No More Learning

10 Hegel's early critique of Fichte's system, or at least the system sketched in the Bestimmung des Menschens, focuses on the architectonics of the system, which Hegel considered to be artificially formal and ultimately empty, the remaining reflective dualisms, the suspension of which is the sole purpose of reason (1801: 90), his maltreatment of Nature (i. e. , his "physiotheology" as opposed, say, Schelling's philosophy of nature under the auspices of the an Identita? tsphilosophie) and, most importantly, Fichte's cowardly retreat into Glaubensphilosophie if not also Schwa? rmerei.
? On Faith and Knowledge in Fichte 111
Hegel claims that Fichte's treatment of intellectual intuition was "merely a formal affair" (1802b: 154) and thus "the Absolute of the system is not absolute at all" (1802b: 157). Hegel's critique of Fichte may well have been designed to make room for his own system. And in this respect, suggest his critics, Hegel provides us with little more than a caricature of Fichte's system, which is unfair to Fichte; at his worst, Hegel, following Schlegel, went so far as to describe Fichte as a Pharisee. But Hegel's appropriation of this strain in Fichte serves as a case in point within a larger philosophical thesis. The general drift of Hegel's critique probably served as a corrective to an emerging philosophical tendency in post-Kantian philosophy. As part of an overarching thesis of Glauben und Wissen, Hegel exploits the vulgar or popular formulations and represses the philosophically sophisticated insights - especially those, one might suppose, that were most influential to Hegel's own fledgling philosophical system. It is conspicuous that Hegel limits his reading to the most popular if not romantic formulation of the "summons to moral autonomy," or the "solicitation [Aufforderung] to freedom," inherent in our sacred "vocation as persons," i. e. , listening and obeying the inner voice of conscience, to the comparatively brilliant and subtle formulations provided within Fichte's earlier formulations of his system; Hegel was certainly aware of Fichte's formulation of Anerkennung [recognition] in the Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre (1796; SW, III, 51). (In this regard, one could say the same thing of Hegel's reading of Jacobi. ) According to Pinkard, "[t]he solicitation to effective freedom of which Fichte speaks - the ability both to form normative commitments and to perform the appropriate actions in light of those commitments - is thus, as Fichte explains, "what one calls education [Erzeihung], that is, a social activity in which other agents 'solicit' an agent to such freedom" (2002: 121). The Bestimmung des Menschens entails, ultimately, the Erzeihung des Menschens. 11
The decisive speculative synthesis, the Hauptsynthesis, writes Hegel, cannot be performed or otherwise enacted according to empty Fichtean formulae; still worse, Hegel treats these formulae as though it were "nothing but the transformation of signs" (1802b: 157). Although Fichte takes us some distance in the direction of a genuinely speculative
11 This theme of Erzeihung and Bildung was certainly in the air, so to speak, during the Jenaer Zeit from Fichte through Hegel: the answers varied from Goethe's Bildungsromaene to Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man and also Rousseau, who was especially influential on Hegel during the years leading to Jena from Tu? bingen and Berne (see Pinkard: 89 ff. ).
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confluence, which takes the form of a divisible Ich and a divisible not-Ich that mutually limit one other, the speculative task collapses into a superficially pious confession of incomprehensibility: the "Third that is truly the First and the Only One" is an impenetrable secret. For Hegel, however, the absolute confluence of the real and the ideal is comprehensible, to greater or lesser degrees, by means of a speculative appropriation of reflective understanding. Taken together, Hegel argues that "Fichte's theoretical philosophy consists in the cognition of the lack and of the manifold which is lacking" (1802b: 162). For Hegel, it seems, the recognition of "deficiency" or "that which is lacking" is itself only possible by means of the idea of totality; Hegel also seems puzzled that this implicit "totality," the measure against which our knowledge is demonstrated to be incomplete or otherwise lacking, does not itself step forth as the Absolute of the system (1802b: 159).
Although Fichte is depicted as "merely highlighting Kant's critical idealism" (1802b: 154) throughout much of Hegel's early critique in Glauben und Wissen, Fichte is also criticized for positing an absolutely hollow and lifeless as well as an "utterly vulgar" conception of nature. Nature is reduced, writes Hegel, to little or nothing more than "the sensation of the empirical subject" in Fichte since it is only by an act of the will that the empirical world receives it veracity:
Because the idealistic side decrees itself to be absolute, what it nullifies must re-emerge as absolute. If empirical reality, the sense world, did not have the whole strength of its being the opposite, Ego would not be Ego; it could not act, its high vocation would be gone (1802b: 175).
