No More Learning

For some, Spinozism was embraced because it was the singular philosophical school of that period that maintained the optimistic conviction that, contra Kant, the nature of God and the real world could adequately be known by reason. For others, Spinoza represented the finest fruits of political liberalism: he defended as well as demonstrated religious tolerance, he promoted freedom of speech if not democracy, and he insisted on the separatism of church and state. Beiser claims that most advocates were "unhappy children of the Protestant Reformation. " While disillusioned with the direction of the movement broadly construed, these unhappy revisionary theologians within the romantic movement wished to remain true to their Reformist ideals, namely, the universal priesthood of all believers, freedom of conscience, and the importance of an immediate relationship with God. "In embracing Lessing's hen kai pan," claims Beiser, "the romantics were also affirming the radical tradition of which he was an heir" and "they too forecast the great event that the radical reformers had always prophesied: the second Reformation" (1992: 243). While historical criticism certainly undermined the reliability of Scripture, alternative sources of revelation were sought under the auspices of pantheism. Indeed, Heine claimed that pantheism was the "secret religion of Germany" (1972: VIII, 175); as Beiser expresses it, in The Fate of Reason, "[p]antheism was thus the secret credo of the heterodox Lutheran" (1993: 52). An alternative explanation of Spinoza's popularity in Germany toward the end of the eighteenth century is to be found in the sheer strength of personalities who took up his cause: e. g. , Lessing, Herder and Goethe. These figures were bound together by a distinct distaste if not distain for the dogmatic rationalism of the then-contemporary "school-philosophers" and a general dissatisfaction with ecclesiastical answers proffered to what many considered to be urgent religious problems, especially the problem of evil and question of freedom. Still another inducement can be discovered in the unacceptable shortcomings of the alternatives to Spinozism, for example, the swelling tide of irrationalism on the one hand and the critical philosophy on the other.
And while the Glaubensphilosophen - e. g. , Hamann, Lavater, and Herder, at least during his Bu? ckeburg period, as well as Jacobi and Wizenmann - were central to the inspirational economy of the Sturm und Drang, the movement as a whole was relatively suspicious of those who seemed to insist upon orthodoxy as the object of that faith. Although weary of the "school dust" of rationalism, those who participated in the
Der Zeitgeist 27
Sturm und Drang were equally disheartened by the restraints imposed upon them by the Critical Philosophy. Spinozism seemed to provide a viable middle path between a discredited if not defeated Biblical Theism and the seemingly ruthless, bald atheism and mechanical materialism of, say, Holbach's Syste`me de la Nature ou Des Loix du Monde Physique et du Monde Moral (1770). The pantheism debate is perhaps best understood as concatenation of often-conflicting symbols. To one group it was a symbol for the consequences of all rational inquiry and criticism: If Lessing, a shining star in the Aufkla? rung, was exposed as a Spinozist, every self- respecting Aufkla? rer would have to concede that reason was heading for the abyss. To another faction, Spinoza shone as the symbol if not the patron saint of the extreme left who resisted the authoritative dogmatism of the academic and ecclesiastical establishment. To yet another group Spinoza was symbolic of the anti-skepticial conviction that God and the real world were knowable and that scientific knowledge leads to a greater comprehension of the Deity. The pantheism debate served as an occasion for drawing the lines between those Glaubensphilosophen who defended theological orthodoxy as well as political conservatism and those who identified instead with the mystical pantheistic tradition that reaches back in Germany at least to Jakob Boehme (1575 - 1624) if not Meister Eckhart (1260 - 1327). "Like the radical Aufkla? rung," claims Beiser, "this tradition is vitalistic, humanistic, and pantheistic; yet it also insists on the value of religious experience" (1996: 205; also Magee 2001: 67).
