Philosophers

I have been reading about phenomenology, and am having trouble understanding how it is different from German idealism. In both, there is a turn to the subject, and there is a sort of despair about understanding the "thing-in-itself". In both, the emphasis is on phenomena as they present themselves to us, and how we as subjects perceive, understand, interpret, and give meaning to those phenomena. So what is the difference?

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Good question! German idealism is so complex, but in general it may be said that phenomenology (as established by Edmund Husserl) was more bound to the study of appearances than, say, Hegel, even in his Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel is prepared to think quite abstractly about being and nothingness, the rational and the real, and the dialectical movement of history (which we see Marx re-formatting), whereas Husserl's Cartesian Meditations is far more (for lack of a better word) experiential and involving the first-person. But interpreting Husserl and Hegel is not easy, and Husserl's book Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (1913) has been interpreted (I believe wrongly) as a traditional form of idealism. One minor point about your excellent question: some phenomenologists do not despair about the "thing-in-itself." There are what are known as phenomenological realists like Deitrich von Hildebrand who are committed to claims about the nature of the world (and the truths about the world and so on is not dependent upon experience, ideas, etc).

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