The Ich and the Nicht-Ich, in Fichte if not also in Kant, represent - argues Hegel - the antipodes of reflective philosophy; linguistically, they function as polar concepts (i. e. , each is defined in terms of its opposite). At least within the Bestimmung des Menschens, where the Ich is constituted in terms of free and active opposition to the impact [Anstoss] of the Nicht- Ich, claims Hegel, the Nicht-Ich takes on the hue of something "devoid of all truth, bearing the law of ugliness and irrationality in it" - that is, as something merely "to be nullified. " Although he does seem to concede that Fichte has a more vibrant formulation of nature - "an earlier teleology" in which nature served "as an expression of eternal truth" - elsewhere, Hegel is nevertheless willing to say that Fichte's "view is one which is denuded of all Reason, for the absolute identity of subject and object is entirely alien to it, and its principle is their absolute non-identity" (1802b: 176).
On Faith and Knowledge in Fichte 113
The critical journalists thought that genuine philosophy, i. e. , speculative philosophy and criticism,12 deals with the actual presence of the Absolute - i. e. , the Idee, not merely as a regulative ideal, as an ought, as something that should obtain, but rather as "concrete[ly] and strictly present. " Rather than the non-identity of the subject and object, or the Ich and the Nicht- Ich, or the infinite and finite, or the supersensible and the sensible, Hegel is seeking an identity within which the antithesis "vanishes altogether" (1802b: 112). But if the real and true resides beyond [jenseits] the sphere of knowledge, as it does for Fichte as well as Kant and Jacobi, where absolute identity is "transferred to the future, a temporal beyond that we do not inhabit," then the truths of reason and the truths of faith are theoretically irreconcilable; rather than a reconciliation between faith and reason, the reflective philosophers of subjectivity settled, each on their own terms but amounting to the same thing, for a practical truce and a temporarily edifying outcome. As an exercise in "edifying philosophy," Fichte offers a practical solution to this otherwise insoluble theoretical problem (i. e. , the non-identity of the subject and object). In each of the reflective philosophers of subjectivity, however, Kant and Fichte as well as Jacobi and Schleiermacher, knowledge or finite cognition is only explicable - ultimately, immediately in Jacobi and remotely in Kant - in terms of faith. In spirit, if not also in letter, Hegel reads Fichte as but a slight dialectical variation on the Glaubensphilosophie inherent in both Kant and - especially - Jacobi:
Jacobi opposes Fichte's philosophy on the grounds that 'what I [Jacobi] understand by the true is something prior to and outside of knowledge. ' But on this point Fichte's philosophy is in full agreement with Jacobi's. The Absolute exists for it in faith alone, not in cognition, Fichte is very far from sinning, as Jacobi claims [in the Preface to his Letter, viii], against 'the majesty of the place' where the true resides outside the range of knowledge, nor does he want to 'include it within the sphere of science. ' On the contrary, absolute identity is, for him, quite outside the sphere of knowledge (1802b: 167-168).
For Kant as well as Jacobi and Fichte, though Hegel thinks that Jacobi misreads Fichte on this point, the absolute identity "exists in faith alone. "
12 Genuine philosophy, writes Hegel, in retrospect, but still brooding on Fichte, "does not waste time with such empty and otherworldly stuff. What philosophy deals with is always something concrete and strictly present" (EL, 149-150). Making a similar point in the Phenomenology, Hegel claims that genuine philosophy "refuses to be led astray by figments of thought which only ought to be and, as 'oughts,' are credited with truth" (1806: 151).
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For Fichte, says Hegel, it is only through our moral vocation that the true or real "steps forth out of the abstraction of knowledge and into the . . . glory of its full vitality" (1802b: 171). At his best, Fichte acknowledges a practical summons toward an absolute identity that ought [sollen] to occur: "but this ought," suggests Hegel, "always implies impotence. " Hegel claims that Fichte's retreat from the sphere of knowledge entails the "absolute finitude of the subject and action, with a sense-world over against it that is devoid of Reason and must be nullified; and finally a super-sensuous world absolutely opposed to the sense-world and dispersed into an infinity of intellectual elements" (1802b: 187).
CHAPTER SIX
RESUSCITATING THE CORPSE OF FAITH AND REASON
Fackenheim was certainly not far off the mark when he suggested, in The Religious Dimension of Hegel's Thought, that 'theologians have never taken Hegel seriously" (1967: 119). The exception to this rule, more often than not, at least in America, comes from those theologians who treat Hegel as posing a threat to what they consider to be most sacred. And yet Hegel's entire philosophical system could - and perhaps should - be read as fundamentally theological in its orientation, since it is preoccupied to the extreme with God construed as 'the Absolute. ' Indeed, the inspirational economy behind the aphorism for which Hegel is best known, i. e. , that 'the truth is the whole,' was at least initially a theological ideal in which God was conceived of as 'an eternal desire for self- revelation' [eine ewige Begierde sich zu offenbaren]. 1
According to Oetinger, '[t]he Ancients saw God as an eternal process in which He emerges from Himself and returns to Himself; this is the true conception of God and of His Glory; it is the true conception of His infinite life and power which issues in the Blessed Trinity. '2 The spirit of the absolute, or the absolute spirit, is what Oetinger called an Intensum: 'a complex whole that dissolves when it is divided into its constituent elements. ' The problem of how to understand the whole without dissecting it, and thus changing its nature from organic to inorganic, from something alive to something distorted if not dead, was the task of Hegel's system and method. For Oetinger, the Zentrallerkenntnis consists in 'an unmediated, synoptic vision in which the mind momentarily sees existence
1 Oetinger, Biblisches und emblematishces Wo? rterbuch (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1969), as quoted in Magee, 65
