ABSTRACT
The System of Transcendental Idealism (STI) of 1800 explicates for the first time in systematic form one of the most influential ideas in modern thinking: the idea that self-consciousness has to develop in stages from a point where it did not exist as such. The STI also develops the newly emerged Romantic thought, which we briefly touched on when looking at metaphor in the Introduction, that art can revealmore than philosophy can say. The STI thereby helps open the space for the specifically modern versions of aesthetic truth that are central to the work of Adorno, Heidegger, Gadamer and others, which are now even affecting conceptions of truth in certain areas of analytical philosophy.1
