The Genesis of Meaning and Absolute Idealism

Abstract This article offers a historical-systematic reconstruction of Julius Ebbinghaus’s Relativer und absoluter Idealismus (1910) as an internal critique of Southwestern Neo-Kantianism. It examines Ebbinghaus’s diagnosis of the structural instability of transcendental philosophy when validity ( Geltung ) is conceived as relative and referred to an external ground. Through a critical engagement with Windelband, Rickert, and Lask, the paper reconstructs young Ebbinghaus’s reinterpretation of Kantian synthesis as a self-grounding process in which the dualisms of form and content, thought and being, are overcome. From this perspective, absolute idealism appears, in Ebbinghaus’s own account, not as a rejection of critical philosophy but as its immanent systematic completion.