2 Quoted in Hanratty, 'Hegel and the Gnostic Tradition,' II, 314; see Chapter 1. 7, above.
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through the eyes of God. '3 The relation of the finite to the infinite, in Oetinger as well as in Hamann and Boehme, is explicable in terms of the 'ewige Selbstbewegung' of God. 4 This principle of an all-embracing and eternally self-animating 'Absolute' is central to Hegel's own - largely still unarticulated or merely implicit in 1802 - speculative reconciliation of faith and knowledge.
6. 1 "Das Wahre ist das Ganze"
Bergson occasionally suggested, as did Heidegger, that strong philosophers are preoccupied to the extreme with a singular yet inexhaustible thought, an ide? e fixe, and the accompanying ideal of expressing or otherwise presenting that idea consistently, completely and coherently. Perhaps the idea in service of which Hegel worked so diligently to express, the string upon which he strummed, time and again, with cadenced pathos, is captured best in his preface to the Phenomenology (1807):5
The true is the whole [Das Wahre ist das Ganze]. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result that only in the end is it what it truly is . . . . Reason is, therefore, misunderstood when reflection is excluded from the True, and is not grasped as a positive moment of the Absolute. It is reflection that makes the True a result, but it is equally reflection that overcomes the antithesis between the process of its becoming and the result . . .
And while this citation may well serve as a fitting epigram for the Hegelian pantology, as it does in the Hegel museum in Stuttgart, it is hardly the whole truth about Hegel. Compare this passage, taken from Hegel's Foreword to the Phenomenology, with the following comment in Faith and Knowledge:
[The reflective philosophies of subjectivity] have their positive, genuine though subordinate, position within true philosophy. . . . For they recognize
3 See Sigrid Grossmann (1979), Friedrich Christoph Oetingers Gottesvorstellung: Versuch E. Analyse seiner Theologie, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, especially 100 ff. ; also Magee, 67.
4 Oetinger, Die Lehrtafel der Prinzessin Antonia, Texte zur Geschichte des Pietismus, Berlin: New York (1977), 128.
5 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 11-12.
? Resuscitating the Corpse of Faith and Reason 117
that thinking is infinity, the negative side of the Absolute. Infinity is the pure nullification of the antithesis of finitude; but it is at the same time also the spring of eternal movement, the spring of that finitude which is infinity, as out of the secret abyss that is its birthplace. . . . But on the other hand, these philosophies of reflection cannot be prevented from fixating infinity, the Ego, and turning it into subjectivity instead of letting it directly somersault into the positivity of the absolute Idea (1802b: 190).
The central thesis of Faith and Knowledge is not unlike the remainder of the Hegelian corpus. But as is often the case with an early formation of a leitmotif, the thesis is less elaborate and elegant than in the latter stages of its articulation; it is, however, perhaps for this very reason, a remarkably clear expression of the task that would busy if not haunt Hegel for the rest of his days. Hegel's Faith and Knowledge essay serves as both a beginning and an end: Although recent Hegel scholars concur that "it was during the Jena years that Hegel made his weightiest decisions,' and that there appears to be an 'astonishing consistency' between the Jena-period manuscripts and his mature system, it must be admitted also that 'this development has not yet been investigated as it should, and it has not infrequently been entirely disregarded. "6 Following Hodgson, "the basic conceptual decisions" concerning the theory of the divine as the unification of the infinite and finite "were made during Hegel's tenure in Jena and completed by the time of writing the Phenomenology of Spirit. "7 In his earlier theological writings, Hegel repeated deferred - with the proviso that it was something that would need to be 'settled elsewhere' - the conceptual elucidation of the relationship between the human and the divine, which "in the end [required] a metaphysical treatment of the relationship between the finite and the infinite. "8 Faith and Knowledge
6 W. Jaeschke, Reason in Religion, trans. J. Steward and P. Hodgson (Berkeley, 1990),126 - 127; also, W. Jaeschke, Hegel Handbuch: Leben - Werk - Wirkung (Verlag - J. B. Metzler, 2003), 451; Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology (2005: Oxford), 14-18; Beiser, Hegel (2005, Routledge: New York), 125. Holger Gutschmidt's Vernunfeinsicht und Glaube: Hegels These zum Bewusstsein von etwas >>Hoeherem<< zwischen 1794 und 1801 (Neue Studien zur Philosophie, Band 20, Herausgegeben von Bubner, Cramer und Wiehl: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht: Goettingen 2007).
7 Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology (2005: Oxford), 14.
