No More Learning

Imagine a space enclosed by two non-concentric circles. Hegel says: "The mathematicians conclude that the inequalities possible in this space are infinite, and they conclude this because it is the nature of the thing that it surpasses any numerical determination. " This shows, thought Jacobi, and Hegel concurs, that "there is in . . . bounded space an actual infinite, an infinitum actu" (1802: 111 - 112). Hegel thinks that Jacobi fails to understand how Spinoza uses this example to prod us on to an authentic concept of the infinite. Infinitude, in the geometric example, is expressed in terms of an absolute affirmation: as "an essence which includes the particular or finite in itself at the same time, and is unique and indivisible" (107). This empirical infinity arises, for example, "in the infinite series [of functions of curved lines] of the mathematicians" (112). For Spinoza, quantity can be conceived of either abstractly (and superficially) or "secundum modum quo a rebus aeternis fluit [according to the mode in which it flows from eternal things]" (1802b: 106). Hegel cites Spinoza:
If then we consider quantity as it is presented in imagination (which we more often and readily do), we find it to be finite, divisible, and constructed of parts. But if we consider it intellectually and conceive it as substance (which is very difficult), then it will be found to be infinite, one, indivisible . . . matter is everywhere the same, and there are no distinct parts in it except insofar as we conceive matter to be modified in various ways. Then parts are distinct, not really, but only modally (Ethics, Proposition 15).
In Spinoza, thinks Hegel, the infinite both "consumes and consummates finitude. "
3. 4 On Jacobi's Reply to Glauben und Wissen
Jacobi provides a scathing review, though perhaps his comments constitute something more along the lines of a rant or harangue than a review, of Glauben und Wissen in a series of three open letters to Friedrich Ko? ppen. (In 1803, Ko? ppen described Schelling's Identita? tsphilosophie as "the philosophy of absolute nothingness. ") Dripping with sarcasm, Jacobi writes: "What I understood appeared to me extremely suitable to the occasion and entirely appropriate to the circumstances" (1802: 142). After fastidiously rehearsing the many slanderous things said about him by "those gallant men," Hegel and Schelling, Jacobi suggests that the sheer
Jacobi and the Poetry of Protestant Grief 85
repetition of reproaches in Glauben und Wissen is severe and repugnant: "As is well known, one believes oneself in the end what one has often repeated and increasingly vehemently asserted" (1802: 144). Jacobi claims that his philosophical disputes, whether with Mendelssohn or Herder, or with Kant and Fichte, were conducted with honor as well as respect and affection. But now that the etiquette had been breached, by Hegel and Schelling, Jacobi considers himself to be released from the bonds of honorable discourse. What makes his satisfaction complete, writes Jacobi, "is that Kant and Fichte have been simultaneously expelled and banished with me; we are brothers in one and the same crime, completely similar sinners and deserving of death" (1802: 147). The central thesis of Glauben und Wissen is expressed by Jacobi in this way:
The Kantian is 'the objective dimension,' the Jacobian 'the subjective,' and the Fichtean 'the synthesis of both. They integrate and differentiate like the three dimensions of the body. . . Seen in daylight, the triune Kantian- Jacobian-Fichtean philosophy is 'nothing but completed and idealized empirical psychology, Lockeanism, eudaemonism, enlightenment in its nakedness (1802: 148).
Jacobi provides a concise summary or compendium of the central ideas expressed in Glauben und Wissen. Reduced to its simplest expression, Jacobi quips that these gallant gentlemen, Hegel and Schelling, do battle "a philosophy which is the death of philosophy is brought to death and destroyed just in the nick of time by philosophy is in the strictest sense philosophically just" (1802: 149).
Eventually, however, Jacobi's sarcasm is transformed into a small set of pointed criticisms: Jacobi objects not only to the clumsy or otherwise poor literary style (e. g. , Hegel's muddled metaphor of the bat as well as the vulgar image of the philosophy of subjectivity as impaled at the stake of finitude) and irresponsible scholarship (e. g. , claiming that Hegel falsely cited Jacobi in several ways), he is also convinced of several instances of "deliberate chicanery. " Perhaps the most damning reprimand is that the authors of Glauben und Wissen are deluded, impiously, in inflating themselves - analogous to the 'fable of the frog' - beyond their proper place and assuming the status of gods. With reference to their maltreatment of his essay in the Reinholdian Contributions and "Kapucinade," Jacobi claims that "nothing in the world can be more ridiculous than the screaming, slandering, rumbling and rapping, etcetera, etcetera, which the gentlemen Schelling and Hegel claim to have read in it" (1802: 156). Hegel's reproaches, claims Jacobi, are disingenuous: they are, in short,
86 Chapter Three
based solely on fabrication rather than fact. By contrast to the critical journalists, Jacobi says that he sought the unbiased truth honestly and humbly rather than, and by contrast to Hegel and Schelling, from "idle curiosity" and "feigned satisfaction. " According to Jacobi, he "needed a truth which would not be my creature, but whose creature [he] was" (1802: 156). Jacobi concludes his August letter on a note of optimism: Perhaps the work of Schelling and Hegel will make a difference, somehow, by shifting the focus of the discourse. But even then, Jacobi's optimism - assuming that it is genuine - also serves as reprimand; adopting the speculative Sprachspiel of the critical theorists, he asks, "Will not impartiality on the part of the object now be able to consume and destroy partiality on the part of the subject just as absolute infinity has already done with absolute finitiude" (1802: 157)? Earlier in the paragraph, however, the plea for impartiality has a personal rather than speculative connotation, namely, when Jacobi asks Ko? ppen: "Is it asking too much of them if one want to have them impartial? "
Though he was a philosophical gadfly, often extreme if not harsh and unfair, Jacobi exercised a significant influence on the trajectory of German idealism as well as early romanticism. This is especially true of his influence on Fichte. Perhaps Breazeale is correct in suggesting that "almost everything Fichte published during his first year at Berlin [1799], including the Vocation of Man, was designed not only to demonstrate the falsity of the charge of atheism, but also to reveal the deep confusion underlying Jacobi to Fichte" (1994: xviii). Beyond the influence of his charge of nihilism and atheism, Jacobi was important for his doctrine of the primacy of existence over consciousness. In his Briefe u? ber Spinoza, Jacobi writes:
In my judgment, the greatest merit of the [philosophical] investigator is to disclose [enthu? llen] existence, to reveal it . . . Explanation is only a means, a path toward the goal - never the final end. His goal is that which cannot be explained: the irresolvable, immediate and simple" (IV/1, 72).
