No More Learning

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). It is in view of our moral calling that human understanding finds its true dignity, one might say, and it is with these moral purposes in mind that knowledge finds its complement in faith. This "practical turn" has consequences also for one's conception of nature, which is construed in terms of our moral vocation, which consists less in knowing than in acting, nature is construed as "that on which I have to act" (VOM: 93). Nature, one might suppose, at this stage in the argument, is nothing but a requisite obstacle to one's moral purposes; "[m]y world is the object and sphere of my duties, and absolutely nothing more" (VOM: 96). According to Hegel, Fichte's conception of nature is "in theory just a non-ego, something merely negative, defined as the opposite in general. " As if by impulse, or a "gift of insight," our human vocation - and there are at least six formulations of the vocation, the most general of which summons us to listen to the voice within - is disclosed to us; but because this summons is incomprehensible
would have to proceed if we were able to think them as one. The case is the same with the original I = the subject-object. This is incomprehensible to me, and the reason for this lies within my own finitude. The only way I can think of this I = X is to think of the task of obtaining a concept of this X--a task that can be stated as follows: 'Think of the rule in accordance with which you would have to proceed if it were possible to think of X. ' . . . Therefore, once again, all we can do is simply propose this as a task. Everything else is obtainable [within consciousness], because everything else is accomplished within experience. "
7 "The conception of a purpose," writes Fichte, "a particular determination of events in me, appears in a double shape: partly as subjective, a thought, and partly as objective, an action" (VOM: 87).
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to human understanding, "faith lends sanction to knowledge. " Because the moral law within must be obeyed, writes Fichte, but following Kant, "we are compelled to assume a certain sphere for this action" (VOM: 98). On the basis of practical or moral reasoning, there is indeed "something beyond mere presentations. " Whereas idealism concedes that things-in- themselves are incomprehensible,8 the moral idealist says: "Whatever these beings may be in and for themselves, you shall [sollen] act toward them as self-existent, free, substantive beings, wholly independent of yourself. Thus I ought to act; by this course of action all my thought ought to be guided" (VOM: 95). When asked whether the world exists as I represent it to myself, one ought to respond by saying:
Our consciousness of a reality external to ourselves is not rooted in the operation of supposed external objects, which indeed exist for us, and we for them, insofar as we already know of them; nor is it an empty vision evoked by our imagination and thought, the products of which must, like itself, be mere empty pictures; it is rather the necessary faith in our freedom and power, in our own real activity, and in the definite laws of human action, which lies at the root of all our consciousness of a reality beyond ourselves (VOM: 98).
Compelled by conscience, and adopted as a regulative principle, we are obliged - writes Fichte - to believe in a "real, actual present world" in which "[others are], and that you are, that there is a medium through which you can influence [one another]. " The kingdom of ends formulation of the categorical imperative in Kant, or the vocation of persons in Fichte, entails an infinite if asymptotic striving toward a convergence of ideality and reality or the actualization of what ought to be the case. 9 This conviction or non-speculative knowledge of the actual world emerges from the necessity of action; and action, which is carried out according to design and purpose, is animated by inner convictions that are
8 In one of his most telling of his reflections on comprehending the incomprehensible, Fichte claims - in WL ? 17 (B419-20; D211) - that "[t]he entire structure of the I is based on the act of determining and what is determined. I-hood consists in the division of the I into a subjective and an objective [I]. This is the fundamental law. When I become conscious of I-hood, a split occurs between the ideal and the real, which are originally one. What is real or objective is, in turn, both a determining agency and something determinate. "
9 In the Phenomenology, Hegel suggests that "what only ought to be without [actually] being has no truth. The instinct of reason . . . refuses to be led astray by figments of thoughts which only ought to be and, as oughts, are credited with truth, although they are nowhere met within experience" (151).