8 Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 176; also see Jaeschke who suggests in Reason in Religion that "[i]t is only in the Berlin Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion that the doctrine [of God] attains what is for Hegel its final form. But the two preceding decades did not remain empty as far as the philosophy of religion was concerned. Specifically, the
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belongs to the outer edge of the 'elsewhere' in question by providing - in content and contour if not also the definitive form of its systematic development9 - a metaphysical treatment of the concept of God.
6. 2 The 'Labor of the Negative' in Hegel
As suggested above, Hegel entered the 'literary rush' of Jena as an enthusiast of the Schellingean system within which the true shape of philosophy was to emerge, in which the absolute - 'there, where all is one' - was to be apprehended, and "the two most opposite systems . . . unite in the absolute, i. e. , where they cease as opposite systems" (Werke, I: 333). Their collaboration on the Critical Journal provided a critical forum from which to examine the present state of philosophy and, in the process, cleared away the 'abundantly flourishing weeds' which at that time threatened the 'few good seeds that had been sown. ' The "genuinely scientific concern of the Journal," wrote Schelling and Hegel, was "to peel off the shell that keeps the inner aspiration from seeing daylight'; this form of philosophical criticism, for Hegel, at least, and perhaps to a lesser degree for Schelling, consists in recounting how the reflective philosophies of subjectivity "confess their non-being" (1802a: 277). In short, the speculative goal of philosophy consisted in nothing less than the apprehension of the absolute - i. e. , speculative cognition. But if Du? sing's analysis of the Jena-period collaboration is correct,10 Schelling and Hegel disagreed about the means by which they might best arrive at this cognition; in particular, they disagreed on the positive relationship between common cognition and philosophy. And while Schelling was firmly convinced that there is "no path which leads from [common
Jena period contains a continuous development of the philosophy of religion within the elaboration of the system as a whole" (126 ff. ).
9 W. Jaeschke, Hegel Handbuch: Leben - Werk - Wirkung (Verlag - J. B. Metzler, 2003): "Waehrend die Jenaer Jahre gewinnt sie fortschreitend an Inhalt und Kontur, ohne jedoch eine eigene Form der systematischen Entfaltung zu finden" (450-451). For more on the relationship of "Faith and Knowledge" to the earlier theological writings, see William Desmond's Hegel's God: A Counterfeit Double? (Ashgate 2003), 43 ff. .
10 Klaus Du? sing, "Spekulation und Reflexion: Zur Zusammenarbeit Schelling und Hegels im Jena" (Hegel-Studien, vol. 34, Spring: 1969, pp. 34 - 61), which is translated as an Appendix below; also see Du? sing, "Die Entstehung des Spekulativen Idealismus" in Tranzendentalphilosophie und Spekulation: Der Streit um die Gestalt einer Ersten Philosophie (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1993), pp. 144 ff. .
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cognition] to philosophy," it was upon that very path that Hegel spent his life. Whereas the Schellingean conception of the Absolute, like that of the Spinozistic, is one which excludes all genuine negation (i. e. , identity simpliciter or schlechthin), the distinctively Hegelian version of speculation is one in which the absolute necessarily involves a theory of negation - i. e. , for Hegel, not unlike Fichte, "the identity of the Ego = Ego is no pure identity" (1801: 64). In his Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie, and as a logical consequence of this conception of the absolute as an absolute and pure identity, Schelling says that "the absolute as such can never become the object of knowledge, thought and philosophy" (IV, 136 & 144, Anm. ). The Hegelian corpus is, successful or not, a sustained effort to refute this Schellingean conviction. The task of unfolding a system of the sort envisioned by the critical journalists, as 'a complete appearance of philosophy in all its richness,' would require - as Hegel put it in the Phenomenology - "the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative. " The Schellingean system announced the transition to a new era, the world of spirit, but in Schelling it remained merely the principle of a system, i. e. , in the inwardness of aesthetic insight. But this "new world," writes Hegel, "is no more a complete actuality than is a new born child; it is essential to bear this in mind. "11 In retrospect, thought Hegel, the Schellingean system - profound in its vision - remained undetermined and thus esoteric.
Schelling insisted - in his U? ber das Verha? ltniss der Naturphilosophie zur Philosophie U? berhaupt, Ideen, and System essays - that the 'original and pure identity' [urspru? ngliche und reine Identita? t] is impenetrable to all reflective efforts and the identities constructed by the understanding [Verstandes-Identita? t]. And while Schelling's conception of speculation varies from text to text, it is - both before, during, and after the Jena period collaboration - understood primarily as an immediate apprehension and never the mediated result of reflective processes; this points to a significant difference between the Hegelian and Schellingean perspective on the relationship of reflection to speculation. Hegel maintains that reflection is central to the speculative enterprise, i. e. , borrowing a felicitous phrase from Heidegger, that it is only by means of reflection that we "reflect our way out of reflection" [sich aus dieser Reflexion hinauszureflektieren]. 12 On this point, at least, on how to 'think pure