Citing this passage in his German Idealism, Beiser suggests that "[n]o single statement of Jacobi has a greater impact on the romantic generation" (Beiser 2002: 384). Fichte's failed attempt to explain the irresolvable, or, alternatively, to "comprehend the incomprehensible" [das Unbegreifliches zu begreifen], constitutes the speculative task for Hegel if not also Schelling in Jena. For Kant, the Hegelian demand is unfair: "we comprehend this incomprehensibility, and that is all that can be fairly demanded of a philosophy which strives to carry its principles to the very
Jacobi and the Poetry of Protestant Grief 87
limit of human reason" (1795: 463). When it comes to comprehending the incomprehensible, or at least comprehending incomprehensibility, Jacobi agrees - more or less - with Kant and Fichte. But for Jacobi, faith provides us with an immediate or intuitively direct knowledge and certainty [unmittelbar Gewissheit] (II, 101). Though they differ from one another, Hegel suggests that Jacobi as well as Kant and Fichte deny knowledge and surrender philosophy to faith; ultimately, they agree that - as Fichte put it in his ber der Grund unsers Glaubens an eine Go? ttliche Weltregierung (1798) - "faith is the basis of all certainty" and "the condition of all other truths. "
Before turning to Hegel's reading of Fichte, however, it seems important to address the dialectical if not historical influence of Schleiermacher on Hegel's speculative reconciliation of faith and knowledge. Although Hegel claims that Jacobi provides "the most comprehensive expression of the principle of Protestantism, an exemplary representative of its species," Schleiermacher is characterized as "a higher and nobler shape" (Hegel 1802: 148) of the same fundamental principle; at best, this is a very left-handed compliment. That said, Schleiermacher may well have been pleased by the association alleged by Hegel. And indeed, Jacobi expresses a certain degree of satisfaction at having been maligned in such good company - together, that is, with Kant and Fichte. (Conspicuously, no mention is made of Schleiermacher. ) Although it was Jacobi who first accused Fichte of 'nihilism,' in his Open Letter to Fichte (1799), Hegel appropriated Jacobi's indictment for himself and applied it not only to Fichte but also Kant and the entirety of transcendental idealism. As representatives of the reflective philosophy of subjectivity, Hegel associates Jacobi with Kant and Fichte; so to the extent that Jacobi, not unlike Kant and Fichte, or Locke and Hume, "denies that speculation is the standpoint of truth" and that "empiricism still remains the highest site of the human intellect" (1799: 129), Jacobi is himself guilty - by association - of skepticism if not also nihilism.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE HEGEL-SCHLEIERMACHER CONFLICT
In his Introduction to Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion, Richard Crouter concedes that "analysis must sometimes appear as the betrayal of a friend, if only to get inside the arguments in an objective manner" (1996: xxxi). Schleiermacher, to whom Lu? lmann refers as "the church-father of the nineteenth century," is by some accounts the dominant theologian of modernity, correctly ranked together with Luther and Calvin in his significance to Protestant thought, since what began in 1799 with the Speeches ended - according to Barth, who some read as Schleiermacher's "twentieth-century nemesis" - with the Schleiermacher renaissance as embodied in the romantic orientation of Troeltsch, Ritschl, and particularly W. Herrmann. Schleiermacher's importance as a theologian has not been underestimated; and his centrality to hermeneutics is also secure. But as a philosopher of religion, whose task it is - says Hegel - to articulate conceptually what is already experienced in religion, Schleiermacher's reputation has been tarnished from the very beginning. Nearly all of Hegel's early criticisms of Schleiermacher (and Jacobi) stem from his life-long preoccupation with resolving "the discord [between reason and religion] in a manner appropriate to us, a reconciliation in [the form of] philosophy" (1821: 161). According to the philosophy indigenous to Halle, where Schleiermacher studied Wolff by day and Kant and Herder by night: "Everything must be proved by reason, as on the philosopher's stone. " I am interested in Schleiermacher's "night thoughts. "
Traditionally, perhaps not altogether unjustifiably, philosophers of history and historians of philosophy alike have tended to characterize Hegel's relationship to Schleiermacher as constituting - it should come as no surprise - a dialectical Gegensatz (antithesis) between, say, were we to state the dilemma in its most extreme form, philosophical gnosticism and religious emotivism. Although Schleiermacher's programme came to set the standard for Romantic theology, he was "by no means only a Romantic" (Barth: 228). And if we were to follow Beiser's reading of Hegel, implicit in The Fate of Reason (1992) and Enlightenment, Revolution, Romanticism (1998), we might be tempted to say that much if
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not most of what Hegel gets right, he got from the Romantics. For those who work through the popular caricatures of what Hegel stressed as a philosopher and what Schleiermacher advocated as a theologian, it is not the differences but very often the similarities, with regard to inspiration and method and literary style, which secretly animate continued analysis into the alleged conflict. But Schleiermacher and Hegel were latecomers or perhaps outsiders, each in his own way, Hegel to a greater degree, and "nothing is less generous than the poetic self [and I would amend this with the philosophical self] when it wrestles for its own survival" (Bloom 1973: 18). In what follows, I focus on Hegel's side of the story as told albeit cryptically in his 1802 Faith and Knowledge.
In a very telling essay, titled "Hegel and Schleiermacher at Berlin: A Many-Sided Debate" (1980), Richard Crouter "pauses," briefly, before turning his attention to the alleged conflict in Berlin in 1814, to examine Hegel's earliest criticisms of Schleiermacher's Speeches. The initial and, I suggest, for Hegel, decisive Zusammenstoss [clash] in the Hegel- Schleiermacher conflict occurred in 1802, when, in the process of mounting a more general critique of the reflective philosophies of subjectivity, Hegel refers - almost parenthetically - to the Speeches as but a slight variation on the philosophy of Jacobi; and because Jacobi's philosophical standpoint is maligned, Schleiermacher - or, as it were, "the author of the Speeches" (Hegel 1802: 150) - is guilty by association. Hegel's Jena period critique (1800-1802) signals, thinks Crouter, "a foreshadowing of differences" - differences that, according to Jeffrey Hoover (1988), are explained as much in terms of political alliances as philosophical conviction. While agreeing with Crouter that it is important "to examine this [Jacobi-Schleiermacher] association and ask whether it has any basis in fact," an adequate answer to this question requires - or so I shall argue - substantially more than a pause. And while it is true that the debate in Berlin was markedly political, Hegel's later criticisms - most notably in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1821) and his Foreword to Hinrichs's Die Religion im inneren Verha? ltnisse zur Wissenschaft (1822) - are remarkably consistent with the philosophical criticisms of 1802. The conflict between Schleiermacher and Hegel, though undeniably exacerbated by political alliances and personal grievances, I am convinced, was essentially philosophical.
