This chapter takes up Zola’s self-portrait as Saint Thomas in the wake of his much-commented visit to Lourdes in 1892. The novel he went on to write about the Pyrenean shrine, ‘that divine land of dreams’, was largely based on those supposedly miraculous events he had witnessed, and about which he remained sceptical. This chapter looks to Zola’s Lourdes (1894), in conjunction with the heated polemic it provoked, to better understand the stakes of the author’s divisive foray into matters of Catholic practice and dogma. More than an expression of Zola’s anti-clericalism, the novel aroused debates that were aesthetic as much as ideological, as adversaries argued over questions of representation, proofs, facts, documents, and faithfulness. The chapter reads a set of material penned by Catholic detractors, who were determined to defend the divine status of the miracle, casting Zola’s naturalism as an illegitimate, unbelievable – even, à la limite, idealist – aesthetic mode.

This chapter engages with an important tradition of Marxist literary criticism – principally via Fredric Jameson – that has insisted on the insufficiencies of the naturalist novel as a vehicle for revolutionary impulses. It takes up Jameson’s claims as a spur to reconsidering the contested politics of Zola’s best-selling strike novel Germinal (1885). The chapter conceives of the strike as a particular vehicle for the idealist imagination that Zola obsessively discredits – casting it as a form of ‘impossibilism’, an epithet applied to the earliest manifestation of French Marxism. Embedded in contemporary schisms on the Left, Zola’s strike novel is shown to negotiate with debates about the ethical and political legitimacy of this weapon of working-class struggle, as well as the figure of the ambitious strike leader. Zola’s critical account of political idealism ultimately entails a set of anxious reflections on the naturalist novel’s own modes of representation, as well as its equivocal sense of political purpose.

The epilogue broaches the wrangling over Zola’s posthumous fortune: principally, the shifting attitudes that were brought about by his heroic support of Dreyfus, and the energetic debates attending his Pantheonisation. At Zola’s funeral, Anatole France famously described the writer as ‘an ardent idealist’, his speech emblematising a wider effort to recast Zola’s literary career in the gilded light of his sacrifice. This epilogue tackles, then, a supposition only alluded to in earlier chapters: that the positing of Zola as an idealist goes hand in hand with his emergence as an exemplary object of idealisation. Reflecting on Zola’s evolution as a writer, it explores the irresistible pull of biographical destiny as something of an ultimate horizon for our reading of his fiction. To account for idealism in Zola is inevitably, or perhaps especially, it is argued, to grapple with the question of teleology that the Dreyfus Affair imposes.

This chapter tackles Zola’s incongruous experiment in Le Rêve (1888) with an ‘idealist’ style of fiction. Generally understood as a strategic demonstration of the author’s versatility, Le Rêve also responds to a longstanding negotiation with the language of idealism – one rooted, the chapter argues, in Zola’s complex relationship to the century’s most prominent idealist writer, George Sand. The chapter reads Le Rêve as effectuating a return to Sand’s aesthetic, which Zola had assimilated into the troublesome figure of the dream. It tracks the burgeoning imagination of Zola’s heroine via Freud’s ‘Family Romances’, then via Marthe Robert’s Freudian genealogy of the novel, which together reveal the mutual entailments of authorial creativity and childhood fantasy. Zola’s roman d’artiste emerges as another projection of idealist tendencies onto women – most obviously, Sand, but also the artist-heroine of Le Rêve, who is made to embody Sand’s congenital extravagance.

The Introduction makes the case for privileging idealism in our accounts of Zola’s thought and writing, and, in turn for recovering the fundamental role it plays as a cornerstone of naturalism’s self-image. Exploring naturalism’s relationship to its chief antagonist can open up new perspectives on two thorny critical questions. First, how to grapple with the gap between naturalist theory, in all its dogmatism, and the experimental, even contradictory, nature of naturalist writing in practice. Second, how to make sense of Zola’s own eventual destination as the author of utopian novels (1899-1902), where the rhetoric of idealism, of the dream, surfaces as the best expression of the writer’s political commitment. Against prevailing accounts of Zola’s ‘late’ fiction as a product of subterranean, emotional, or instinctual impulses, the Introduction reframes Zola’s idealism as a strategic political and intellectual project.

The first instalment of Zola’s novel Vérité appeared on 10 September 1902, just nineteen days before the author died under suspicious circumstances that were likely related to his involvement in the Dreyfus Affair. The novel provided an allegorical transposition of the contemporary political drama that had divided the nation, but which, as yet, had been denied its proper dénouement. This chapter explores how Zola imagined the right and just resolution of the legal case, as well as of the national crisis it galvanised. Working across Zola’s journalistic and fictional versions of the Affair, it argues that Zola understood the Dreyfus case as an aesthetic problem: as a matter of style, taste, plot, and plausibility. In order for the truth to win out, Zola must imagine the aesthetic and ethical re-education of a nation; and this happy ending involves harnessing an acceptable version of the idealist imagination.

