No More Learning

According to Hegel's Differenzschrift, written in 1801, knowledge is stipulated as "the conscious identity of the finite and the infinite, the unity of both worlds, the sensible and the intellectual, the necessary and the free in consciousness. " Faith, on the other hand, refers to "a relation of restriction to the absolute, a relation through which one becomes conscious of the opposition alone in consciousness, indeed, in which one is entirely unconscious of the identity" [hingegen u? ber die Identita? t eine vo? llige Bewusstlosigkeit vorhanden ist]; this construal of "faith does not express," argues Hegel, "the synthesis of feeling and intuition. " The faith of the Glaubensphilosophen, among his theological and philosophical contemporaries as well as the tradition they personify, demonstrates what Hegel treats as a "posture of reflection to the Absolute. " Enlightened faith, the child of enlightened reason, which hovers over the divided corpse of faith and reason, has - thought Hegel - 'as little of Reason in it as it has of genuine faith. ' This bold hypothesis simplifies things considerably: The task that Hegel sets for himself in
4 Introduction
Faith and Knowledge is nothing more or less than a "speculative" synthesis, one that extends beyond the reflective reconciliation, of the finite and the infinite, feeling and intuition, the necessary and the free in consciousness. The "identity" to which Hegel here refers, the speculative relationship or synthesis, "is by no means a simple identity"; in the end, Hegel will argue - drawing on Spinoza's logic - for "an identity of identity and non-identity" or, perhaps better, "a differentiated unity. " The real genius of Hegel's distinctive version of a speculative reconciliation, one influenced perhaps by religious mysticism, consists in showing how the infinite, the absolute, when rightly understood, both "consumes and consummates finitude" [die Endlichkeit aufzuzehren] (1802b: 66).
"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 that, for all intents and purposes, exhausts the inherent principle entirely: Kant illustrates the objective standpoint, Jacobi represents the subjective antithesis, and Fichte presented a synthesis of both (1802b: 62). And while the artificial triadics for which Hegel is now renowned - the thesis- antithesis-synthesis model in which the component part is subsumed under the synthetic whole - are conspicuously absent from his actual texts, he is as close to that model in Faith and Knowledge as he is anyplace else. (Hegel's dialectic became increasingly nonhierarchical. ) The effort of criticism, as Hegel applies it to these philosophies, consists in "tearing off the masks of subjectivity" (1802a: 277) which disguise and distort as well as disgrace perfect objectivity - that is, in facilitating the transition from a finite to an infinite standpoint. The reflective philosophers of subjectivity, afflicted as it were with finitude, hyperpolarized - that is, exaggerated to the point of mutual exclusion - the opposition of faith to knowledge; but, quips Hegel, "this makes the transition to genuine philosophy easier. "
The task of the philosophy of religion - Hegel's Religionsphilosophie - includes an adequate explanation of how the individual human subject rises above all that is finite to absolute universality and, at the same time, remains within the scope of finite self-consciousness (1821, I, 211-212). This task requires, in the words of the Preface to the Phenomenology, the sustained "seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the
Hegel: Hovering Over the Corpse of Faith and Reason 5 negative. " Hegel's explanation hinges on the role of thinking in relation to
feeling. Hegel thinks that
[i]n thinking I raise myself above all that is finite to the absolute and am infinite consciousness, while at the same time I am finite self- consciousness, indeed to the full extent of my empirical condition (1821, I, 212).
The speculative enterprise in Hegel consists in organizing the manifold shapes of restriction and defect into an integrated totality or organic unity which elevates common understanding to rational knowledge; indeed, for Hegel, "non-knowing becomes knowledge by becoming organized" (1801, 165). According to the Logic, an adequate religion would demonstrate in some manner that though "[w]e usually suppose that the absolute must lie far beyond, it is precisely what is wholly present" (1817, 59). In a telling passage from Faith and Knowledge, Hegel claims that
[i]n the true faith the whole sphere of finitude, of being-something-on- one's-own-account, the sphere of sensibility sinks into nothing before the thinking and intuiting of the eternal. The thinking and the intuiting become one and all the midges of subjectivity are burned to death in this consuming fire, and the very consciousness of this surrender and nullification is nullified (1802b, 141, my italics).
Finitude's "sinking into nothing," which is felt but not fully cognized by primitive religious consciousness, e. g. in song, argues Hegel, is wholly explicable within the sphere of speculative thought. Hegel characterizes, perhaps even caricatures Protestantism as "a conscious flight from objectivity" or as "subjectivity holding fast to itself. " And if Hegel is right about this, the question shifts to how - and to what extent - faith is able to elevate itself above its subjectivity, shed all particularity, and thus participate in the universal objective harmony? How might reflectivity move beyond a mere longing for and toward the actual possession of eternity? And how is reflective thought, borrowing a phrase from Heidegger, who seems to have understood the Hegelian project as well as anyone has, "to reflect itself out of this reflectivity" (i. e. , sich aus dieser Reflexion hinauszureflektieren)? Adorno turns it nicely when he suggests, in his Three Studies, "only through reflection can reflective thought get beyond itself" (1993: 73). Answering this question, or this set of questions, i. e. , teaching reflection how to jump over its own shadow, constitutes Hegel's methodological preoccupation at the time of his Jenaer Zeit collaboration with Schelling.