In Part I of what follows I quickly rehearse what we know about the Jacobi-Schleiermacher association alleged by Hegel. But since the association alleged by Hegel turns on a philosophical association, treating
The Hegel-Schleiermacher Conflict 91
Schleiermacher and Jacobi as representative of the subjective side of the reflective philosophies of subjectivity, I turn in Part II to the central argument of Hegel's Faith and Knowledge essay. In Parts III and IV, I examine the principle of Protestantism in Jacobi and Schleiermacher. I suggest by way of conclusion that while Hegel may have misread Schleiermacher, the association alleged by Hegel is based on an instructive and quite arguably accurate reading of Schleiermacher's and Jacobi's respective philosophies of religion.
4. 1 The Historical Association
Jacobi was acquainted with Schleiermacher through a mutual friend, Brinkmann, who first met Schleiermacher in 1800. In a letter sent to Brinkmann in May of that same year, Schleiermacher wrote apropos of the Speeches:
I can only hope to be understood by a few; but most importantly, and sacred to me, would be Jacobi's judgment. You are familiar with my respect for this humane and independent thinker; I cannot deny that I have always thought of him, if nothing better comes to mind, as a judge. You must not conceal anything of his comments. Even his conditional praise would make me proud, though his reproach would not discourage me. This is my first literary attempt - it certainly is not excellent, but I should not give up the hope to one day present something good.
Brinkmann cited this very portion of Schleiermacher's letter in his correspondence with Jacobi. In Dilthey's words, "Jacobi empfand keine Sympathie" [Jacobi was indifferent to, or felt no real sense of kinship with, Schleiermacher] (Dilthey: 371). Above all else, Jacobi was shocked by the incipient Fichtianismus he detected in the Speeches. While admitting his reserved affinity with Fichteanism to Jacobi, again through Brinkmann, Schleiermacher stressed the points of divergence; nevertheless, Jacobi - whose "Open Letter to Fichte" (1799) associated Fichte with Spinozism and thus atheism - withheld even so much as his "conditional praise" for Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher understood that Jacobi's accusation of Fichteanism was tantamount to the charge of atheism. 1 Schleiermacher confided to Brinkmann that he had been wounded to the heart.
1 Schleiermacher's critics typically concur with Jacobi that Schleiermacher was a Spinozist. Robert Adamson, whose work on Fichte was influential on the appropriation of German idealism by the classical American pragmatists, is representative: "The truth is that Schleiermacher never advanced, philosophically,
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The Speeches (1799) are mentioned briefly in two of Hegel's Jenaer Zeit essays: "The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy" and "Faith and Knowledge," published in 1801 and 1802 respectively. According to the earlier essay:
A phenomenon such as the Speeches on Religion may not immediately concern the speculative need. Yet they and their reception - and even more so the dignity that is beginning to be accorded, more or less clearly or obscurely, to poetry and art in general in all their true scope - indicate the need for a philosophy that will recompense nature for the mishandling that it suffered with Kant and Fichte's systems, and set reason itself in harmony with nature, not by having reason renounce itself or become an insipid imitator of nature, but by reason recasting itself into nature out of its own inner strength" (1801: 83).
And while it might be possible to read Hegel's earliest references to the Speeches as "far from being critical" (Crouter 1980: 24), even "laudatory" (Harris 1977a: 75), there can be little doubt about Hegel's decidedly negative assessment one year later in Faith and Knowledge. Recalling the programmatic introduction to the Critical Journal of Philosophy to which these essays whole-heartedly or, as in the case of Hegel, almost whole- heartedly subscribed, it is clear that Schleiermacher was to be considered one of the "abundantly flourishing weeds" which then jeopardized the "few good seeds that [had] been sown. "
Crouter claims that "Jacobi appears to have made no formal reply to Hegel's attack on his teaching in Faith and Knowledge" and that "Schleiermacher [regretted] that Jacobi did not respond to Hegel's remarks" (1980: 25). But while it may be true that Schleiermacher regretted that Jacobi did not comment explicitly on the association alleged by Hegel, Jacobi was quite thorough if "repetitively long-winded" in his response to Hegel's remarks: Jacobi's response, in the form of three letters, one of which was titled "On Faith and Knowledge," was published in 1803 as part of an appendix to Friedrich Koeppen's Schellings Lehre oder das Ganze der Philosophie des Absoluten Nichts, Nebst drei Briefen
beyond Spinozism, the principles of which are only disguised under the mystically pious tone of feeling on which all his speculation rested" (Adamson 1884: 73). On the question of Schleiermacher's alleged pantheism, Julia Lamm argues convincingly that "Schleiermacher's notion of a living God, while indeed influenced by his appropriation of Spinoza and neo-Spinozism, is developed in the Glaubenslehre in such a way that it is free from the charges of pantheism commonly made against it" (1996: 6).
? The Hegel-Schleiermacher Conflict 93
verwandten Inhalts von Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (Hamburg). And indeed Schleiermacher discusses the mentioned essay in several tormented letters to Brinkmann. Perhaps this is a very minor point; and perhaps Jacobi's published letters to Koeppen cannot be taken seriously as a "formal response" to Hegel's critique. Nevertheless, Schleiermacher considered Jacobi's "silence" concerning their alleged association - which Schleiermacher readily accepted - to be conspicuous; indeed, Schleiermacher treats the silence as indicative of "eine unumgeschra? nkteste Verachtung" [an unlimited disdain]. There is, however, a happy ending to this biographical sketch: Fifteen years later, in 1818, Schleiermacher finally met Jacobi. By Schleiermacher's account, the belated encounter was more than conciliatory. Indeed, Schleiermacher - prior to Jacobi's death in 1819 - intended to dedicate his forthcoming publication (The Christian Faith [Glaubenslehre], published in 1821-1822), which constitutes a subtle but significant refinement in Schleiermacher's position, to "old Fritz. " These biographical comments simply set the stage for a more substantive investigation into the "facts" of the philosophical association alleged by Hegel in 1802.