11 Hegel, Pha? nomenologie des Geistes, Vorrede, XXII, 21.
12 Heidegger, Was Heisst Denken? (Reclam: Stuttgart, 1992), 15.
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being,' Hegel was much closer to Fichte than he was to Schelling; in the
Wissenschaftslehre, first published in 1797, Fichte claimed that
. . . the concept of being is by no means a first and original concept, but rather derivative - as a concept derived specifically through opposition to activity, and therefore as merely a negative concept. 13
For Hegel, subjecting the reflective philosophies of subjectivity to systematic scrutiny is not simply a matter of watching them collapse in on themselves - by means of exposing the contradiction inherent in the constructs of the understanding - and thereby stripping away the empty husk of reflection so that the substance of absolute philosophy might be presented without distortion; for Hegel, careful attention to the antinomies inherent in reflection is itself a disclosure of speculative cognition or absolute knowing.
Although Schelling wrote the following passage prior to his collaboration with Hegel in Jena, he may have had Hegel in mind when he amended the following passage for the 1803 edition of the Ideen:
The philosopher who employs his entire life, or a part of it, following [reflective philosophy] into its endless oppositions in order to abolish its last opposition, earns through this service that which, when it remains negative, is reserved for the best among those similarly respected - a relatively dignified position, assuming that he should not have enough in himself to resuscitate philosophy from the raggedness of [reflection] and into its absolute form.
But it may have been Schelling who missed the critical point. Kroner thinks that Fichte was correct in reprimanding Schelling - in a letter from May of 1801 - that his highest principle ruins all positivity, that the absolute point of indifference was only an abstraction, that his system lacked movement and that he privileged intuition over thought or otherwise neglected the thinking about intuition ["das Denken u? ber das Anschauen vernachla? ssigt ha? tte"]. 14 (Fichte is responding to a letter from Schelling, in which Schelling describes his conception of the Absolute "als etwas, dessen Anschauen im Denken, dessen Denken im Anschauen
13 Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre, in Sa? mtliche Werke I, ed. J. H. Fichte (Berlin: Verlag von Veit und Comp, 1845), 498 - 499.
14 Kroner, Von Kant bis Hegel, II, 135. Harris reads Hegel's Phenomenology as 'an explicit rebellion against [Schelling's] intuitionism' (1985, 267).
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ist";15 the identity of thought and intuition is at the very heart of both Schelling and Hegel's the speculative system. ) The Hegelian system might well be read as a corrective to this intuitionist strain in the Schelling's system.
For Hegel, the reflective if not negative side of the absolute draws the positive side into the scope of determinate thought - i. e. , it is precisely in our cognition of reflective negation that we become cognizant of the speculative absolute. 16 According to the Encyclopedia Logic,
restriction and defect are only determined as restriction and defect by comparison with the Idea that is present . . . It is only lack of consciousness therefore, if we do not see that it is precisely the designation of something as finite or restricted that contains the proof of the actual presence of the Infinite or Unrestricted . . . . 17
The finitude indicative of the reflective philosophies of subjectivity - or indeed of any consciousness, however confused and impaired it might be18 - is nevertheless a trace of the infinite: and yet, it is only by sublimating the illusions characteristic of reflectivity that the speculative purpose is fulfilled. The difference between Hegel and Schelling lies in the function, value, and interpretation of the activity of sublating [aufheben] that illusion (i. e. , finitude or error). Said all at once, Hegel's mature view is that
the Idea produces the illusion in which we live for itself; it posits an other confronting itself and its action consists in sublating that illusion. Only from this error does the truth come forth and herein lies our reconciliation with error and finitude. 19
15 Schelling an Fichte, 3. 10. 1801, in J. G. Fichte, Gesamtausgabe der Beyerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, III, 5, 80-81
16 See Eckhart Fo? rster (2003), "Hegel in Jena" in Das Interesse des Denkens: Hegel aus heutiger Sicht, Wolfgang Welsch and Klaus Vieweg (Wilhelm Fink Verlag), 109-130.
17 Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (hereafter referred to as EL), trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991), ? ? 60, 60A, pp. 104 - 106.
18 Ibid. , 288, Sec. 213 Zusatz. 19 Ibid. , 286, Sec. 212 Zusatz.
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This metaphysical insight, namely, that "the inward movement of thought that results from reflection on the finite as the vehicle for navigating the passage between the finite and the infinite,"20 is significant also to the design of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1821 - 1831): "It is the finite content from which we pass over to God, from which we relate ourselves to the absolute, infinite content and pass over to it. "21 Hegel considers scientific systemization to be indispensable to an adequate apprehension of the absolute - i. e. , as necessary to the transition from philosophy as the love of knowledge to philosophy as the actual possession of knowledge; for him, 'to know is to think,' to think is to think determinately (i. e. , 'thought is systematized reflection'), and to think determinately involves 'the labor of the negative. ' As he put it in the Differenzschrift, "unknowing becomes knowing through organization" (1801: 34).