1. 4 Herder's Vitalism
The pantheism debate served as a convenient inducement for the exposition of J. G. Herder's system, which is indebted to Shaftesbury and Leibniz but also - and above all others - "the holy Spinoza. " Herder was a student of both Hamann and Kant, who personified the two main currents of intellectual life in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century, i. e. , the Sturm und Drang and the Aufkla? rung, respectively, in Ko? nigsberg; eventually, and to varying degrees, Herder was denounced by both Hamann and Kant. (Hamann allegedly condemned Herder's Gott, einige Gespra? che, on his deathbed. ) But Herder's influence on Hegel was, writes Jaeschke, "early as well as steady and strong" (2004: 168 ff. ). "If we were to describe in a word how Herder adopted and assimilated Hamann's thought," suggests Beiser, "then we would say that he secularized it" (1992: 195). And while this may be true of Herder's early writings, it seems less true of his Aelteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts. Herder's writings emphasize throughout an aesthetic posture toward God, construed
28 Chapter One
as immanent in Nature, the reconciliation of all oppositions (e. g. , between God and the world, mind and body, belief and reason), a unified or monistic world view, and they also tend to treat history as the revelation of God in the process of the universe. Although his early works - especially those of the Bu? ckeburg period (i. e. , 1771 - 1776) - are stamped with the spirit of the Sturm und Drang, his later works tend to emphasize the importance of reason, especially to the knowledge of God. "He would misunderstand humanity," writes Herder, "who sought only to taste and feel the Creator without seeing or apprehending Him" (Werke, V: 163). Following Herder's Gott, einige Gespra? che [God, Some Conversations],
[The artist] had to be content with fusing various symbols. The abstract truth gives them to me as necessary determinations of the conception itself. . . You see, Philolaus, the advantage of such scientific formulas. They clarify and turn into general laws, and indeed wherever possible into quantitative terms, what the ordinary understanding dimly but intuitively apprehends in everyday experience. Thereby judgments attain a definite surety and a universal application which subsequently can be readily followed in every particular instance.
This text shows the influence of Spinoza on someone who had earlier claimed that "[i]f we weaken ourselves through abstraction, separate and split our senses, and shred our whole feeling into little threads which no longer fell anything wholly and purely, naturally the great sense of God, the Omnipresent in the world must thereby become weakened and dulled" (A? lteste Unkunde des Menschengeschlechts, Su. VI, 273). The Divine substance in Spinoza was considered by most of Herder's contemporaries to be a mere abstraction and empty conception. (Mendelssohn had argued, in his Morganstunden, that Spinoza's God was merely a collective name for the various extensions and thoughts of the phenomenal world. ) And it was one of the central goals of the Conversations to demonstrate that Spinozism can be made consistent with itself, that it can be liberated from its insipient Cartesianism as a means of revealing its inner essence, and that the new advances of science and speculation - especially that of J. H. Lambert and J. N. Tetens - rendered it possible to express that inner truth with greater significance and consistency (Cassier 1932: 172 ff. ).
The first part of the Fourth Conversation, which Herder directs against Jacobi's interpretation of Spinoza and in defense of Lessing, would be subsequently echoed - and in a similar polemical tone - by Hegel in the second section of his Glauben und Wissen. Herder challenges Jacobi's claim that Spinoza's system was closed, that his God is simply a "Naught
Der Zeitgeist 29
and an abstract idea," and that the knowledge of God through the exercise of our rational powers is impossible. (Following Herder's appropriation of Spinoza, God is "the most real and active One"; and if there is no need to resort to a salto mortale, asks Herder, alluding to Jacobi, then why take one? ) Herder also objects to Jacobi's usage of Glaube [faith] and Vernunft [reason], calling them "unusual" and "confused"; once these confusions are cleared away, he claims that the central truth behind the Jacobian project is one that all philosophers are agreed, namely, that all philosophizing must presuppose external existence and internal laws of thought. And while Herder was eager to defend Spinoza - and thus Lessing - against the charge of atheism, which consisted in transforming the idea of substance into a locus of forces, magnetic or otherwise, Herder was inspired by Kant's analysis of organicity and natural purpose in the Critique of Judgment (see especially ? ? 64, 76); this creative combination of Spinoza's monism and Kant's theory of teleological explanation was influential on Herder as well as Hegel.
