European Idealism

Empiricism is for the most part Anglocentric in its thinkers and flourished in Britain most notably. But in Europe, and especially Germany, it was idealism that was most influential.

Hegel believehis philosophical system that can explain all of history. A Christian, he takes the idea of the Fall of Man as a central doctrine of history. This integrates with Rousseau (who harkens back to a Golden Age pre-civilisation). All history is the attempt by everyone to get to heaven, or recreating the Garden of Eden on Earth. Has he been to Bahrain? Gilgamesh liked it. The whole of history is battle between good and evil (perhaps taking from Zoroastrian thought, or perhaps a coincidence). 

Geist is spirit. Zeitgeist means the spirit of the time. It is an immaterial thing. Attempts of history are the attempts of God to bring us back to Eden and, according to Hegel, when geist realises itself, we will be brought back to Eden. This orderly view of the entirety of history is simplistic, but the idea of 'zeitgeist' is a compelling one. One might describe the Arab Awakening and renewed will of the Arab people as the zeitgeist of their time.

Next is Marx, who called himself a 'historical materialist'. He is seen as a follower of Hegel but differs in that his ideas stem from economics. He thought geist was the spirit of the people. Turning Hegel's idea on its head, he suggests that it's not geist (that is, sheer will, like Smith's 'hidden hand of the market') that's getting things happening, it's the people who are doing things, who then call it geist. His is a materialist conception of history. What people actual do is make things, as he outlines in his theories that the history of society is the history of class struggle. It's exemplified in the famous statement of the Communist Manifesto: workers of the world unite!

Kant changed the way philosophers approached the universe. Previous to him, philosophers believed that the world was there and our mind perceives it (as Locke did). Kant states that rather, one's mind is everything and the universe is inside one's head. Bertrand Russell puts it “We see space and time because we wear space and time goggles” To put it another way, as three-dimensional beings we cannot cannot imagine an object that is 2D, or that does not exist in time or space. Wittgenstein pointed out that we cannot even imagine space except as on object inside of space.

Schopenhauer is of the generation after Kant. He thinks there's only one "numena": the universe as a thing in itself, the will to be, beingness as a thing. This Will is everything and, when we perceive something, that is a representation of it. In other words, the human mind shapes Will into representation Schopenhauer's ideas were being influenced by Hinduism, reflecting the contact Europeans were beginning to make with cultures beyond their continent.