Richard Kroner (1884-1974) - German Idealism as a Systematic Unity
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Richard Kroner wrote the most influential overall account of German idealism during the interwar period: From Kant to Hegel (Volume 1: 1921, Volume 2: 1924). The work presented idealism not as a collection of individual philosophers but as a unified developmental process.[1]
Kroner’s basic thesis: German idealism is a systematic movement in which each thinker takes up the problems of his predecessor, resolves them, and in doing so generates new contradictions that push toward the next step. This development is not contingent but necessary - driven by the inner logic of the problems at stake.
The line of development: Kant discovered the transcendental dimension - cognition constitutes its object. But he remained fixed on subjectivity and posited the “thing in itself” as an unknowable limit. Fichte radicalized subjectivity into the absolute I - but thereby produced the dualism of I and not-I. Schelling attempted to find unity in the indifference of subject and object - but this unity remained abstract, immediate, undeveloped. Hegel finally developed unity as process - the self-movement of the concept, which mediates subject and object.
This account was systematically convincing. Kroner showed that Hegel’s Logic is not arbitrary speculation but the necessary solution to the problems that Kant and his successors had left behind. The categories of the Logic are not plucked out of thin air but answers to precise questions.
The method was Hegelian: Kroner wrote the history of philosophy as the self-development of philosophical thinking. Every position is a moment of a process. Truth lies not in one position but in the movement through all positions. This method was itself an application of dialectical logic to the history of philosophy.
The impact: Richard Kroner’s From Kant to Hegel (1921/1924) was for decades the standard work on the development of German idealism and lastingly shaped its understanding. It showed that this was no mere episode but a systematic achievement. The problems Kant raised are not resolved - they drive philosophy to this day. Kroner made clear: whoever pursues contemporary epistemology must engage with German idealism - not historically, but systematically.
The limit: Kroner tended toward a teleological presentation. The development from Kant to Hegel appeared as necessary progress, Hegel as its completion. This perspective was one-sided. Kant, Fichte, and Schelling too had insights that were lost in Hegel. The development was not linear-progressive but complex and branching.
Moreover: the sequence itself was not original. It followed Hegel’s own self-presentation in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy.[2] Hegel’s own students - for instance Carl Ludwig Michelet in his Entwicklungsgeschichte der neuesten deutschen Philosophie (1843) and Johann Eduard Erdmann in his Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie (1866) - had already used this structure.[3]
Nevertheless: Kroner’s work remains a milestone. It proved that systematic history of philosophy is possible - history of philosophy as philosophical argument, not merely as historical documentation. Kroner’s achievement lay not in discovering this development but in its detailed systematic reconstruction and in defending its contemporary relevance against neo-Kantianism and positivism.
Richard Kroner: Von Kant bis Hegel, 2 volumes, Tübingen: Mohr, 1921 (Vol. 1), 1924 (Vol. 2). New edition 1961. ↩︎
Hegel: Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, in: Werke Vols. 18-20, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1971 (Theorie Werkausgabe). ↩︎
Carl Ludwig Michelet: Entwicklungsgeschichte der neuesten deutschen Philosophie mit besonderer Rücksicht auf den gegenwärtigen Kampf Schellings mit der Hegelschen Schule, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1843; Johann Eduard Erdmann: Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, 2 volumes, Berlin: Hertz, 1866. ↩︎