This chapter charts the long history of what Zola dubbed ‘the quarrel of the idealists and the naturalists’. In its wide-ranging account of a shifting literary field in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the chapter shows how naturalism came to be defined by its double-edged relationship to its chief adversary: idealism. It sets out some of the key charges that Zola formulated against idealism, as the means to justify naturalism’s ethical, political, and aesthetic superiority. Then, in looking to Zola’s contemporaries, it examines a strain of literary criticism that sought to trouble the binaries Zola established - notably, by claiming to determine an idealist tendency in the naturalist author’s own writing , albeit ‘à rebours’. The remainder of the chapter describes the so-called idealist reaction that took hold in the late 1880s, forcing Zola to contemplate ways of adapting to the demands of a younger generation.

Leibniz is the genuine initiator of German Idealism, developing ideas of freedom as spontaneity or self-originating action, and linking freedom with justice and progress in ways that are decisive for Kant and later idealists. Rethinking spontaneity as negative freedom, Kant criticises the paternalistic perfectionism and Enlightened absolutism of Christian Wolff, a distinct development from Leibniz, but opens the way for a new perfectionism of freedom. The origins of perfectionism in Aristotle and the Stoics are surveyed, and the various formulations of post-Kantian perfectionism from Humboldt to Marx are outlined.

This chapter considers Heidegger’s “two-handedness” on the issue of realism versus idealism: on the one hand, an apparent realism about entities, while on the other, an apparent idealism about being. Interpreters tend to resolve the tensions such two-handedness engenders by giving one side or the other the upper hand. Kantian approaches to Heidegger privilege idealism, other readings favor realism. The latter readings neglect Heidegger’s own rather mocking remarks directed at those who fear idealism as “the foul fiend incarnate” and favor instead what he calls a “blind realism.” Properly understood, such remarks point toward a position beyond both realism and idealism, a position akin to, but importantly different from, Quine’s naturalism. Quine’s imagery of “working from within” and “mutual containment” provide models for a more evenhanded approach to the issue of realism and idealism. Moreover, they help us to understand Heidegger’s principal aim of rejecting both positions.

Coalescing developments in brain, mind, and body bring about qualitative changes in all aspects of the teenager’s life, with both great advantages and challenges. Being able to imagine how things could be, and seeing multiple possibilities, can lead to idealism or cynicism. Teens are aware of the complexity of thought and feeling and know that neither they nor others are always aware of motives. Along with a profound sense of uniqueness, they have the capacity to connect with others in a deeper, more intimate way and to be involved in a complex network of relationships. At the same time, they can feel alone in dealing with emotions at a new level of complexity. To thrive during this period they must be able to tolerate a level of vulnerability never before experienced, because they know others may be thinking about them and seeing beneath the surface of their behavior, just as they can.

Shelley was an adherent to the basic tenet of empiricism, that ‘the senses are the only inlets of knowledge’. Yet he also affirmed that there are things we only ‘feel’ to be true. Rooted in Hume’s distinction between ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’ – between sensory perceptions and the pictures in our minds, distinguishable only by the relative strength of their appearances – Shelley developed the notion of an ‘inward sense’ that guides us in our feelings or intuitions and discerns between real and ideal things. Above and beyond the philosophy of the British empiricists and the scepticism of Hume, yet rooted in their works, Shelley also developed in his verse a notion of what it would mean for an ‘idea’ to outstrip an ‘impression’ – for the world of the imagination to surpass the real thing, and for poetry to offer up ideas of greater force than empirical reality.

Gail Marshall reflects on the European roots of George Eliot’s formulation of realism, the way in which her European experiences in the 1850s coincided with those of a very young Henry James, and how both writers embrace the challenging difference of their experiences of Europe as a prelude to developing their respective practices of realism. ‘George Eliot, Henry James, Realism, and Europe’ examines the novelists’ travels in Europe in the 1850s, the availability of European culture in Britain, Thomas Cook’s first tours to Europe, a nostalgic interest in peasants, and the publication in 1859 of David Masson’s British Novelists and their Styles: Being a Critical Sketch of the History of British Prose Fiction. The chapter argues that the experience of European travel is intrinsic to both Eliot and James’s aesthetic, as well as to the ethical practice of realism.

This chapter argues that Gissing’s novels offer significant and philosophically sophisticated engagements with the novel of ideas. Gissing’s study of Schopenhauer’s works led him to take a keen interest in post-Kantian idealism and in fundamental questions regarding the irreconcilability of the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’. These concerns are reflected in the novels Gissing wrote in the 1880s – these books satirize the idealist pretensions of social reformers, and they demonstrate that the philanthropic ideals of the Settlement Movement were bound to fail when confronted with the complex and harsh reality of London’s East End. Gissing’s novels are animated by a set of questions that bear directly on the history of the novel of ideas: are aspirational ideals necessarily external and alien to the literary work, or is it possible for them to be assimilated into the medium of literary form? Is it possible for these ideals to become artistically productive?

