create the world and knowledge and truth and are self-conscious of our ability to do so. So something is true if it fulfills this potential, the possibility of unity and universality. So the facts of reality are then not truth at all, their fixity is only apparent, they are on the way to transforming into something else and therefore not fixed at all. What seems true is actually pregnant with its contrary, negativity, and so we must destroy this negativity that exists in the moment in order to realize the truth. All forms are permeated with negativity, this negativity determines what they are, their content and movement, so in this way things are what they are not. Philosophy is necessary only because of this split between subject and object, and it is no longer necessary when they are unified once again, when we are the masters of our own truths once again, when we live and think according to truths we have created, when we are living up to our potential ideal. Contradictions drive development through the negation of the negation.