6. 3 Hegel: Hovering
The new born peace that hovers [schwebt] triumphantly over the corpse of faith and reason, uniting them as the child of both, has as little of Reason in it as it has of authentic faith (Hegel 1802b: 55).
Hegel's Glauben und Wissen essay provides a revisionist reading of three prominent faith philosophers [Glaubensphilosophen]: Kant, Jacobi and Fichte. The 'corpse of faith and reason,' to which Hegel is alluding in the above quote, is the casualty of what Hegel considered to be an unfortunate because unsustainable compromise between faith and reason: The rational faith for which the critical philosophy made room, by limiting the reach of reason, which constituted a clever but ultimately inadequate solution to a difficult problem, writes Hegel, 'no longer appeared to be worth the bother. ' And victorious but deflated reason, let us call her enlightened, hovering but by no means soaring, suggests Hegel, no longer seemed to be 'worthy of the name. ' Hegel's analysis of the reflective philosophies of subjectivity demonstrates the dialectical somersaults by which finitude (i. e. , one-sidedness and error) "emerges in its own proper shape" (1802b: 84). Indeed, it is only by following reflection along her path - or 'highway of despair' - from common understanding to rational knowledge that one discovers the teleology or essence inherent in that original unity from which one-sidedness and finitude were initially extracted. That is to say, the Idee - or that mode of cognition which is, allegedly, 'philosophy's sole
20 Patricia Calton, Hegel's Metaphysics of God (Ashgate Press, 2001), 58. 21 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, I, 414.
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knowledge' - is one that will "consume and consummate finitude" ['die Endlichkeit aufzuzehren'] (1802b: 66), in which the nature of the finite has itself passed beyond itself, i. e. , has negated its own negation, and disclosed the infinite within finitude. This double negation displays, following Hegel's speculative method, the forms of determinateness within the simple albeit indeterminate infinite in Kant on the one hand (i. e. , the bad infinite) and Schelling on the other (i. e. , an abstract universality, the Idee only in its notional form).
According to Hegel's terse conclusion to Faith and Knowledge, the reflective philosophies of subjectivity considered in his analysis recast the 'dogmatism of being' into 'the dogmatism of thinking'; in this way, dogmatism merely assumes a 'hue of inwardness. ' This was almost as true of Schelling at this stage in his career as it was of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte; indeed, Schelling wrote to Hegel - as Hegel was en route from Frankfurt to Jena - that 'whereas for Spinozism the object itself [das Objekt schlechthin] was everything, for me it is the subject. '22 The critical journalists argue that the shared assumption 'ineradicably implanted' in the reflective philosophies of subjectivity is the conviction that "in order to be genuinely real, the 'in itself' must be independent of the Ego outside it" (1802a: 368). This supposition is inherent also in those forms of idealism which, by the method of simple conversion, cheaply earn their name by immediately dismissing the 'in itself' and insisting on the utter independence of the Ego; in this brand of idealism, the "in itself is denied in theoretical philosophy - the Ego neither posits it within itself, nor genuinely posits itself in it, rather the 'in itself' is simply superseded, and its reality is entirely disavowed. " This disavowal, suggests Hegel, secretly signals "the death of God. " This disavowal goes unnoticed, at least initially, because edifying philosophers managed to "introduce the Absolute, as faith, through the back door. " In this way, the reflective philosophies of subjectivity try to answer the need of their age not with knowledge of what is (i. e. , 'to think pure being') but rather with a mollifying substitute or compensation for a lost sense of solid and substantial being.
The edifying philosophers meet the demand of their age by carefully crafting an absolute being "which is all and does all, but never itself makes an appearance"; rather than making an appearance, the absolute is hurriedly escorted into an unattainable beyond. This enterprise is doomed,
? 22 Schelling to Hegel in Hegel Briefe, I, 22
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thinks Hegel, not only because the reconciliation is precarious and insubstantial but also because a faith of this sort, one steeped in a reflective attitude toward finitude, cannot - in principle - lift itself above its subjectivity. When the light dove of reason ventures out on the wings of the ideas,23 when she reclaims her existence in the absolute, she will also reshape our understanding of religion. For Hegel, speculative religion must demonstrate in some manner that while "[w]e usually suppose that the absolute must lie far beyond, it is precisely what is wholly present. "24
6. 4 The Absolute Idea and Speculative Religion
Enlightened Reason won a glorious victory over what it believed, in its limited conception of religion, to be faith as opposed to Reason. Yet seen in clear light the victory comes to no more than this: the positive element with which Reason busied itself to do battle, is no longer religion, and victorious Reason is no longer Reason (1802b: 55).
