German Idealism and Normativity

A defining commitment of that group of philosophers labelled the German Idealists is that experience is not explicable as natural stimulus and response. Rather, experience is infused with rules which are to be understood as determinations of reason. What this means, essentially, is that our experience of the world bears the characteristics of determinations that, precisely as the products of reason, are attributable to human beings. These determinations of reason act as constraints on behaviour and on knowledge, yet these are, in effect, constraints that we give to ourselves. It is this idea to which the famous thesis of the autonomy of reason refers: reason is not grounded in nature and nor is it part of the chain of material causality.