4. 2 Schleiermacher and the Principle of Protestantism
Since Hegel's early assessment of Schleiermacher is parasitic on - perhaps even incidental to - his critique of Jacobi, we are now in a position to better "examine [Hegel's association of Schleiermacher with Jacobi] and ask whether it has any basis in fact" (Crouter 1980: 25). But what qualifies as a fact in this case? The "association question" presupposes an understanding of Hegel's reading or misreading of the reflective philosophies of subjectivity, the principle of Protestantism, the philosophy of Jacobi, and then the philosophy of religion articulated in the Speeches. And at this point, one may well be tempted to abandon the "association game" altogether; but before that happens, let us examine the philosophical association in Hegel's own mind - for surely, our reading of Hegel's reading of Jacobi and Schleiermacher will precede our criticism that Hegel misread Schleiermacher. Should we take seriously Schleiermacher's claim that he "remained the same since the Speeches"? Perhaps, but out of fairness to Hegel, we must focus on what Schleiermacher actually said in the 1799 (as opposed to the 1806, 1821, or 1831) edition. That said, let us not forget Schleiermacher's own intimation - in the second Speech, the speech on which Hegel focuses his attention - that "we must learn to read between the lines. " Hegel's criticisms, like Jacobi's, are primarily concerned with what was going on between the
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lines or behind the veil of Schleiermacher's prose. With this in mind, I think that Hegel's criticism is as far-reaching as it is terse.
Hegel implicitly associates Schleiermacher with Jacobi insofar as Schleiermacher is associated with the fundamental principles of Protestantism: But is the truly Absolute, in Schleiermacher, as in Jacobi, an absolute Beyond in faith and in feeling? Is it nothing for cognitive reason? Is Schleiermacher all tangled up, along with Jacobi, in finitude? Did Schleiermacher, in the Speeches, like Jacobi, understand the eternal to be above or beyond the sphere of opposition, beyond the concept and the empirical (Hegel 1802b: 63)? Did Schleiermacher, in 1799, misled by his reading of Jacobi's misreading of Spinoza, and as part of an over-reaction to the Aufkla? rung, unjustly and paternalistically restrict the reach of reason [Vernunft] to the domain or dominions of the understanding [Verstand]? And is Schleiermacher, like Jacobi and Kant and Fichte, as alleged by Hegel, committed to an absolute antithesis between the finite and the infinite (1802b: 147)? Hegel takes the more obvious points of agreement between Schleiermacher and Jacobi for granted - namely, that nihilism is the admonitory lesson of idealism and that feeling is the highest form of interiority. 2
Hegel explicitly associates Schleiermacher with Jacobi in the following manner: First, because Jacobi's radical subjectivity is easily polluted with reflectivity and thus collapses in on itself, abandoning the beyond for the things of this world, Schleiermacher's more moderate subjectivity (a subjectivity tempered by intersubjectivity) achieves a higher pitch of intensity. Second, in Schleiermacher, much more than in Jacobi, the "deification of the subject [is] made into a more elevated object" (1802b: 149). Third, the "intuition of oneself and of the world [are] grasped in a more ideal [idealisch] way" in Schleiermacher than in Jacobi - i. e. , even
2 According to Jacobi, the honest transcendental idealist is forced to admit that "our senses teach us nothing of the qualities of things, nothing of their mutual relations and connections, they do not even teach us that, in a transcendental sense, things are actually there. This would be a sensibility that represented nothing at all of the things themselves, a sensibility that is decidedly empty of objective reference. Our intellect is supposed to connect with this sensibility in order to give radically subjective forms to radically subjective intuitions according to radically subjective rules. [. . . ] In that case I am everything and, properly speaking, nothing exists outside me. I, and everything of mine, am in the end also nothing but a mere delusion of something or other, the form of a form, [. . . ] a ghost" (1812-1825: II. 214-17).
? The Hegel-Schleiermacher Conflict 95
the highest intuition is turned into something subjective, something that remains private and personal. 3 Fourth, the quest of Protestantism for reconciliation in the here and now is achieved - in Schleiermacher - without stepping out of its character of subjectivity. Fifth, and last, that "even when the individual casts away his [or her] subjectivity, and the dogmatism of yearning dissolves its antithesis in idealism, still this Subject-Objectivity in the intuition of the universe [remains] something particular and subjective" in Schleiermacher (1802b: 150). Do these explicit associations have any basis in fact? One's answer to this question turns on what one means by "fact. " Hegel's association of Schleiermacher with Jacobi is part of a larger association; the reflective philosophies of subjectivity include not only Jacobi and Schleiermacher, of course, but Kant and Fichte as well.
4. 3 Schleiermacher at the Periphery
To what extent did Hegel misread or otherwise misrepresent Schleiermacher? That depends on how one reads Schleiermacher and, I think, equally, how one reads Hegel. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Hegel, at least to this point in his career, in 1802, actively ignored or otherwise evaded the speculative significance of the Speeches. But because Hegel, at least at this stage of his career, was often viewed as a mere apprentice to Schelling's genius, Hegel's alleged misunderstanding of his precursors - in this case, Schleiermacher and Jacobi - is itself something to be understood. In short, Hegel's alleged misreading is a philosophical interpretation; rather than a history of philosophy, Hegel is committed to a philosophy of history. Rather than merely rehearsing the thought of his precursors, Hegel intended to transform and complete them - and indeed, this is philosophical criticism as described in the programmatic introduction to the Critical Journal of which this 1802 essay is a part. Whether the association Hegel draws between Schleiermacher and Jacobi has any basis in fact, then, depends on whether Hegel's interpretation of the "reflective philosophies of subjectivity" has
3 Schleiermacher's philosophy, says Hegel, begins to compensate nature for the mishandling it received at the hands of the Critical philosophy: "Nature, as a collection of finite facts, is extinguished and acknowledged as the Universe" [i. e. , the identity of the jenseits and the diesseits]; because of this, "the yearning is brought back from its escape out of actuality into an eternal beyond, the partition between the cognitive subject and the absolutely unattainable object is torn down, grief is assuaged in joy, and the endless striving is satisfied in intuition" (Hegel 1802b: 150).
