An anarchist strain runs through Lawrence’s immediate postwar writings, but epistemological idealism in its current manifestations in politics, union activism and educational policy is his real target in his essays of 1918–19 and his play Touch and Go (May 1920). In his poem ‘The Revolutionary’ and in the ‘Fruits’ sequence of poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers a way out of the idealist fog is plotted. Comparison of the two versions of these poems of September 1920, rewritten soon afterwards with idiomatic simplicity and arch comedy, exposes the mind’s capacity to interfere with, to sublimate, the body’s instinctive grasp of a deeper non-idealist world. Count Psanek, a revolutionary in his own way in ‘The Ladybird’ (novella, written December 1921), prosecutes the next of Lawrence’s performative encounters with big ideas stretched across broad intellectual terrain. Those stagings leave us suspended in the void between them, troubled by the undercutting, the ridicule, that the Lawrence protagonists typically attract from their partners and friends, even as their intellectual goal is kept stubbornly alive.

This chapter examines Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seemingly contradictory relation to European Romanticism. Focusing on the concepts of genius, idealism, and originality in key works (Nature, English Traits, and Representative Men), it argues that Emerson’s admiration for English and German Romantic writings was not at odds with his call for cultural independence. Because Emerson understood the genius to be a teacher who empowers his students to reject him, he could imagine any reliance on Coleridge, Wordsworth, or Carlyle as ultimately enabling independence. The philosophical idealism essential to Emerson’s call for cultural independence, moreover, was a mode of perception that defied national categorization and so did not threaten the distinctive American culture he hoped to inaugurate. In his later writings, Emerson also came to clarify a concept of originality that involved the adaptation of inherited forms rather than the invention of new ones. Because borrowing became a precondition for innovation, intellectual debts did not undermine autonomy.

Sellars’s long-neglected account of “picturing” has recently found more sympathetic interpretations. At the same time, there has been more sustained engagement with Sellars in terms of Kant. However, there has not yet been an inquiry into the role that “picturing” played in debates amongst nineteenth- and twentieth-century neo-Kantians prior to Sellars. This chapter examines how neo-Kantians such as Helmholtz, Riehl, and Hertz used the concept of picturing in theorizing both scientific philosophy of mind and adjudicating debates between realism and idealism. Thus Sellars belongs to a rich and complicated tradition in his own use of the concept to address both problematics.

In the final chapter, the general account of the artifactual paradigm at work in Hegel’s thinking is extended to explain the shape of his overall philosophical position. Speaking loosely, Hegel sometimes suggests that everything is conceptual. However, it is here contended that Hegel’s idealism essentially involves an asymmetry in the domains of Geist and nature that is rooted in Hegel’s theory of concepts. Geist is that which is conceptually constituted; nature is that which is not conceptually constituted. This asymmetry between the two domains is the “inversion” of philosophy that Hegel’s concept-centric metaphysics inspires. In this chapter, evidence is assembled from Hegel’s so-called Realphilosophie – specifically his works on political philosophy, natural philosophy, and aesthetics – to show that Hegel’s treatment of these topics indeed demonstrates an inverted conception of philosophy, one that is rightly considered a humanism.

The Introduction develops the idea that Hegel’s philosophy is distinctive by its endorsing an artifactual paradigm for philosophy, in contrast to a natural one. The artifactual paradigm says that our knowledge of humanly constructed artifacts, rather than natural things represent the standard-setting case for objects of philosophical knowledge. The world of spirit or Geist is thus the central topic of philosophy. But the philosophical basis for the centrality of Geist is Hegel’s theory of concepts. Hegel presents a theory of concepts which allows for concepts not only to represent their objects but also to constitute them, akin to the artifactual production of an object. This interpretation contrasts with metaphysical readings of Hegel that make “the Concept” a part of the structure of reality, as well as with more deflationary interpretations that understand Hegelian concepts on the model of Kantian categories.

The human standpoint and what sets it apart from the standpoint of non-rational animals is discussed. Some distinctions are also drawn between “lower” and “higher" representations of objects in terms of how much they involve of the cognitive apparatus. Additionally, it is discussed briefly how the human standpoint contrasts with the God’s eye viewpoint of traditional metaphysics. This brings us to a distinctive framework for empirical cognition of objects, namely, space and time as human forms of intuition – rather than God’s absolute “sensoria,” as in Isaac Newton. The framework gives rise to the distinction between appearances and things in themselves that comes with Kant’s Copernican turn. However, what is to be defended in subsequent chapters is a special variety of direct realism in philosophy of perception, and, thus, a deflated version of the “transcendental” side of Kant’s position. Even within mere empirical realism, with transcendental idealism bracketed, space can be seen as a form of perceiving, in so far as perceptual content is organized in a space-like manner and mirrors the layout of a spatial, perceived scene.

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.