6 Introduction
The speculative philosophy of religion proposed by Hegel if not also by Schelling is dedicated to overcoming the one-sided abstractions inherent in the reflective philosophy of subjectivity on the one hand and cognizing conceptually the unity of the finite and the infinite on the other; that the former is related to - if not identical with - the latter is distinctive to Hegelian thought. According to his 1821 lectures, the philosophy of religion aims at reconciling religion to reason; in short, philosophy articulates conceptually what is already experienced in religion. And in the revised Concept of Religion, Hegel claimed that religious consciousness begins in feeling (1824, 1: 140); thus, from the outset, faith is steeped in interiority. But the interiority of devotion when limited to feeling and representation - i. e. , of the reflective philosophy of subjectivity - is not, argues Hegel,
the highest form of interiority. It is self-determined thinking which has to be recognized as this purest form of knowing. It is in this that science brings the same content to consciousness and thus becomes that spiritual worship which, by systematic thinking, appropriates and comprehends what is otherwise only the content of subjective sentiment or representation (1827b, 1: 143).
Thus, what was originally interior is further internalized by elevating itself into self-determining thinking; this must be done, of course, without losing one's sense of adoration for the Divine. In his "Tu? bingen Fragment," thinking of Kant and Fichte, but closer to Ho? lderlin, Hegel claimed that "the Ideas of reason enliven the whole web of human feeling - their operation penetrates everything, like subtle matter and gives a peculiar tinge to every inclination and impulse" (1793, 511-512). Thus, religious consciousness in its truest form transcends the traditional bifurcation between thinking and feeling. And this, Hegel wants to suggest, would constitute a lasting reconciliation between faith and reason. But how do we get from here to there, from hovering over the corpse of faith and reason to a form of intellectual devotion that is more interior than the interiority of feeling? This question was decisive for Hegel en route from Frankfurt to Jena.
If the resolution of a difficulty constitutes the discovery of the truth, as Aristotle suggests, a judicious assessment of Hegel's reconciliation would depend on a thorough grasp of the difficulty for which the Hegelian answer was intended to serve as a solution. Without attending to the wide range of questions to which Hegel's philosophy of religion is intended to be an answer, the answer itself - cast in the dizzying language of the time
Hegel: Hovering Over the Corpse of Faith and Reason 7
- must appear to us monstrously difficult if not utterly unintelligible. "The task, therefore, of one who lives in another age and wants to appreciate that work correctly, consists precisely in rediscovering the varied information and complexes of ideas which the author assumed to be the natural property of his or her audience" (Parry 1971: 2). This task, the task of criticism, as described by Milman Parry, in his L'e? pithe`te traditionnelle dans Home`re, is daunting at best. But with Hegel, it is worse than daunting. In his Foreword to Hegel's Logic, the Wallace translation, Findlay suggests that:
Hegel is better seen macroscopically than microscopically, even though the latter may be a necessary preliminary to the former: the broad drifts of the dialectic, fixed as to starting-points and goal, do not depend on the minuter eddies that can with some strain be seen in it. One has to let the headaches produced by continuous Bacchantic riot subside into the calm of a more distant, critical vision if one is to profit from the majestic assault of Hegel's genius (Wallace 1975: vii).
I think that Findlay is right about this. And I think that Findlay and Adorno, though they diverge in other ways, are suggesting similar strategies for how to read Hegel. The difficulty, however, for which the following study is meant as a corrective, consists in the proclivity of many casual students of Hegel, especially his critics, to latch onto the latter, i. e. , the macroscopic metaphysical maxims, and dispense with the former. This tendency has led to what I consider to be an egregious misreading of the Hegelian project. I do not propose to build sepulchers to Hegel, nor do I plan to exaggerate his importance, but I am convinced that we have yet to appreciate his work - his philosophical corpus - correctly.
According to Bloom, and substituting philosophy for poetry, philosophical history is "indistinguishable from [philosophical] influence, since strong [philosophers] make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves"(1973/1997: 5). If this thesis can rightly be applied to philosophical history, a scandalous suggestion in itself, it would be more accurate - or at least more fruitful - to view Hegel's early critique of his contemporaries as having less to do with them and more to do with himself. (This in no wise trivializes Hegel's accomplishment. ) Hegel was, borrowing Bloom's adjective, a "strong" philosopher; thus rather than idealizing his influences, by whom he was formed and malformed, Hegel appropriated them for himself. In Faith and Knowledge, Hegel offers a philosophical interpretation of what he then considered the "present state of philosophy. " Rather than merely
8 Introduction
expositing upon or simply rehearsing the thought of his precursors, Hegel reads or interprets them "plastically" with an eye turned toward a speculative "Aufhebung. " To view Hegel's reading of his contemporaries as a misreading, therefore, misses the critical point of the Critical Journal of Philosophy as well as what is most instructive in Hegel's belabored critique of the reflective philosophies of subjectivity.