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any basis in fact. To view Hegel's reading of Schleiermacher as a misreading, therefore, misses the critical point of the Critical Journal and an essential feature of this "many-sided debate. "
But even if Hegel relegates Schleiermacher to the periphery of his analysis of his philosophical contemporaries, mentioning the Speeches en passant, and then only as a slight variation on Jacobi, Hegel must have been familiar with Schleiermacher's philosophy of religion by the time he wrote Glauben und Wissen. Hegel could have easily appropriated Schleiermacher along the lines of those proposed by Fackenheim in his God Within. But if that were the case, Schleiermacher would have been construed not as a variation on Jacobi but rather as a step beyond Fichte; but for Hegel, that honor belongs to Schelling. Following Fackenheim, Fichte represents a "historic breakthrough to God internalized, to the God within" (1996: 58). Though we will discuss Fichte in the following chapter, Fackenheim argues that whereas morality led to religion in Kant, the joy of moral activity constitutes religion in Fichte's system of idealism. For Schelling, at this same time, in 1800, the God within is found within art; and for Schleiermacher, the God within is found in the experience of the religious life. According to Fackenheim, who seems to understand the religious dimension of Hegel's thought as well as anyone, Hegel misunderstood Schleiermacher's assertion that religious experience is captured in the feeling of absolute dependence. "For Schleiermacher," claims Fackenheim, "to have reached this feeling [of absolute dependence] is to have gone beyond Fichte's self-activity: it is to have reached the ultimate" (1996: 59). What Fackenheim is claiming for Schleiermacher, namely, that he transcends Fichte's self-activity and reached the ultimate, is a speculative distinction that the critical journals reserved - as we shall see in the following chapters - for themselves. 4
4 The dialectical somersault from, say, Kant's 'transcendental realism' to Fichte's 'ethical idealism' and then to Schleiermacher's 'higher realism' if not also Schelling's 'realism-idealism' would have fit nicely into the program implemented in Glauben und Wissen. As Fackenheim turns it: "Divinity is present for this feeling, but it is not in it, let alone reducible to it, for the feeling is one of dependence, and this is on an Other. Schleiermacher therefore asserts a new 'realism. ' Rather than a lapse into the old, discredited realism, which is beneath Fichte's idealism, this is a realism beyond it.
Divinity, to be sure, is present-as- other, but it is thus disclosed to the feeling of absolute dependence, and to it alone, and manifest as present only once Fichtean moral activity, which projects Divinity into the infinite future, is transcended. Fichtean idealism therefore paves for Schleiermacher the way for something higher still, a 'higher realism'" (1996: 59).
? CHAPTER FIVE
ON FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN FICHTE
As for myself qua subject-object, I am incomprehensible. Within experience, I divide myself into a subject and an object, which, to be sure, should [sollte] be thought of as originally one.
--Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre, ? 17 (B419-20; D211).
Hegel's 1802 reading of Fichte is based largely on his reading of Die Bestimmung des Menschens [The Vocation of Man], which was published in 1799 as a popular if not polemical presentation of Fichte's 1794 Wissenschaftslehre. And Hegel's reading of Fichte was certainly influenced by Ho? lderlin and Schelling. Hegel appropriates Fichte's solution to the faith and reason debate by situating it within its dialectical if not also historical context: though Fichte is associated with Kant and Jacobi by Hegel as the third stage or Aufhebung within the paradigm of reflective philosophy, Fichte distinguishes himself from his dialectical siblings in terms of his synthesis of the objectivism of Kant and the subjectivism of Jacobi or Schleiermacher. Not altogether unlike Herder, who was caught between Kant and Hamann, Fichte attempts to reconcile the spirit of the Aufklarung with the faith and feeling of the Sturm und Drang.
According to Hegel's reading of the Bestimmung des Menschens (1800), Fichte's compromise - not unlike the solutions posed by Kant and Jacobi - underestimates the scope of reason and misidentifies the source of faith. Although Hegel's reading of the Bestimmung might be viewed as misleading, since the Bestimmung is itself polemical to such a degree that it surely misrepresents Fichte's larger enterprise, as anticipated in the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre but perhaps best articulated in his later manuscripts on Naturrecht, it is - I think - instructive nonetheless: Hegel's (mis-)reading of Fichte teaches us something important about Hegel in terms of his goals as well as his methods. And Hegel's (mis-)reading of Fichte may well have exercised some influence on Fichte's subsequent theory of inter-
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subjectivity and the social origins of consciousness. Hegel may have been right to suggest that Fichte and Jacobi are ultimately preoccupied with the same problem and that they are suggesting a similar solution, something that both Fichte and Jacobi animatedly denied. What Hegel sees as minor differences, Fichte and Jacobi saw as utterly irreconcilable. 1 And while Jacobi complained that Hegel misread or otherwise misrepresented him,2 Fichte never responded to Hegel's criticisms; indeed, claims Wayne Martin, in "In Defense of the Bad Infinite," Fichte "never publicly acknowledged their existence. " Despite Fichte's alleged "speculative failure," and the remaining residue of reflectivity, the Wissenschaftslehre is a triumph when viewed as an attempt to turn systemicity back upon itself and thereby stretch the reach of reason beyond the phenomenal realm. Fichte's deduction is, on this reading, an elaborate attempt "aus Reflektion hinauszureflektieren. "
5. 1 'Egregious Misinterpretations' of Fichte.
In Fichte's Jena Wissenschaftslehre, philosophy is presented as a whole in which the various parts are united by an Act [die Tat], an intellectual intuition which is "the singular or sole secure standpoint for all philosophy" [der einzige festige Standpunkt fu? r alle Philosophie] (Werke: I. 466) and, thinks Fichte, the sort of consciousness underlying the categorical imperative in Kant. The Jena WL was in large part written in response to what Breazeale calls "the egregious misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the aim and the content of the [Foundations of the Wissenschaftslehre]" (1988a: xi). Two of the more prominent of these alleged misunderstandings or misinterpretations were promulgated by or at least associated with Hegel and Jacobi. The fact that Jacobi's misunderstanding was painful to Fichte is all too clear from the sustained cordiality - an anomalous gesture in Fichte's career - that he extended toward Jacobi in his comments in the "Second Introduction"; it is also
1 Freud discusses the "narcissism of minor differences" in "The Taboo of Virginity" (1917), "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego" (1922), and "Civilization and its Discontents" (1929). In the earliest essay Freud observes that "it is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them. "
2 Jacobi objected to Hegel's reading in an essay titled "On Faith and Knowledge in Response to Schelling and Hegel" (1803), which was published as an appendix to Friedrich Ko? ppen's Schellings Lehre oder das Ganze der Philosophie des Absoluten Nichts. Nebst drei Briefen verwandten Inhalts von Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (Hamburg, 1803).
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clear from the conciliatory comments at the conclusion of the 'second dialogue,' the transition from 'Wissen' to 'Glauben,' in the Bestimmung des Menschens essay.