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incomprehensible to theoretical reason. And, alas, Fichte says: "I will not suffer myself to entertain the desire of pressing this conviction on others by reasoning, and I will not be surprised if such an undertaking should fail. I have adopted my mode of thinking first of all for myself, not for others, and before myself only will I justify it. He who possesses the honest, upright purpose of which I am conscious will also attain similar conviction; without the purpose, the conviction can in no way be attained" (VOM: 98).
Fichte's speculative project of constructing "a scientific philosophy, one which can measure itself against mathematics" and whose success seemed "already good as assured" in 1794 had been altered considerably, drastically even, by the time that Fichte published his popular account - which was "not intended for professional philosophers" - in the Bestimmung des Menschens; but from another perspective, it seems accurate to say, as Fichte does in the Foreword, that one "will find nothing [in the Vocation of Man] that has not been already set forth in other writings of the same author. " As early as the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte thought that "the opposites must be united, so long as opposition remains, until absolute unity is effected: a thing, indeed - as will appear in due course - which could be brought about only by a completed approximation to infinity which itself is impossible" (I. 116). And indeed, Fichte's strategy in "ber der Grund unsers Glaubens an eine Go? ttliche Weltregierung" (1798) is perfectly consistent with what he re-enacts in the Vocation of Man essay. The difficulties of dogmatism, writes Fichte, "vanish if we adopt the transcendental standpoint. There is then no longer an independent world: everything is now simply a reflection of our inner activity" (1798: 21). Elsewhere: "Our moral vocation is therefore itself the outcome of a moral attitude and it is identical with our faith; one is thus quite right in maintaining that faith is the basis of all certainty" (1798: 22). This faith, claims Fichte, is intrinsically true and evident - "it is not based on or conditioned by any other truth, but on the contrary all other truths are conditioned by it. " Though Fichte says that "this logical order is frequently overlooked," Hegel makes it the crux of his critique: philosophy is surrendered - in Fichte as in Kant and Jacobi - to faith. Granted, Fichte is concerned here with the "true religion of joyful morality" rather than the exposition of his system, with certainty rather than knowledge, per se, but he does seem to suggest - as Hegel interprets him to say - that "transcendental theory teaches that the world is nothing but the sensuous appearance, given according to intelligible rational laws, of our own inner activity, our own intelligence operating with boundaries
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that must remain incomprehensible [as far as their origin is concerned]" (1798: 24).
5. 5 Hegel's (Mis-)Reading of Fichte
One of the things that "everyone should be learning" about recent Fichte scholarship, writes Breazeale, is that many of the deeply entrenched "truisms" that have guided and continued to guide the scholarship are egregiously misleading (1996; also, Seidel 1998). The textbook version of Fichte's wild exaggeration of Kant's principle of the "primacy of practical reason" and reliance on a Sollen, or the task of striving toward an unattainable ideal, to solve otherwise "theoretically insurmountable problems" constitutes - suggest Breazeale and Seidel - an egregious misreading of Fichte; at least in part, the alleged misreading constitutes the backbone of Hegel's interpretation of Fichte in Glauben und Wissen. 10 And while Hegel's reading of Fichte merits more scholarly attention, and while it may be true that Hegel misread or otherwise misunderstood Fichte, Hegel's reading in Glauben und Wissen should be explored within the context of the central interpretative thesis: "The fundamental principle common to the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte," writes Hegel, "is the absoluteness of finitude and, resulting from it, the absolute antithesis of finitude and infinity, reality and ideality, the sensuous and the supersensuous, and the beyondness of what is truly real and absolute. " From a religious point of view, these philosophers embody "the principle of Protestantism" (1802b: 57). These reflective philosophies of subjectivity form a dialectical triad, more or less, which exhausts the inherent principle entirely: Kant illustrates the objective standpoint, Jacobi represents the subjective antithesis, and Fichte posits a synthesis of both (1802b: 62). Fichte serves as a case in point, an exemplar of the species and an admonitory lesson apropos the reflective philosophy of subjectivity.
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.
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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).
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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.
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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.