So while I am certainly interested in the accuracy of Hegel's interpretation of Kant as well as Jacobi and Fichte in his Faith and Knowledge essay, that is by no means my only concern: reading misreading teaches us more about the one misreading than it does about those misread. Strong philosophers, such as Hegel, like Bloom's "strong poets," are never disinterested readers of philosophy, nor are they philosophical critics "qua common readers raised to the highest power. " In the work of their precursors, a strong reader discovers not only their "own rejected thoughts, [which] come back to [them] with a certain alienated majesty," as Emerson put it, but they search also for the place where the precursor shall be overthrown. Hegel, I have discovered, is an apotheosis of philosophical strength. But even if all strong readings were a misreading of a kind, since philosophical reading is all-but-impossible, that is not to say that there are not better and worse readings. On the contrary, recognizing our tendency to misread - whether because we have lost "the varied information and complexes of ideas which the author assumed to be the natural property of his or her audience" or because we recognize that "there is no such thing as a disinterested reader" or even as a means of staking a claim to an intellectual territory - is at the very core of our task of an increasingly more accurate reading of Hegel' philosophical corpus. Although Hegel's philosophy of religion has received a good deal of attention within the past decade, especially in America but also in Germany, the development of Hegel's concept of God from the early Jena essays to the later Berlin lectures - writes Jaeschke in Reason in Religion (1990) - "has not yet been investigated as it should, and it has not infrequently been entirely disregarded. " And while much of the recent scholarship focuses exclusively on the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, which were delivered in Berlin, it was - again Jaeschke, but acknowledged more recently also by Pinkard (2002) and Hodgson (2007) as well as Desmond (2003) and Beiser (2005) - "during the Jena years that Hegel made his weightiest decisions. "
Hegel: Hovering Over the Corpse of Faith and Reason 9
But the debate that Hegel rehearses as if to appropriate in his 1802 manuscript, Faith and Knowledge, is also timeless: it is as old, or as new, as philosophy - and theology - itself. Though the history of the debate reaches back to ancient Greek philosophy, from Heraclitus to the Neo- Platonists, the basic questions that constitute the character of the conflict have a strangely contemporary ring to them. The medieval period is replete with treatises on the notion of double-truths, the truths of reason and the truths of faith, which some viewed as complementary (e. g. , Aquinas) and others viewed as adversarial (e. g. , Averroes, Duns Scotus, and Ockham). The Enlightenment in general and the Deutsche Aufkla? rung in particular was itself fuelled by the dispute between the dictates of reason and the demands of the heart. By the time that Hegel wrote Faith and Knowledge, the philosophy of Kant provided - in spirit if not in letter - the dominant though contested reconciliation of faith and knowledge. The alternatives to Kant's moral theology were pantheism, e. g. , Spinoza or Lessing or Herder, which was the sub rosa doctrine of most heterodox Protestants at the time, and the theology of feeling (e. g. , Jacobi and Schleiermacher). Hegel considered these proposed solutions to be woefully inadequate because they, one and all, but each in their own way, consist in degrading reason as well as deflating faith. Beyond his critique of the prominent faith philosophies of his age, especially Kant and Jacobi and Fichte, which Hegel casts as constituting a dialectical triad, Hegel offers - in Faith and Knowledge - his own version, in nuce, of speculative theology and doctrine of God.
CHAPTER ONE
DER ZEITGEIST
The conflict between faith and reason gave rise to an astonishing number of varied and often ingenious if not ultimately unsatisfactory reconciliations prior to Hegel's remark - in Glauben und Wissen - that the time had finally come to "give philosophy the shape it has always been trying to reach, a shape in which the old conflicts of religion on the one hand and the sciences on the other are suspended once and for all. " In his Faith and Knowledge (1802), an early contribution to the short-lived Kritischer Journal, which he co-edited with Schelling in Jena, more or less in Fichte's stead, Hegel claimed that the 'imperfect philosophies' of his day rendered the conflict as extreme as possible and subsequently assumed the "edifying" role of cutting Gordian knots rather than untangling them. (Five years later, in the Preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel claimed that philosophy must "beware of the wish to be edifying. ") The greatest achievement of that era, the Kantian system, polarized the respective standpoints of faith and knowledge to the extreme. The Kantian philosophy of the first Critique, construed by the faith philosophers as a paragon of the Enlightenment principles, seemed to collapse into Humean skepticism if not solipsism when disencumbered of the Ding an sich or, if the Ding an sich was retained, into dogmatism; but the Critical philosophy was commonly supposed - based on Reinhold's popularist reading of Kant - to do away with both of these. For transcendental or subjective idealists, argues Hegel, according to which we "know a priori of objects only what we produce in them" (Kant 1781: B xviii), the rationality of the world has its source in the knowing subject alone - indeed, quips Hegel, it would seem that the world would implode altogether were it not for the good services of the categories of the understanding. Of the noumenal, the in- itself or the Absolute, following the limitations of transcendental idealism, we know nothing. Our understanding of the real scheme of things, therefore, and strictly speaking, is a matter of faith rather than knowledge. It is against this view that Schelling and Hegel conceived of their objective if not absolute idealism. Hegel also claimed that transcendental criticism is quickly transformed into dogmatism if not Philistinism once it takes the
12 Chapter One
form of a system in Fichte. The rival model of rationality, namely, scientific naturalism (i. e. , the thesis that everything in nature happens according to ineluctable laws), which was often associated with Spinoza, was summarily dismissed as leading to atheism and fatalism. And while there are exceptions to this view, e. g. , Lessing and Herder, this critique of naturalism carried the weight of tradition; indeed, it was practically a matter of protocol to prove one's orthodoxy in the eighteenth century by publicly renouncing Spinozism. The faith philosophers viewed Lessing as a paragon of the Aufkla? rung1; and Lessing, according to Jacobi, as we shall see, was secretly a Spinozist. After a formidable reign, enlightened reason was suffering a severe and painful setback. Though the enlightenment philosophers, including those who developed the critical theory of knowledge, viewed themselves as defending knowledge against the tyranny of religious faith or authority, Hegel argues that it took the brilliance of Kant to disclose the affinities between the finite knowledge and Protestant faith; in both cases, suggests Hegel, for both the reflective philosophers of subjectivity and the faith philosophers of Protestantism, these philosophers exhibit "merely a negative relation to the Absolute. " The alternative to the skepticism or solipsism if not atheism and fatalism inherent in the eudaimonian principles of the enlightenment was the salto mortale of fideism or irrationalism.