This chapter contrasts the approach to nature taken by Alexander von Humboldt and Hegel. In particular, it focuses upon the notion of Naturphilosophie and how it is developed in the work of both thinkers. It gives details from the work of Schiller, Goethe, and Schelling in order to provide historical context to the discussion. To clarify some of the contrasts between Humboldt’s and Hegel’s approaches to nature, the chapter focuses upon their approaches to the landscape and people of America. The fate of natural beauty in the work of both thinkers is highlighted. It argues, by reference to Adorno’s critique of Hegel, that while Humboldt gives natural beauty autonomy by not limiting it to what the subject contributes to it, Hegel’s view of nature is as repressed natural beauty, eclipsing it with human reason and human subjectivity. Ultimately, Humboldt’s more empirical approach, balanced with a recognition of the role of freedom, allows nature to come into clearer focus than it does in Hegel’s work. Hegel’s more abstract, speculative approach keeps nature too far from the empirical realm. In the case of our understanding of nature, Hegel’s clean hands become a problem, resulting in a Naturphilosophie that does not bring us close enough to nature or its beauties.

This chapter examines the tension between mysticism and science in Aldous Huxley’s novels of ideas. It deploys the new critical terminology of Rachel Potter and Matthew Taunton and illustrates its utility. Those Barren Leaves (1925) is a good example of the ‘comic novel of ideas’, in that the high seriousness of Cardan and Calamy’s disputations is interspersed with low farce. Point Count Point (1928) exemplifies the ‘serious novel of ideas’: in addition to staging a Hegelian dialectic between the paganism of Rampion and the Manicheanism of Spandrell, the narrative tests their ideas. Eyeless in Gaza (1936) is an ‘asymmetric novel of ideas’: the dialectic between a version of D. H. Lawrence’s philosophy and a broadly Buddhist worldview is enacted in the person of Anthony Beavis, rather than being expounded in ‘character-character dialogue’. Beavis’ metaphor of the ocean and the waves signals the triumph of mysticism over Lawrence’s ‘psychological atomism’.

In contrast to what several recent interpreters suggest, Hegel would reject the labels “naturalism,” “essentialist naturalism,” and “naturalist essentialism” for his philosophy. In light of the architecture of his system, the label “essentialist naturalism” would commit him to a variety of physicalism, which he rejects on the grounds of physics’ inability to establish the compatibility of material bodies and physical form. Second, as his critique of nature’s most concrete category “the death of the individual animal” and the sublation of nature into Geist illustrate, Hegel deems nature incapable of reconciling the individuals’ particularity with the genus’ universality, and therefore associates the realm of nature with death and proceeds to sublate nature into the concept of Geist. Finally, pointing out the inability of objectivist essentialist metaphysics to consistently unite the universal with the particular, Hegel also rejects the metaphysics of “naturalist essentialism” and proposes a concept-metaphysical account of the relationship between the logical idea, nature, and Geist. As all of these are variations of the idea, this proves him to be an idealist rather than a naturalist or a spiritualist.

Hegel’s “natural philosophy” is an extension of his overall systematic project having to do with a post-Kantian philosophy that did not rely on Kant’s conception of “pure intuitions.” Instead, Hegel proposed a Logic that as an internally self-enclosed system of pure thoughts required to make sense of making sense. Famously, he concluded his Logic with some not entirely clear ideas about the need to move from it to a Naturphilosophie, a move which he somewhat puzzlingly said was not itself a further logical “transition.” Hegel also defends a non-empiricist study of nature, that is, an explanation not merely in terms of empirically determined regularities, for all such regularities, although existent, are not fully “actual” in that they are not what is doing the real work of explanation. What explains the regularities themselves are the various pure objects of the Naturphilosophie which are involved in working out what “external to pure thought” would mean: the mechanical, the physical, the chemical, and the biological fields of nature, each of which manifests a power (Potenz) that explains why the empirically found regularities in nature actually hold. This chapter suggests that the reason for the transition from Logic to Nature is that pure thought on its own is powerless, and that this has implications for how we think of Hegel’s system as a whole.

In our Introduction we briefy discuss Collingwood’s life and philosophical career, as well as mentioning his work in other fields such as history and archaeology. We argue for the continued relevance of Collingwood’s thought for both twenty-first-century academic philosophy and for some of the central concerns of contemporary life beyond academia, such as scientism, the idolatry of technology, and the current political climate. The second part of the Introduction gives an overview of the fourteen chapters in the volume.

At the other end of the philosophical spectrum from Saint-Simonian ‘materialism’, though sharing its rhetoric of progress, was Hegelian Idealism. It influenced not only critics such as Franz Brendel and A. B. Marx, but also the ‘New German School’ of Liszt and Wagner. Though Hegel opposed Romanticism, applications of his aesthetics to music by Marx and Liszt remained closer to it, noting the convergence of music and literature on Romantic subjectivity and responding with the new genre of ‘programme music’. Another Romantic project, the ‘new mythology’, was realized in Wagner’s operatic Gesamtkunstwerk. Its more ‘realist’ approach to feeling was derived from Feuerbach’s post-Hegelian philosophy and little changed by Wagner’s later enthusiasm for Schopenhauer. Though overshadowed by his universalizing and exclusionary goal of a ‘purely human’ art (one that had no space for Jewish artists), Wagner’s aesthetic technique remained faithful to the idea of theatrical illusion inaugurated a century earlier by Rousseau and Diderot.