Herder's thesis concerning the dynamism or organicity of nature is especially relevant to our understanding of Schelling's Naturphilosophie; but it is relevant also to Hegel's reading of Spinoza in Glauben und Wissen. According to Herder, the universe is best understood as a unified complex of forces, all of which are considered the activity of God construed as "the infinite, primal, and original power" or the "force of all forces"; moreover, Herder's God, Who "is but One," operates according to "inherent, eternal, and necessary laws" (1940: 123). The continuous and infinitely dense Whole, avers Herder, "lives many lives"; this early formulation of an all-embracing Spirit, which contains nature as well as persons, constitutes the ever present ideal of the Tu? bingen years: the hen kai pan. 23 The all-embracing monistic ideal that constituted the vital spirit
23 Walter Jaeschke claims - as does Henry Harris - "that Herder had a steady and strong influence on Hegel during the late 1780s and into the 1790s" ("Das Nictige in seiner ganzen La? nge und Breite - Hegels Kritik der Reflexionsphilosophie," Hegel-Jahrbuch, 2004: 165). The early ideal, which emerged in Tu? bingen with Ho? lderlin and Schelling, inspired by the monistic principle of the hen kai pan, finds precedent not only in Lessing but also Herder; but Hegel is also beholden to Herder for many of the leading ideas expressed in his early essays, especially "Liebe" (1797/8) and "Dem Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal" (1798- 1800). The title of the second of these early essays is but a slight variation on Herder's own "Vom Geist des Christentums" (1798); Hegel is also influenced by Herder in terms of the the central theme of the essay, namely, the relationship of ancient Judaism to Christianity.
? 30 Chapter One
of the Spinozism was mitigated by the dualistic remnants of his inherited Cartesianism. The remaining dualistic residue of the 'real distinction' could now, suggests Herder, drawing on Leibniz and emerging paradigm of the natural sciences, be resolved in terms of substantial and organic forces, vis via, which Herder holds to be the dynamic essence of both mind and matter. "Thus the knot is loosed, and the gold it contained lies before us. However our frail reason may divide it up," claims Herder, "it is still infinite and the same" (1940: 123-4).
The organic Weltanschauung inspired an entire generation of thinkers at the close of the eighteenth century: beyond Leibniz, who is sometimes viewed as the father of Naturphilosophie, there was also Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel, Ho? lderlin and Schelling. Nature is transformed from an indifferent mechanism, i. e. , dead extension, and into something active, organic, and alive. It could be argued that Herder is misinterpreting each of the participants involved in this new found synthesis, both Spinoza and Leibniz, but it seems more likely that Herder understood better than anyone the compromise that he proposed. (Herder's capacity for assimilation and synthesis is quite remarkable. ) Herder's Neo-Spinozism24 - and his willingness to radically transform previous traditions for the purposes and needs of the present - was significantly influential on Schelling as well as Hegel during the Jenaer Zeit. Schellingian musings about the dynamism of nature, in his On the World Soul (1799) and Of Human Freedom (1809), which provides a descriptive paradigm drawn from the life of organic beings, need not be considered as emerging solely or even primarily from Kant's Critique of Judgment; it could in fact be considered to be representative of the intellectual outlook of an entire generation. Although Herder was critical of the Aufkla? rung, because it failed to achieve its goal of Bildung (i. e. , the education of the people) and because it was used to justify oppression or imperialism, he "could never bring himself to join the ranks of the anti-Aufkla? rer, whether they were orthodox Lutherans or the pietist Schwa? rmer" (Beiser 1992: 205).