And while Hegel's solution is no great secret, namely, that the infinite is not transcendent but rather immanent in the finite, or that "the Absolute is the identity of identity and non-identity," or more simply that while we "usually suppose that the Absolute must lie far beyond, it is precisely what is wholly present," we have tended to neglect the contextual significance of his proposed reconciliation of faith and reason. We have, as a result, in large part lost the philosophical orientation requisite to what Schleiermacher called "reading behind the lines" of the speculative metaphysical systems of post-Kantianism. Laurence Dickey argues convincingly that the Frankfurt school strategy of "going 'back to the text' is misguided, for so much of the intellectual context of what Hegel wrote is unfamiliar to us. " Only after having familiarized oneself with, e. g. , the Pantheism Controversy
1 This term is often used to signify the uniquely German dimension of the Enlightenment;, although committed to the education of the general public (i. e. , to its liberation from superstition, ignorance, and servitude as well as to the cultivation of taste, manners, and reason) and Deism, similar to the Enlightenment outside of Germany, the Aufkla? rung expressed these views, for good or ill, with reference to the distinctively German philosophical tradition, e. g. , often in Liebnizian-Wolffian terms.
? Der Zeitgeist 13
(which began in the Summer of 1783), and how it exercised an influence comparable with the publication of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft (published in May 1781), and the latter not only as the alternative to Hume's skepticism and Leibniz's rationalism, but also with Hamann and Jacobi's irrationalism, and perhaps even Swabian Pietism, can we hope to appreciate the considerable subtlety of the Hegelian reconciliation. We can surely apply to Hegel what Herder once said of Spinoza, namely, that "if you read a philosopher of the last century in the language of contemporary philosophy, then he must needs appear a monster to you. " For this reason, it is important to read Hegel against the backdrop of - at the very least - the most prominent philosophical personalities and problems of this rather remarkable era. Without attempting to provide an exhaustive or even altogether adequate index of influences on Hegel's earliest - i. e. , Jenaer Zeit - philosophical system, which has been a preoccupation of Hegel interpretation since Dilthey, a project culminating in the Jena project, the following pages are intended merely as an introduction to an array of diversely formative influences on Hegel's reconciliation of faith and knowledge. The twenty years that separated the publication of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft and Hegel's Glauben und Wissen essay may well be said to be among the most animated and embittered epochs in the history of western philosophy.
Following the textbook reduction of early nineteenth century German idealism to a dispute over post-Kantian epistemological subtleties, which is an unfair treatment of the cultural movement during the Goethezeit, philosophers at the end of the eighteenth century were faced with a seemingly unavoidable dilemma: rational skepticism (represented more or less by the Kantian and Spinozistic models of rationality) or irrational fideism (represented, though perhaps unfairly, by Jacobi). Rather than supporting faith, as the Enlightenment figures assumed, enlightened reason seemed bent on - as Hegel later remarked - "suffering violence at its own hands. " The unyielding philosophical criticism indicative of the Enlightenment was bound to turn back upon itself, to beg the meta-critical question, and simultaneously violate what Rousseau called the rights of the heart. Pinkard notes parenthetically, when describing the influence of Scottish common sense philosophy on the Popularphilosophen, that "many 'popular philosophers' championed Rousseauian notions of 'nature' and virtue; indeed, it would falsify the whole period to underestimate the influence of Rousseau on German thought during that time" (Pinkard: 89). Hegel did not attend the Kant reading group at Tu? bingen because he was allegedly preoccupied with reading Rousseau. (It is likely that Hegel was
14 Chapter One
also reading Hamann at this point in his education at the Stift. ) Pinkard's admonition, his warning against "falsifying the whole period" by neglecting certain philosophers and fixating on others, is arresting. And Burkhardt, who bemoans our collective proclivity to underestimate the influence of Herder on Hegel, offers a similar admonition when he quips that:
[t]he tendency of most historians to treat eighteenth and nineteenth century Germany thought as . . . a continuous and simple development from Kant through Fichte and Schelling to Hegel . . . has only its simplicity to recommend it, for there is reason to believe that the growth of the late idealism of Schelling and Hegel, and even that of Fichte, becomes fully intelligible only when one relinquishes the notion that Kant is the source from whom all later philosophy flows (1940: 18-19).
With a certain amount of trepidation, I have attempted in the following pages to strike a balance between the admittedly esoteric yet important and the overly simplistic but nevertheless instructive: although I discuss Herder and Hamann as well as Oetinger and Boehme, which is meant as a corrective to the standard reading of Hegel, I confess that I have in large part neglected Rousseau and Schiller as well as Lessing and Goethe. And while I concede that the simplistic story of a philosophical march or dialectical somersault from Kant and Jacobi to Fichte and Schelling has little more than simplicity to recommend it, this is precisely the simple story that Hegel rehearses as if to appropriate in the essay presently under consideration, namely, his 1802 Glauben und Wissen.
1. 1 The Ideal of Hegel's Youth
In a now well-known letter addressed to Schelling, a letter that secured his invitation to Jena in 1800, Hegel wrote that "the ideal of my youthful period was likewise bound to transform itself into the form of reflection, into a system. " In this, writes Harris, "Hegel had come to his point of contact with Schelling" (1972: II, 3). Hegel's earliest theological concerns were anticipated most transparently by Lessing, in the Erziehung des Menschensgeschlects (1785), who claimed that "the development of revealed truths into truths of reason is necessary at all costs" (? 76). Transforming the ideal of his youth into a genuine system is perhaps a fitting epitaph to the Hegelian corpus. The ideal of Hegel's youth, claims Beiser, "was Hegel's organic vision of the world, his concept of the infinite life, which would reconcile the individual to the universe" (2005: 89). And while the transformation continued in earnest long after the
Der Zeitgeist 15
Jenaer Zeit collaboration, the ideal of systemization can be traced back to its ambitious implementation in Hegel's Critical Journal essays (1800 - 1802).