The alleged Hegelian misunderstanding runs something like this: In the Differenzschrift, which apparently provided the "decisive nudge" for Schelling's split with Fichte, Hegel argues that although Fichte succeeded in purifying further the principle of Kant's deduction of the categories and identify if not remove its "unthinking inconsistency" (Haldane and Simson, III, 481), the Wissenschaftlehre is ultimately a speculative failure; in order to tie up the speculative loose ends, Hegel says that Fichte resorts to a strategy characteristic of the reflective philosophies of subjectivity (or, as he puts it in the Pha? nomenologie, "edifying philosophy") - i. e. , "to introduce the Absolute into philosophy through the backdoor" (1802a: 369). 3 According to Hegel's Glauben und Wissen, "the Third that is truly the First and the Only One is not to be found in the system" (1802b: 170); the task of the third principle "simply cannot be performed" (1802b: 173). Hegel and Schelling agree that Fichte's system "knows only the knowing, but is not the knowing itself"; the speculative task consists in an Ausfu? hrung of Fichtean idealism. Hegel complains that "if we accept the popular conception of philosophy and make explanation our business, the most interesting side of the objective world, the side of its reality, remains [in Fichte] unexplained" (1802b: 154); in short, Hegel argues that "formal idealism does not alter the common and incomprehensible necessity of empirical existence in the slightest. " Adding insult to injury, the Fichtean philosophy is characterized as but a slight dialectical variation on the faith philosophy of Jacobi. Jacobi, on the other hand, is critical of the Wissenschaftslehre because it leads - in short and as is clear from his Jacobi an Fichte (1798) - to nihilism; granted, the charge of "nihilism" was part and parcel of Jacobi's rhetorical arsenal (i. e. , marshaled at various times against Spinoza, Kant, Fichte and - eventually - Hegel), but given Fichte's response, there is good reason to think that it was the charge
3 In the Vocation of Man (hereafter VOM), Fichte seems to concede that the way of knowledge leads to nihilism: "All earnestness and all reality are banished from my life; and life, as well as thought, is transformed into a mere play which proceeds from nothing and tends to nothing" (88). Moreover, "[k]nowledge is not [the means by which to grasp my vocation]; no knowledge can be its own foundation, its own proof; every knowledge presupposes another higher knowledge on which it is founded, and to this ascent there is no end. It is faith, that voluntary acquiescence in the view which is naturally presented to us, because only through this view can we fulfill our vocation" (88-89).
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which Fichte took most to heart. The simple juxtaposition of these two interpretations, i. e. , of Hegel at one extreme and Jacobi at the other, is startling; perhaps Fichte is partially justified in his suspicion that to the best of his knowledge, the Grundlage had been understood by almost no one.
5. 2 Fichte's Varied Deductions
According to Harris, it may well have been Schelling who first suggested to Fichte that the self-positing activity of the Ego displayed the structure of intellectual intuition described by Kant in the Critique of Judgment (see 1977: 4). But it was Fichte who insisted that intellectual intuition was "the only secure foundation or standpoint for all philosophy" ["intellektuelle Anschauung ist das einziges festiges Standpunkt fu? r alle Philosophie"] (W, I: 466). By philosophy, or at least philosophy worthy of the name, Fichte was thinking of a form of philosophy that "could measure itself against mathematics"; to accomplish that, however, meant removing the "unthinking inconsistencies" (e. g. , the dualism between receptivity and spontaneity) from the Kantian system. It is with this in mind that Hegel claimed, in the Differenzschrift, that while "the Kantian philosophy had proved unable to awaken Reason to the lost concept of speculation, Fichte's is the most thorough and profound speculation" (1801: 118). The Wissenschaftslehre constitutes Fichte's attempt to deduce, "out of the activity of this intellect, the manifold of specific presentations: of a world, of a material, spatially located world existing without our aid, et cetera, which notoriously occurs in consciousness" (WL, in Werke: I, 4, 200). Hegel agrees with Fichte that the speculative task consisted in providing a synthesis containing "the ground for the antithesis [i. e. , the sensuous manifold] within itself" (1802b: 130). Or as Pippen turns it, the task consists in showing that "the intellect's synthesizing activity is not, even in some highly complex, indirect way, a result of sensible receptivity" (1989: 45). In this speculative task, however, suggests Hegel, Fichte failed; but Hegel believes that Fichte's failure is instructive, perhaps even necessary.
The Fichtean system, though constantly evolving, with no fewer than sixteen different expositions of the first principles of his system (Breazeale, 1994: ix), strives to deduce the totality of empirical cognition from the activity of intellectual intuition - i. e. , to demonstrate how the Nicht-Ich, or "those representations which are accompanied by the feeling of necessity," arise from the free acts of the Ich. In his 1794
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Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte extracts - following Kant's transcendental method - three fundamental principles (Grundsa? tze) from the primordial, absolutely unconditioned first principle of all human knowledge. In the Foundations, Fichte says that critical philosophy or transcendental idealism - as opposed to dogmatism - "posits everything in the Ich" (I. 2, 279). 4 For Schelling, as well as for Fichte and Hegel, the speculative task consisted in showing how the Ich and the Nicht-Ich, "A and not-A, being and non-being, reality and negation, can be thought together without mutual elimination and destruction" (Schelling, I,, 2, 269). Fichte's answer to this problem is to say that they, the Ich and the Nicht-Ich, will mutually limit one another: "The self posits itself as determined by the not-self, Hence the self is not to determine but be determined, which the not-self is to determine, to set limits to the reality of the self. . . . But to say that the self determines itself as determined obviously amounts to saying that the self determines itself" (I, 2, 287). Elsewhere, Fichte says that to "the Ich, I oppose a divisible Nicht-Ich to a divisible Ich" (I. 110).
Fichte often claimed that his system had not yet been presented to the public in a worthy form. The publication of the New Presentation (1797- 1799), which was to appear in installments in the Philosophisches Journal, was delayed - subsequent to the initial installment - by the Atheismusstreit. The impact of the atheism controversy, which revolved around Jacobi's charge of nihilism in Jacobi on Fichte, changed Fichte's research agenda; according to Breazeale, "almost everything Fichte published during his first year in Berlin [1799], including the Vocation of Man, was designed not only to demonstrate the falsity of the charge of atheism, but also to reveal the deep confusion underlying Jacobi on Fichte" (1988a: xviii). This is important because Hegel treats the Vocation of Man, which offers a practical solution - a retreat to Kant's regulative "sollen" (see 5. 3, below) - to a theoretical or speculative question, as though it "set forth Fichte's philosophy in its totality as a system. " Hegel's reading of Fichte in Glauben und Wissen focuses almost exclusively on Fichte's least technical if not also popular presentations of his system: "On the Foundation of our Belief in a Divine Government of the Universe"
4 It is with this in mind that Schelling and Hegel considered it important to "recompense nature for the mishandling it suffered at the hands of Kant and Fichte" (1801: 83). Indeed, Hegel was initially attracted to Schelling's system because, in Schelling's words, "he who has reflected on idealism and realism, the two most opposite theoretical systems, has found by himself that both can come to pass only in the approach to the absolute, yet that both must unite in the absolute, that is, must cease to become opposite systems" (I, 333).