And while Hegel, not unlike Schelling, was attracted to Spinoza's monism as well as his theory of divine immanence and intellectual love of God, Hegel was in other ways repelled by Spinoza (e. g. , his geometric method and arch-mechanism). But as we shall see, Hegel was keen to
24 By Neo-Spinozism here, I am thinking of the Romantic transformation - influenced surely by figures like More and Schaftsbury - of Spinoza's views on the Universe and God, i. e. , monism, divine immanence, the dynamic and evolutionary understanding of the universe, et cetera.
? Der Zeitgeist 31
defend Spinoza against what he considered to be an egregious misreading by Jacobi. Hegel's reading or appropriation of Spinoza is also important as a way of distinguishing Hegel from Schelling during the Jenaer Zeit. Shortly before Hegel arrived in Jena, Schelling declared his Spinozism in no uncertain terms. But for Hegel, the significance of Spinoza lay more in the formulation of the ancient problem of the one and the many, i. e. , the origin of finitude or the necessity of contingency, than in the proposed solution. Similar to Spinoza, who considered finitude to be a figment of the imagination, Schelling argued - in his Darstellung (1801) - that the absolute consists in a pure or undifferentiated identity. But for Hegel, contra Spinoza and Schelling, an adequate solution to the perennial problem of philosophy would demonstrate the necessity of contingency, i. e. , that the absolute must include finitude and differentiation; by the time he wrote Glauben und Wissen, Hegel believed that the infinite both consumed and consummated finitude. As a differentiated unity, the identity of identity and non-identity, Hegel's conception of the absolute is deeply indebted to Herder's organic or vitalistic construal of life itself.
1. 5 The Critical Philosophy and her Critics
The "Critical Philosophy," associated with Kant but variously reformulated by his successors, was slowly but steadily gaining admirers within the final two decades of the eighteenth century. The early reception to the Critique of Pure Reason, which was published in 1781, was ambivalent. It was seven months before the first review, the so-called Go? ttigen Review, appeared anonymously; Kant's scathing reply to his unnamed critic, in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), deterred all other prospective critics for the next two years. Apropos the reception of the critical philosophy among the general public, Schultz wrote that they saw it as a sealed book, consisting in nothing but "hieroglyphics. " It was to this reception that Kant blustered, again in the Prolegomena, that the first Critique had been "honored by silence. " But this was merely the proverbial calm before the storm. The critics of the Critical Philosophy drew courage from, if nothing else, the sheer vastness of their numbers. There were in fact entire journals devoted exclusively to the criticism of Kant (e. g. , Feder's Philosophische Bibliothek and Eberhard's Philosophische Magazin). The Popularphilosophen,25 for
25 George di Giovanni offers the following concise description of the Popularphilosopie, though with the proviso that the movement was "just as complex a phenomenon as the Aufkla? rung itself" in Freedom and Religion in Kant
? 32 Chapter One
example, whilst otherwise committed to the authority of reason, were among the bitterest critics of Kant. Although the Popularphilosophen were divided in their philosophical loyalties, some tending more toward Locke's empiricism and others in the direction of Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalism, they were one and all disappointed with Kant's transcendental compromise; the former were disappointed by the vestiges of a priori knowledge, while the latter were equally distressed by the denial or restriction of that same knowledge. In the end, the early enemies of irrationalism became - in their collaboration against the tide of Kantianism - her unwitting ally.