The ideal that Hegel shared with Ho? lderlin, as well as Schelling and Novalis (and also Sinclair), can be traced back to a rarified form of "speculative pietism" indigenous to Wu? rttenberg. The speculative ideal is beholden to hermeticism, from Plotinus and Bruno as well as Peracelsus and Eckhart if not also the Freemasons, but the generalized ideal itself is by no means esoteric. The ideal harkens back ancient Greece, an ideal described in Ho? lderlin's Hyperion, but it alludes also to the kingdom of God as conceived by Swabian Pietism. The task of "uniting ourselves with nature to an infinite whole," which restores the "blessed unity" and "peace of all peace," inspired an entire generation of budding theologians and philosophers in Tu? bingen. The goal of poetry in Ho? lderlin, namely, the disclosure of truth and pure being, is the ideal also of religion (e. g. , Liebe, Systemfragment, and Positiv wird ein Glauben genannt) and philosophy (e. g. , Differenzschrift and Glauben und Wissen) in Hegel between 1800 and 1802. The "One and All" [i. e. , hen kai pan] served as a sacred schrift for Hegel as well as Schelling and Ho? lderlin2 in Tu? bingen; according to Harris, "the watch word was freedom and reason. " But it is not merely the ideal but also the means of achieving the ideal in question that one finds, at least in nuce, in these early essays.
Though he wavered on this, Hegel initially believed that apprehending the infinite whole, whether construed as the Unconditioned or the Absolute, was a "reality beyond all reflection"; for this reason, Hegel claimed in his 1800 Systemfragment, that philosophy - which adheres to discursive logic - "has to stop short of religion" (Nohl 1948: 313). While in Tu? bingen and Berne, and for most of his years in Frankfurt, claims Beiser,
2 In his Hyperion, Ho? lderlin expresses the ideal this way: Non coerceri maximo, contineri minimo, divinum est [Not to be confined by the greatest, yet to be contained in the smallest is divine]. More prosaically expressed, also in the opening section of Hyperion, Ho? lderlin writes: "To be one with all that lives! With these words virtue removes its wrathful armor, the spirit of man lays its scepter aside and all thoughts vanish before the image of the world's eternal unity, just as the rules of the struggling artist vanish before his Urania; and iron fate abdicates its power, and death vanishes from the union of beings, and indivisibility and eternal youth bless and beautify the world" (1797/2008, Benjamin translation: 12).
? 16
Chapter One
Hegel was still in the grip of the common romantic doctrine that all forms of discursive thought are finite and therefore inadequate for the infinite. . . . Hegel further argued that the infinite, the universe as a whole, could be only an object of faith, where faith consisted not simply in belief but also in the feeling for the divine life permeating all things. The only role of philosophy would be to criticize the forms of finitude to make room for faith (2005: 88).
This statement, which Hutchison Stirling calls the 'secret of Hegel,' is - suggests Nohl - "the fountainhead of Hegel's dialectic": "Desperately but as yet unsuccessfully, Hegel gropes [in the Systemfragment] after a method which would understand life by both positing and uniting opposites" (1948: 312-313). But under the magical influence of Ho? lderlin in Frankfurt, who latched onto Fichte's description of intellectual intuition as the exemplar of all subject-object identities, Hegel had a change of mind. In his ber Urteil und Seyn (1795), which he according to legend penned on the flyleaf of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, Ho? lderlin wrote:
Judgment [Urteil] is in the highest and strictest sense the original separation [Ur-teil] of the object and the subject which are most intimately united in intellectual intuition, that separation through which object and subject first become possible, the original division . . . Being expresses the connection of subject and object, where subject and object are not only partly united but so united that no separation at all can be undertaken without violating the essence of that which is to be separated, there and nowhere else can one speak of Being simpliciter, as is the case with intellectual intuition.
The possibility of intellectual intuition, which serves only a regulatory function in Kant's critical philosophy, is an unmediated cognition - a beatific vision - of being simpliciter. Hegel had searched since the time of his Reines Leben zu Denken for a way to think pure being, to apprehend the unity if not identity of the subject and object. For Oetinger, who is representative of Swabian speculative pietism, the ideal or "central cognition" [Zentrallerkenntnis] consisted in what Magee describes - in Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition - as "an unmediated, synoptic vision in which the mind momentarily sees existence through the eyes of God" (2001: 67). The ideal of Hegel's youth was steeped in German mysticism reaching back at least to Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme. Shortly after his death, Ferdinand Bauer argued that "in the entire history of philosophical and theological speculation, nothing is more related and analogous to gnosticism as the newest [i. e. , Hegel's] philosophy of religion" (1835: 24; as quoted in Mitscherling 1997: 143). In Novalis's "Das
Der Zeitgeist 17
Kloster oder der Vorhof" (1802), in Part II of his "Heinrich of Ofterdingen," under the auspices of "die Erfu? llung," which owes much to Boehme and Kabbalahism, we find a similarly poetic description of absolute - or central or revelatory or synoptic or divine-like - cognition or comprehension of the "grosse Weltgemu? th" (1840: 128-9):
Und so das grosse Weltgemu? th
U? berall sich regt und unendlich blu? ht. Alles muss in einander greifen
Eins durch das Andre gedeihn und reifen; Jedes in Allen dar sich stellt
Indem es sich vermischet
Und gierig in ihre Tiefen fa? llt,
Sein eigenthu? mliches Wesen erfrischet, Und tausend neue Gedanken erha? lt.
And so the great heart of the world
Is stirred, and endlessly blooms.
All things must into all others flow, Each through the other thrive and grow. And each in all others represented
Into which, all of them, it mingles
And avidly drops into their depths, Refreshing thus its peculiar essence, And a thousand fresh thoughts invented.