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(1798) and the Vocation of Man. That said, Fichte's alleged "speculative failure" might have resulted, ultimately, from intrinsic rather than extrinsic - e. g. , the Atheismusstreit - difficulties. And it is also true that Fichte stressed - as early as the Foundations (1794/95) - the importance of examining the practical implications as well as presuppositions of criticism vis-a`-vis dogmatism as a means of resolving theoretical metaphysical disputes.
By the end of 1800, Fichte abandoned his hope of completing the New Presentation. Breazeale claims that "Fichte was beginning to have serious second thoughts about several features of his earlier presentation and was finding it increasingly difficult to assimilate to the form of the latter some of the new results he had arrived at working on The Vocation of Man" (1988a: xviii-xix). The desideratum of the "common ground," where the Ich and the Nicht-Ich can be thought together without annihilating one another, is considered to be - not unlike in Kant - "incomprehensible" [unbegreifliche]. Fichte ultimately concedes that "such a ground is incomprehensible, since it is not included under the basic principle thereof - namely, that the self posits itself as determined by the not-self; on the contrary, it is presupposed by that principle" (I, 2, 328). In his Neue Bearbeitung der Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte claims that from the idealistic starting point "there is no way of unifying the not-I and the I" (GA II, 5: 532).
By the time that Hegel and Schelling began work on the Critical Journal, Schelling and Fichte were corresponding only intermittently. In a letter addressed to Schelling in August of 1801, Fichte complained that Schelling still failed to "penetrate completely" the Wissenschaftslehre. In his earlier Letters, Schelling suggests:
By itself the Critique of Pure Reason is or contains the genuine theory of science or Wissenschaftslehre, for it is valid for all science. Nevertheless, science may lift itself to an absolute principle; indeed, it must do this if it is to become a system. But it is impossible for the Wissenschaftslehre to establish an absolute principle and thereby to become a system (in the narrow sense of the word), because it is supposed to contain within itself, not an absolute principle nor a determinate, completed system, but rather, the canon of all principles and systems (Werke, I, 304-305).
For Schelling, the task of delineating the "canon of all principles and systems" belongs to criticism, which investigates the nature of philosophy itself, as opposed to metaphysics, which provides a transcendental
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explanation of the possibility of ordinary knowledge and experience (see Breazeale, 1988a: xx). As Hegel turns it, Fichtean philosophy "knows only the knowing, but is not the knowing itself" (1802b: 157). In his correspondence with Fichte, Schelling suggests that it is impossible for a science of all sciences to extend beyond those principles to the ground of those self-same principles; he also denies - even in the case of intellectual intuition - that the epistemological principles inherent in transcendental idealism can be transformed into a metaphysical system. Schelling agrees with Fichte, however, that intellectual intuition is the key to the development of a genuine philosophical system. But like Hegel, Schelling thought that Fichte's account of intellectual intuition was "a merely formal affair" (1802b: 154). In its popular formulation, in the Vocation of Man, the unity of the Ich and the Nicht-Ich is established in terms of religious faith; like Kant, Fichte acknowledged the limits of knowledge and the need for faith (see VOM: 88).
5. 2 Fichte and the Limits of Knowledge.
It is sometimes suggested that while morality merely leads to religion in Kant, "morality is religion" for Fichte. More precisely, writes Fackenheim,
. . . it is the 'joy' inherent in the moral agents' experience itself, produced by their awareness of having a share in the moral conquest of the world. The conquest is the "moral order of the world," and that order is God. The joy that is in moral activity is therefore nothing less than a share in God (1996: 57).
It was this interpretation of Fichte's philosophy of religion that led to the Atheismusstreit. But Fichte insisted that his philosophy aimed instead at retrieving God from the transcendent beyond [jenseits] to the God within [diesseits]. In this, at least, Hegel sees Fichte's "breakthrough" as genuinely speculative rather than merely reflective. But while we encounter glimpses of the speculative Idea in Fichte, whether in the Wissenschaftslehre or the Vocation of Man, it is not as something that exists, but rather as "something which we ought [sollen] to, but yet cannot achieve" (Werke, I: 100). Hegel had already dealt with the Wissenschaftslehre in the Differenzschrift, but the emphasis in the earlier essay was placed on Fichte's refinement of the transcendental unity of apperception; though Hegel treats Fichte as an improvement on Kant's deduction of the categories, Fichte is compared unfavorably to Schelling's emerging system. By the time that he was working on Faith and Knowledge, Hegel was able to point to the Vocation of Man as a slight variation on the
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Kantian reconciliation of faith and knowledge. Hegel claims that "Fichte acknowledges that the sole truth and certainty, that is, pure self- consciousness and pure knowing, are incomplete, are conditioned by something else; or in other words, that the Absolute of the system is not absolute, and that for this reason we must go on to something else" (1802b: 157). This "something else" is the manifold of the determinate Nicht-Ich, that is, the counterpart of the indeterminate Ich, which allegedly exists "outside of me, something which does not owe its existence to me. "
In the second part of the Vocation of Man, i. e. , the stage of doubt and self-knowledge, the philosophical protagonist claims to have achieved what he set out to accomplish - namely, freedom from his bondage in the chains of empirical necessity; he achieves this in the recognition that - in words reminiscent of the Wissenschaftslehre - "the self posits itself as determined by the not-self. " Elated, the protagonist reiterates that "the consciousness of any thing outside us is absolutely nothing more than the product of our own representative faculty [and] the Spirit declares 'I' to be free and delivered forever from the fear that humiliated and tortured him, free from a necessity which exists only in his thought and from the reality of things existing outside him" (Werke, II, 341); in response to this popular presentation of transcendental idealism, Hegel quips: "As if here were not in one and the same prison of his own condition, subject to the same necessity as before. " Apparently conceding Jacobi's charge of nihilism, though defending himself against the implication of atheism, Fichte concludes the second section of the Bestimmung des Menschens with the dialogical protagonist's forlorn complaint that "nothing now exists, nothing but representations, that is, determinations of a consciousness as mere consciousness. " In a comment aimed more at Jacobi than Fichte, Hegel glosses on this passage in the Vocation of Man by saying that it "is not for what it took away, but for the whole range of finitude which it left him that Fichte's 'I' could fairly call the Spirit profligate" (1802b: 164).
