It is common to consider that both the analytical and the continental philosophical traditions in the twentieth century developed largely as a critical reaction to what was seen as the excesses of the German Idealism and post-Kantian thought, such as their alleged attempt to provide a systematical, a priori account of every fundamental aspect of experience and reality. This could suggest that, even if those currents might still share some ideas with German Idealism (such as a concern with what gives validity to our judgments, both theorical and moral), their philosophical projects and outlooks are fundamentally different (with German Idealism having a project of reaching some sort of absolute knowledge, whereas those currents opposed to it would have a “deflationary” or “anti-metaphysical” philosophical project). In my project, however, I attempt to show otherwise: in fact, my aim is to show that German Idealism shares with the philosophical trends that developed after it and positioned themselves critically in regard to it one fundamental common philosophical project: the search for a real ground of knowledge, i.e. a ground that not only allows us to infer what should be truth, assuming that something else is true (and thus, a merely logical ground), but rather, that allows us to determine what is true as such.
In order to show that, I will first of all, examine some of the works of pre-critical Kant (such as the New Elucidation and The Only Possible Proof of God’s Existence), so that we can see how one of the fundamental problems that preoccupies the pre-critical Kant, if not the most fundamental one, is the distinction between formal ground and real ground, and the search for a principle that can provide us with a way of determining what objects actually are, rather than only how we are supposed to think about them. Secondly, I will defend that Kant’s movement to his critical period in the Critique of Pure Reason represents not an abandonment of the search for a real ground, but rather, his solution to this very problem (which he presents, precisely, as the answer to the question “How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?”). Thirdly, I will examine post-Kantian thinkers, in particular Maimon, Schelling, Fichte and Hegel, in order to show that they too, instead of abandoning the project of searching for a real ground, tried to carry it through always in a more consistent and rigorous way than their predecessors. To conclude, I will discuss how some of the main philosophical currents of the 20th and 21st centuries that arose after German Idealism, such as Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, the first Wittgenstein’s philosophy and Markus Gabriel’s new realism, are still trying to carry through the project of searching for a real ground, always in a more consequent way than they considered that had been done until then. I hope, thus, to show that, through the concept of real ground and the framework it provides, one can acquire a fresh outlook not only of Kant and German Idealism in particular, but also of contemporary philosophical trends in general and of what is at stake at them.