For Schelling, not unlike Novalis, who stressed the role of imagination in cognition, an apprehension - immediate or otherwise - of the Absolute was an exceptionally rare revelation or speculative disclosure reserved for artistic geniuses. On this point, Schelling and Hegel disagreed (Du? sing, 1969). It is through organization, or perhaps through systemicity, which requires its own form of genius, suggests Hegel, that "untruth returns to its own truth. "
The ideal of Hegel's youth is both directly and indirectly influenced by Plato's theory of forms, especially the doctrine of truth as recollection and the dialectical method. (Plato enjoyed a significant renaissance in Germany toward the end of the eighteenth century. ) In Tu? bingen, speculative Pietism was replete with metaphysical Platonism in various stages of its sizable heritage: from Plato to Plotinus and hermeticism to medieval mysticism, especially Eckhart, from Spinoza to Herder, from Luther and Boehme to Reuchlin, and all this in the hands of Swabian
18 Chapter One
religious societies in general and, in particular, theologians such as Fredrich Christoph Oetinger (1702 - 82). 3
A friend of Schelling's family, Oetinger was - by most estimates, writes Stoeffler - "the most original theologican of the eighteenth century in Wu? ttemberg and perhaps in all of Germany. "4 Shortly after entering the Tu? bingen Stift, Oetinger discovered the speculative theology of Jacob Boehme; but he was influenced also by a circle of Jewish Kabbalists. 5 Opposed to the mechanistic materialism and the rationalism typical of the enlightenment, Oetinger espoused a Boehmean vitalism in which God is conceived as "an eternal desire for self-revelation. " Elsewhere: "The 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" (Hanratty: 314). This Oetingerian formula exerted considerable influence on Hegel's thought, it seems, and not only in his early theological essays; in the Enzyklopa? die der philosophischen Wissenschaften, initially published in 1817 and revised in 1827, so clearly within the scope of his mature thought, Hegel claims that: "God is God only insofar as He knows Himself; moreover, His self-knowledge is man's self-consciousness and the human knowledge of God, which moves on so as to become man's self-knowledge in God" (? 564; also see Fackenheim 1967: 191 ff. ). The spirit of the absolute, or the absolute spirit, is what Oetinger called an Intensum "in which the whole is immanent in every part a complex whole" (Magee: 69). The complex and unified whole, suggests Oetinger, which is the spirit of God, is greater than the sum of its parts. The problem of how to understand the whole without dissecting it, or how to observe something without distorting it, or how to analyze the aggregate parts without neglecting the complex if not dynamic set of relations that unify them, whether teleologically or otherwise, constituted something along the lines of a philosophical if not also poetic preoccupation at the Stift in Tu? bingen. 6
3 See Jensen, "The Theological Foundations of Hegel's Phenomenology" in Heythrop Journal of Philosophy and Religion, Volume 50, Issue 2 , pp. 181 - 360 (March 2009)
4 Stoeffler, German Pietism, 107.
5 See Magee, "The Sorcerer's Apprenticeship," 64 ff. .
6 The preface to Ho? lderlin's Hyperion provides a literary description of this problem: "Wer bloss an meiner Pflanze reicht, der kennt sie nicht, und wer sie pflu? ckt, bloss, um daran zu lernen, kennt sie auch nicht. Die Auflo? sung der Dissonanzen in einem gewissen Charakter is weder fu? r das blosse Nachdenken,
? Der Zeitgeist 19
"Das Wahre ist das Ganze," i. e. , that "the true is the whole," the well- known passage from the Preface to the Phenomenology (1807M: 11), may well allude to Oetinger's conceptual ideal of a "Zentrallerkenntnis": "The truth is the whole," wrote Oetinger, and "when one finally receives this total, synoptic vision of the truth, it matters not whether one begins by considering this part or that. "7 This Zentrallerkenntnis of the Absolute is intimately bound together with "sensus communis,"8 in Oetinger, anticipating the dialogical principle in Hegel, which might be generally though inadequately described as "an unmediated cognition" [unmittelbare Erkenntnis], at the very core of our being, of our underlying unity with God and other persons - "a state of faculty that lies beyond the run-of-the- mill distinctions made by consciousness, including the distinction between consciousness and the world" (Magee: 67; also see Sigrid Grossmann, 1979: 101 ff. ). One of Oetinger's students, Philipp Matthaeus Hahn (1739 - 90), was acquainted with Herder and also, it seems likely, with Schelling and Ho? lderlin. Hegel's early theological works, if not also the 'ideals of his youth,' are "alive with the sort of issues and questions that were characteristic of Wu? rtemberg Pietism" (Magee: 71). 9 A parish clergyman
noch fu? r die leer Lust" [Those who merely sniff the scent of my plant do not know it, nor those who pluck it solely for the sake of learning about it. The resolution of dissonances in a particular individual is accomplished neither by restive reflection nor empty desire. ].
7 Oetinger, Sa? mtliche Schriften, vol 5, ed Karl Chr. Eberh. Ehmann (Stuttgart: Steinkopf), 45.
8 Following Oetinger, sensus communis "is concerned only with thing that all men see before them, things that hold an entire society together, things that are concerned as much with truths and statements as with the arrangements and patterns comprised in statements" (quoted in Gadamer, 23; Magee, 67). This description fits nicely with the aims of Faith and Knowledge as well as the Phenomenology.