Fichte's idealism represents, for Hegel, a sustained and systematic but ultimately flawed attempt to demonstrate how specific presentations (e. g. , "of a world, of material, spatially located, existing without our aid, et cetera") emerge from the primordial, absolutely unconditioned self- positing act of the Self. The task, thinks Hegel, is genuinely speculative; the solution, however, is decidedly non-speculative (i. e. , it resorts to Reflexionsphilosophie and the backdoor of a Glaubensphilosophie). Setting out from the intuiting subject, and the identity principle, Fichte
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attempted to discover - borrowing Kant's phrase - "a common, but to us unknown, root" (KRV, A15/B29), whence springs the delimiting object as well as the self-positing subject. But in Fichte, this common source or ground is "incomprehensible, since it is not included under the basic principle thereof, viz. , that the self posits itself as determined by the not- self"5 and thus "a ground of that kind, if it is to be identified at all, would have to lie outside the boundaries of the theoretical Doctrine of Knowledge" (Werke, I,2: 328). This "absolute confluence," as Schelling called it in the Deduction of the Universal Organ of Philosophy (1800: 207), extends beyond the scope of the Wissenschaftslehre; and within the confines of Fichte's speculative system, thinks Hegel, the theoretical deduction "simply cannot be performed" (1802b: 173). This common ground, i. e. , "the Third that is truly the First and the Only One is not to be found in [Fichte's] system" (1802b: 170), is incompletely comprehended by acquiescence only by means of faith. But if the system cannot perform the task for which it was designed, thinks Hegel, "the whole apparatus of this theoretical idealism is nothing but a construct of logical forms, in abstraction from all content" (1802b: 170) or "nothing but the transformation of signs, of the minus sign into a plus sign" (1802b: 157). In short, "formal idealism does not alter the common and incomprehensible necessity of empirical existence in the slightest" (1802b: 156).
5. 4 Faith in the Bestimmung des Menschens
Whereas the Wissenschaftslehre concludes with a candid admission the roots from which our knowledge springs are theoretically incomprehensible, the Bestimmung des Menschens - published while he was in the throes of the Atheismusstreit and presented as a popular exposition of Fichte's system - provides an extra-theoretical solution to the "incomprehensibility problem. " Written as a dialogue, the first conversation presents the thesis of the dogmatist, or materialist, the second expresses the antithesis, i. e. , idealism, and the last conversation - or Third - aims at a synthesis or practical solution; the third phase of the dialogue, titled "Faith," is animated by an apparently unsettling consequence of the adopted idealist
5 In ? 17, which is prefaced with the gentle warning that "hier mangelt die Sprache", Fichte writes: "This act of self-determining [of apprehending oneself] is the absolute beginning of all life and of all consciousness (and all activity), and - for just this reason - it is incomprehensible, for our consciousness always presupposes something. As we saw above, our consciousness cannot grasp its own beginning; instead it always discovers itself in the midst [of its own conscious activity], where the beginning must be presupposed" (B414; D208).
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system, namely, that the world in which we live is "absolutely nothing but presentations - modes of consciousness, and of consciousness only . . . the shadow of a reality; in itself it cannot satisfy me and has not the smallest worth" (VOM: 76). This passage echoes Jacobi's charge - in his Open Letter to Fichte - that thoroughgoing idealism constitutes of form of nihilism. To this complaint, the Spirit replies "all knowledge is only pictures, representations; and there is always something wanting in it - that which corresponds to the representation. This want cannot be supplied by knowledge; a system of knowledge is necessarily a system of mere pictures, wholly without reality, significance, or aim. Did you expect anything else? " (VOM: 81-82). This concession, that there is always something wanting in our knowledge, is at the heart of Hegel's critique of Fichte's system:
Because of its absolute deficiency the completely empty principle from which he begins has the advantage of carrying the immediate necessity of self-fulfilment immanently within itself. . . The necessity rests upon the principle's being nothing but a part and upon its infinite poverty being the infinite possibility of wealth (1802b: 157).
As an exercise in what Hegel elsewhere calls "edifying philosophy," Fichte is able to console the dissatisfied idealist by assuring him or her that our vocation is not merely to know but also to act. "When I act," the Spirit claims, "I doubtless know that I act, and how I act; nevertheless this knowledge is not the act itself, but only the observation of it" (VOM: 84). For Fichte, not unlike Kant, the solution is more a matter of 'will' than 'cognition': "This voice thus announces to me precisely that which I sought - something lying beyond mere knowledge and, in its nature, wholly independent of knowledge" (ibid. ). The ethical ideal or "law of holiness" consists in achieving a confluence of will or desire and duty; the speculative ideal consists in thinking the absolute confluence of the subject and the object. 6 Although these ideals are "unattainable by any creature,"
6 In ? 18 (B430; D217), Fichte tells us that "[t]here is here a conflict between, on the one hand, the expressions we employ and the way we necessarily have to view [what we are describing] and, on the other, the topic we want to think about. . . . Try as we might, we can never exhaust our investigation of the primary synthesis. Consequently, we could never intuit what is determinate and the determining subject as one and the same, for they are separate within this synthesis. . . . For us, therefore, they will always remain discrete and separate. . . . To think of them as one and the same is no more than a task. . . . Thus when we say here that what is determinate and the act of determining are one and the same, this simply means that we are able to think of the rule (or the task) in accordance with which we
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writes Kant, "it is yet an archetype which we should strive to approach and to imitate in an uninterrupted progress" (Grundlage: 86). Following Kant, Fichte claims that acting is distinct from knowing: whereas the former is performed according to conceptions of design or purpose (i. e. , "as types of something yet to be"),7 the latter is preoccupied with representing that which already exists.
For Fichte, similar to Kant, or at least for the progenitor of the dialogue, "practical reason is the root of all reason" (VOM: 99) and "through the edict of conscience alone, truth and reality are introduced into my conceptions" (VOM: 94). Unless our moral conscience is for naught, in which case the summons is merely an exercise of our faculties within an empty system of pictures, then the purpose to which we are summoned "shall, must be realized. " In a world of mechanistic necessity, or dogmatism, suggests Fichte, "the whole of human existence is nothing but an idle game without significance and without end" (VOM: 106).