Following Kant's famous dictum, the reflective philosophers of subjectivity 'found it necessary to limit or deny reason in order to make room for faith': For Kant, the supersensuous qua noumenon lay beyond the reach of reason; for Jacobi, reason is reduced to a corrupt instinct and the absolute is known only by feeling; and in Fichte, according to Hegel's reading of the Bestimmung des Menschen, knowledge knows nothing save that it knows nothing. As a means of recovering from 'a lost sense of solid and substantial being,' these philosophers seek refuge in faith. For them, the absolute is no more against reason than it is for it: it is beyond [jenseit] reason. Denying or otherwise limiting knowledge, which was Kant's strategy for making room for faith, believed Hegel, had the unintended consequence of undermining faith. As part of his critique of Jacobi, Hegel asks, rhetorically, "whether a faith that has this reflective attitude to finite knowledge is truly able to raise itself above subjectivity and finitude, since no rational knowledge is supposed to be achievable" (1802b: 141).
23 Recall Kant's claim that "[t]he light dove [reason], cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance --meeting no resistance that might, as it were, serve as a support upon which he could take a stand, to which he could apply his powers, and so let his understanding in motion" (CPR, A5=B9).
24 Hegel, EL 59, Sec. 24 Z2.
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To reflect oneself beyond the limits of reflection, which is how Heidegger characterized the Hegelian strategy, one must reflect on the limits of reflection itself; this was the ostensive purpose and sustained labor of Faith and Knowledge. But Hegel is interested also in the process by which "the infinite consumes and consummates finite"; this is what one finds, allegedly, in the Phenomenology. (The finest expression of Hegel's speculative religion is found in his Foreword to H. Fr. W. Hinrich's 1822 Die Religion im inneren Verhaeltnisse zur Wissenschaft, which serves as his final published formulation of his reconciliation of faith and knowledge, and the Berlin Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. ) For the reflective philosophers of subjectivity, which for Hegel is "by no means a restricted expression of the spirit of a brief epoch or small group," philosophy no longer aimed at the cognition of God but rather - and only - the cognition of the person. For the reflective philosophers of subjectivity, complains Hegel, the person is no longer a glowing spark of eternal beauty or a spiritual focus of the universe but merely an absolute sensibility. When steeped in finitude, religion has its sublime aspect in feeling alone; resigned to its restriction to the sensuous, wrote the critical journalists, "philosophy prettifies herself with the surface color of the supersensuous by pointing, in faith, to something higher. " At its best, these philosophies acknowledge that although the absolute identity exists only for faith, it ought to exist for cognition and knowledge; the task of constructing identity and integration simply cannot be performed. In these philosophies, then, the supersensuous world is only the flight from the sensuous world. Cognizant only of the fact that it cannot cognize the absolute, philosophy takes up an edifying role and tries to meet the need of the age by slipping God in 'through the back door of faith. '25 In an attempt to tear persons away from the sensuous and to direct their gaze to the stars, suggests Hegel, the reflective philosophies of subjectivity reaffirm what thought had put asunder and restore the feeling of essential being; in this way, these philosophies "arouse the desire to bite but offer nothing to eat. "26 In the reflective philosophies of subjectivity,
spirit shows itself as so impoverished that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for a mere mouthful of water, it seems to crave for its refreshment only the bare feeling of the divine in general. By the little which now satisfies Spirit, we can measure the extent of its loss. 27
25 Schelling and Hegel (1802c), 369.
26 This is how Hegel characterizes the reflective philosophies of subjectivity in his Preface to the Phenomenology, see pp. 4-6, ? ? 7-10.
27 Hegel, Phaen. , VIII.
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This, then, is the life of spirit for an age which denies itself the rational cognition of the absolute; even worse, this resignation to finitude is construed as piety: 'by drawing a veil over self-consciousness and surrendering understanding,' we become the beloved of God. The intensity of our feeling, because it is without a core, writes Hegel, is 'a rapturous haziness' that 'is in no way distinguishable from superficiality. ' The religious attitude consists, thinks Hegel, precisely in its flight from the inward feeling that 'God Himself is dead' and, outwardly, a premonition that nature "signifies everywhere a lost God both within and outside man" (1802b: 190). 28 Emptied of objective content, faith and reason are inadequately - because unsustainably - reconciled. In Glauben und Wissen, argues Hodgson, "the concept of absolute spirit is present - it is the true infinite that includes finitude within itself and overcomes it - but the category 'spirit' is itself lacking. "29 By the time he wrote the Foreward essay, Hegel was committed to a notion of faith "as involving both phases [objectivity and subjectivity], the one just as much as the other, and I place them together, bound up in a differentiated unity [in unterschiedener Einheit]. "30
6. 5 The "spring of that finitude which is infinity"
The goal of speculative religion, says Hegel, consists in sublating the "negation of my particular, empirical existence" (1802a: 218). Speculative thought overcomes the decisive one-sidedness of human subjectivity as manifested in reflectivity and conceptually cognizes the unity of the finite and the infinite. 31 As Hegel puts it in his 1821 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, philosophy should conceive of religion as reconciled with reason: 'Instead [of allowing] reason and religion to contradict themselves,
28 Hegel is here citing Pascal's Pensees, 441 (Brunschvicg). For an excellent analysis of Hegel's utterance that 'God is dead,' see Deland Anderson's Hegel's Speculative Friday (Scholars Press, 2003). Also see Cyril O'Regan, "Philosophy of Religion in the Context of Hegel's Philosophy," Owl of Minerva, 2006, Vol. 37: 1, 24: "In opposition to the rationalistic reduction of faith, which Hegel regarded as characteristic of Enlightenment culture, true philosophical knowledge depends on the religious consciousness and experience of the absolute - not an alien, transcendent, other-worldly absolute but an immanent absolute that subjects itself to negation in the historical Good Fridays of this world. "
29 Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 18.