9 Though Hegel rarely makes explicit reference to the Kabbalah, certain portions of the Book of Zohar are not so far removed from the ideal of his youth: "And when these two, soul [nefesh] and spirit [ruah], have duly readied themselves, they are worthy to receive the 'supersoul' [neshamah], resting in turn upon the throne of the spirit [ruah]. The supersoul stands preeminent, and not to be perceived. There is throne upon throne, and for the highest a throne. A study of these grades of the soul yields an understanding of the higher wisdom; and it is in such a fashion that wisdom alone affords the linking together of a number of mysteries. " The influence of Jewish philosophy, especially mysticism, from the Kabbalah through Miamonides to Spinoza, Mendellsohn as well as Lessing, on German thought is not often enough discussed. Leibniz, as an example, was thoroughly well-versed in Maimonides's Guide to the Perplexed. Moses Maimonides was committed to reconciling faith and philosophy as well as presenting religious content in
? 20 Chapter One
in Wu? rttemberg, known not only for his popular sermons (published as Evangelische Rauchwerk in 1753) and prayer books but also for his utopian writings (e. g. , Die gu? ldene Zeit in 1759), Oetinger was certainly influential on the Tu? bingen Stift10; but it does seem possible, as some scholars insist, that Hegel was not directly exposed to Oetinger's teachings at that time. 11 But even if Hegel did not directly encounter the writings of Oetinger at Tu? bingen, which seems unlikely, he was quite likely to have been familiar - at least indirectly, through Ho? lderlin or Schelling - with Oetinger's doctrines by the time that he wrote the Phenomenology. 12 Opposed to the mechanistic materialism and the rationalism typical of the enlightenment, Oetinger espoused Bo? hmean vitalism in which God is conceived as 'an eternal desire for self-revelation' [eine ewige Begierde
philosophical form. Hegel considered Golgotha and Scheblimini (1784), Hamann's critique of Mendelssohn, to be more significant than his more celebrated Metacritique of Purism of Reason (1784), which was aimed at Kant. If the religious dimension of Hegel's thought consists in synthesizing faith and philosophy by means of retaining the content of faith while modifying its form, as Fackenheim among others suggests, and if this strategy leads to something along the lines of panentheism, Hegel's strategy was anticipated by medieval Jewish philosophy. Oetinger's fundamental "cosmic processes" are drawn explicitly with Kabbalism, including 'expansion' [Ausbreitung, identified with the fourth sephirah, both Hesed and Gedulah] and 'contraction' [Sta? rke, identified with the fifth, Gevurah] (see Magee: 66 ff. ). And in its poetic expression, the interlude between the "Expectation" and "Fulfillment" in Novalis' Frederick von Ofterdingen is replete with references to the Kabbalah and related hermetic traditions.
10 Nicholas Hope, German and Scandinavian Protestantism 1700 - 1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 193.
11 Brecht and Sandberger argue - in 'Hegels Begegnung mit der Theologie im Tu? binger Stift: Eine neue Quelle fu? r die Studienzeit Hegels' - that Hegel was unfamiliar with and indeed not at all influenced by Schwa? bian Pietism in general or Oetinger's theological teachings in particular (Hegel-Studien, Bd. 5, Bonn 1969, 48 ff. ). Meinhard Prill, however, suggests that the ideas of Oetinger, as well as Fricker and Hahn 'constituted an Alltagswissen in Wu? rtemberg' (Bu? rgerliche Alltagswelt, 13).
12 Schelling was certainly familiar with the teachings of Oetinger by 1806 (see Plitt, Aus Schellings Leben in Briefen, 2 Bde. , Leipzig 1869-1870, Bd, II, 201). For more on the question of Oetinger's influence on Hegel, see Ernst Benz (1983, Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy) and Robert Schneider (1938, Schellings und Hegels schwa? bishe Geistesahnen); also Hayden - Roy, 'New and Old Histories: The Case of Ho? lderlin and Wu? rtemberg Pietism,' Modern Languages and Literatures, Department of German Language and Literature Papers, University of Nebraska - Lincoln (1992).
? Der Zeitgeist 21
sich zu offenbaren]. 13 The underlying unity if not identity between the finite and the infinite, in Oetinger as well as Boehme, is explicable in terms of the 'ewige Selbstbewegung' [eternal self-movement] - i. e. , the 'Zusammenziehung' [contraction or inhalation] and 'Wiederausdehnung' [re-expansion or exhalation] - of God. 14
How does one comprehend this infinitely complex if not incomprehensible whole? And how does one grasp 'the truth that is the whole' or 'that finitude which is infinity'? Oetinger suggests, and Hegel follows his lead, that the preferred method is generative and consists in grasping - through familiarity - the various stages of that organism's unfolding, as well as the vitalistic or teleological logic by which varied developmental stages emerge 'as plants do from their seeds. '15 Hegel's 'Das Wahre ist das Ganze,' the well-known passage from the Preface to the Phenomenology discussed at the outset of the present essay, sends the student of theology back to Oetinger's central insight, mentioned earlier, that "[t]he truth is the whole; when one finally receives this total, synoptic vision of the truth, it matters not whether one begins by considering this part or that. "16 It certainly seems plausible to suggest that this Zentrallerkenntnis contributed, directly or indirectly, to 'the ideal of [Hegel's] youth'; it also seems possible that Oetinger's doctrines secretly influenced, in various ways at different stages in his own philosophical development, the entire Hegelian system. (Though indirectly, Oetinger's teaching on Boehme may well have exercised also an influence on Hegel's ambivalent disenchantment with Spinoza. 17) Oetinger's Zentrallerkenntnis resurfaces, though philosophically transfigured, in Hegel's 'Preface' to the Phenomenology (1807: 11-2):18
13 Oetinger, Biblisches und emblematishces Woerterbuch (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1969), as quoted in Magee, 65. Also see Jensen (2009), ? The Theological Foundations of the Hegelian System. "
14 Oetinger, Die Lehrtafel der Prinzessin Antonia, Texte zur Geschichte des Pietismus, Berlin: New York (1977), 128.
15 Magee, 67; Priscilla A. Hayden-Roy, "A Foretaste of Heaven": Friedrich Ho? lderlin in the Context of Wu? rttemberg Pietism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 45. 16 Oetinger, Sa? mtliche Schriften, vol 5, ed Karl Chr. Eberh. Ehmann (Stuttgart: Steinkopf), 45, as quoted in Magee 67.
17 See Cosmann, Peggy (1998). "Der Einfluss Friedrich Christoph Oetingers auf Hegels Abrechnung mit Spinoza" in the Zeitschrift fu? r Religions- und Geistesgeschichte, Volume 50, Number 2, pp. 115-136 (22).
18 For Oetinger, the term "phenomenology" refers to the study of the 'divine system of relations' (see Benz, 1958, Der Christliche Kabbala, Zurich: Rhein V erlag).
? 22
Chapter One
The true is the whole. 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 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.
And while this interpretative disagreement continues apace, Gerald Hanratty makes a convincing case that "commentators have recently focused attention again on the affinities between [Hegel's] speculation and the Gnostic systems of the second century and have thus contributed to a clearer appreciation of the nature and scope of the Hegelian synthesis (1984: 25).
1. 2 Hamann and the crisis of reason
Hegel was well versed in the thought of Johann Georg Hamann (1730- 1788). According to Goethe, "Hegel often made mention of Hamann in our discussions, indeed, he was able to recite lengthy passages committed to heart, displaying an intimate familiarity with the work of Hamann. Hegel's skills as a critic have always been excellent. " Hegel also wrote a glowing review of the first edition of Hamanns Schriften (see Werke, XI, 275). The post-Enlightenment critique of reason - the challenge to its authority, universality, impartiality, and its ability to justify morality, religion, and state - was initiated by Hamann and sustained, in large part, by F. H. Jacobi (1743-1819). Hamann, who many consider to be the father of the Sturm und Drang, was one of the first to champion the metaphysical significance of art, the irreducibility of cultural differences, to stress the historical dimension of rationality, the significance of language for thought, and even to suggest that reason was - not unlike Swedenborg - directed by the subconscious. Hamann was influenced by both Luther, who claimed that reason was a whore19 and that faith transcends all criticism, and Hume. Hamann refers to Hume as "a Saul among prophets and one who truly understands the need for faith [Glauben]. " While radically opposed to one another in other ways, Luther and Hume agree that the foundation of our knowledge of ourselves and the external world was belief [Glauben] - that is, "something for which there could be no a priori reasons," something to which everything else "could in the end be reduced" (Berlin, 31). And while Hamann's usage of Glaube is admittedly opaque, his description of how faith occurs or emerges is in some ways
19 Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. (Weimar: Herman Boehlaus Nachfolger, 1914), Band 51: 126.
? Der Zeitgeist 23
worse than opaque: Hegel claimed that Hamann's writings were "an enigma, indeed an exhausting one" (SW: XI, 226). In general, though, Hamann suggests that "faith happens for reasons just as little as tasting and sensing do. " In this, Hamann sounds similar to Pascal, who claimed that "la coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas" [the heart has reasons that reason will never understand].
Hamann's Sokratische Denkwu? digkeit (1759) might well be considered the first sustained attack on the Aufkla? rung. Addressed to the "little Socrates" of Ko? nigsberg, i. e. , to Kant, and tangentially perhaps to Mendelssohn, Hamann argues - implementing the themes mentioned above - for the limitation of reason,20 symbolized by the Socratic confession of ignorance, and a purer form of knowledge captured in an intuitional insight into pure Being. This "intuitional insight" is what Hamann in other texts rather obscurely refers to as faith, i. e. , not a belief per se but rather an experience or sensation [Empfindung] which provides a higher and non-discursive form of knowledge. According to his Aesthetica in nuce, which was influential on both Schiller and later Schelling, the intuitional ideal is enacted by artistic geniuses who, shunning all forms of abstraction, capture the wholeness as well as the fluidity and richness of experience: "Oh, for a muse like the fire of the goldsmith," writes Hamann, "and like the soap of the washerwoman" (Werke, II, 207). Hamann's Sokratische Denkwu? digkeit and Kreuzzu? ge eines Philologen were, writes Beiser, "a defense of the integrity and irreducibility of religious and aesthetic experiences. Such experiences consist of bursts of inspiration, surges of feeling, flashes of insight, Hamann argued, so that they cannot be directed, explained, or assessed according to the norms of reason" (1992: 194-195).
Although Hamann was instrumental in the publication of Kant's first Kritik, arranging for a publisher, and was perhaps the first to read it, he was convinced from the outset that the critical philosophy exhibited all the vices of the Aufkla? rung. Hamann's so-called "metakritik," initially circulated in 1784 but not published until 1800, has been said to have a "strong claim to being the starting point of post-Kantian philosophy"
20 Hamann is arguing here against a particular sort of reason, namely, against the discursive and abstract posture of, say, a theorem. This sort of reason is, for him, wholly helpless in establishing the existence or non-existence of anything; in this sense, Hamann should be sharply distinguished from an irrationalist like Jacobi, who believes that reason can, and in fact does, demonstrate or otherwise establish atheism, fatalism and nihilism.
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(Beiser, 1987: 38). Hamann may well have been the first to reprimand Kant for his residual dualisms: e. g. , between the noumenal and phenomenal, understanding and sensibility, a priori concepts and forms of intuition. Hamann's critique is part and parcel with his more general critique of the Aufkla? rung, namely, that it conceives rationality in terms of arbitrary and artificial abstractions, i. e.