30 Hegel, Die Religion im inneren Verhaeltnisse zur Wissenschaft, 491.
31 See Merklinger, 41; LPR1, 1821, 221-2.
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[we must] resolve the discord in the manner [appropriate] to us - [through a] reconciliation in philosophy. '32 Within the sphere of religion, spirit is steeped in interiority, but Hegel argues that:
the interiority of devotion limited to emotion and representation is not the highest form of interiority. It is self-determined thinking which has to be recognized as this purest form of knowing. It is in this that science brings the same content to consciousness and thus becomes that spiritual worship which, by systematic thinking, appropriates and comprehends what is otherwise only the content of subjective sentiment or representation. 33
Thus, what was originally interior becomes even more internalized by being lifted up into self-determining thinking without losing its sense of adoration. 34
The speculative task consists in articulating conceptually what is already experienced in religion. According to the 1824 Concept of Religion, 'religion is the self-knowing of divine spirit through the mediation of finite spirit'; in the 1824 lectures, religion is the 'consciousness of the true in and for itself' and 'the self-consciousness of absolute spirit. ' The speculative philosophy of religion is one which recognizes that the two sides [one which treats merely the objects as such as God and forget the subjective side as did the Enlightenment, and one which considered and comprehended religion only as something subjective as does Pietism] are united together in a dialectical relationship that is the totality of religion. This dialectic is grounded in thought: it is necessary to understand that 'God and religion exist in and through thought - simply and solely in and for thought. ' The unity of these two sides takes place within religious consciousness:35
In religion, I myself am the relation of the two sides [the singularity of the individual human subject and the absolute universality of this other- the two-sided relation implicit in consciousness] thus defined. I the thinking subject, and I the immediate subject, are one and the same I. And further,
32 LPR, 111.
33 Hegel, Vorstellung u? ber die Aesthetik, vol. 1, 143; Quoted in Lauer's Hegel's Concept of God, 36-7.
34 In direct response to Schleiermacher, Hegel claims - LPR11, 1824, 263 - that "only when the thought is true are one's feelings truthful too" (quoted in Merklinger, 208, ftn. 13).
35 Hegel insists time after time that "religion is human religion," see LPR111, 1824, p. 189
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the relation of the two sides that are so sharply opposed [of utterly finite consciousness and being and of the infinite] is present in religion for me. 36
And again,
In thinking, I raise myself above all that is finite to the absolute and am infinite consciousness, while at the same time I am finite self- consciousness, indeed to the full extent of my empirical condition. 37
In essence, the subject experiences a simultaneous internal rupture and consociation: 'I am the conflict . . . and their bonding together. '38 Because the inner conflict exists as relation and as unity, it is also a unity-in- difference. It is in these terms, then, that we are to understand the relationship of - drawing on Fichte's description of intellectual intuition - 'the I as the knowing and the known object'39 and - drawing on Aristotle's description of divine activity - 'thought thinking itself. '40
The speculative reconciliation of faith and reason relies on a conception of religious consciousness as a concurrence of subjective feeling and objective content. And indeed, this conception of religious consciousness is not new to the later corpus; in his early 'Tu? bingen Fragment' (1793), Hegel claims that "the Ideas of reason enliven the whole web of human feeling - their operation penetrates everything, like subtle matter and gives a peculiar tinge to every inclination and impulse. "41 The Hegelian reconciliation between faith and knowledge involves a systematic understanding of the relationship between feeling and thought and, with that, the unity of the particular and the universal in religious consciousness. Within the sphere of religious consciousness, the consummation of the finite with the infinite requires philosophers of faith to move beyond a merely historical attitude towards the Absolute. 42 By piously adhering to "the unconditional requirement that the Absolute be kept outside oneself," by identifying the real with that which is independent or transcendent, the reflective philosophers of subjectivity inadvertently commit - suggest Hegel and Schelling - "the highest form of
36 Hegel, LPR1, 211. 37 Ibid. ,212.
38 Ibid. , 213.
39 Ibid. , 210.
40 Ibid. , 208.
41 Hegel, "Tu? bingen Fragment (1793), trans. H. S. Harris, in Hegel's Development, p. 511-512.
42 See LPR, p. 128; VPR1. p. 44.