The long anticipated reception of the Critical Philosophy lay largely in its promise to provide the suffering alliance between faith and reason with a desperately needed new foundation, viz. , in Kant's doctrine of a rational faith (Vernunftglaube). It was precisely this aspect of the Critical Philosophy that Karl Reinhold (1757-1823) emphasized to the public, making it, in his Briefe u? ber die kantische Philosophie (1786), a bona fide "sensation. " Following di Giovanni: "Reinhold was the first to appeal to Kant's new critique of reason as a medium for reconciling the otherwise- intractable opposition between philosophers and believers evidenced by Jacobi's book [namely, Letters to Mendelssohn on Spinoza (1785)]" (1997: 212). And while Kant had hinted at his doctrine of a rational faith in the first Kritik, e. g. , in ? 3 of the "Canon of Pure Reason," and though he promised to present it in its polished form in his second Kritik, the argument was rehearsed between these two works, namely, in his essay for the Berliner Monatsschift titled "Was heisst: Sich im Denken orientieren" (1786). This essay, the title of which alludes to Mendelssohn's celebrated method of orientation, allowed Kant to distinguish or otherwise distance himself simultaneously from Mendelssohn as well as Jacobi, both of whom - thought Kant - tended to denigrate reason.
Moses Mendelssohn's (1729 - 1786) defense of reason, which includes his solution to the faith and reason debate, and his proposed 'method of orientation' appeared in his Morganstunden (1785); at least indirectly, Mendelssohn also offers a defense of the metaphysical tradition of Leibniz
and His Immediate Successors: "The popular philosophers were the self-professed boosters of the Enlightenment, the vigilant defenders of the latter's program of rationalization of all things social and religious in the face of what they took to be the ever-present but hidden forces of 'obscurantism'. . . " (2005: 37); for Reinhold's account of Popularphilosophie, which he contrasts with the goals of the Illuminati, see his 1791 Fundament, pp. 44 ff. .
? Der Zeitgeist 33
and Wolff. Mendelssohn's defense of reason shifts quickly from a formal analysis of judgment into a defense of the Aufkla? rer ideal of objectivity and the liberalism espoused in his earlier Jerusalem. In the seventh chapter, Mendelssohn attacks J. B. Basedow's notion of a "duty to believe" [Glaubenspflicht]26 and insists that it is precisely the business of metaphysics to demonstrate the truth of our moral and religious beliefs; any other standard, suggests Mendelssohn, will eventually if not inevitably lead to superstition, intolerance and fanaticism. But in his David Hume u? ber den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus (1787), Jacobi claims that this dogmatic insistence on truth as the sole justification for belief is viciously circular. And while Mendelssohn does not, strictly speaking, concede the Jacobian dilemma between faith and reason, he does discuss the possibility of a conflict between common sense [Gemeinsinn] and speculative philosophy. For Mendelssohn, common sense and speculation emerge from the same faculty, namely, reason: but whereas the former is shaped discursively, the latter is arises intuitively. When speculation diverges from common sense, suggests Mendelssohn, it must return to the crossroads at which they parted and discover the error of its ways. And while it is quite often, perhaps even typically, speculation that is to blame, Mendelssohn admits that common sense - because of its carelessness - is also prone to error. This privileged status of common sense prompted Kant to say that Mendelssohn had betrayed his alliance to reason; along similar lines, Wizenmann observed that Mendelssohn's belief in common sense was not altogether unlike Jacobi's belief in faith. The remainder of Morganstunden consists in an effort to demonstrate that reason does not, in the end, or at least not necessarily, lead to the fatalistic and atheistic conclusions associated with Spinoza.
The central contention of Kant's "Was heisst: Sich im Denken orientieren? " consists in his denial that reason is a faculty of metaphysical knowledge, per se, i. e. , a theoretical faculty suited to comprehending the unconditioned; rather, suggests Kant, reason is a practical faculty which prescribes the unconditioned as the regulative ideal or principle of all conduct. It is in this sense, then, that Kant can agree with Jacobi that 'knowledge cannot justify faith' and also with Mendelssohn that 'reason must be the justification of faith. ' Kant's Vernunftglaube is not knowledge, but belief [Fu? rwahrhalten]. Faith is subjectively sufficient because it is
26 This position, which in some ways reminds one of Kant's, claims that insofar as a given principle is necessary to moral conduct or happiness, albeit inadequately demonstrated on purely rational grounds, we nevertheless have a duty [Pflicht] to believe it (i. e. , to conduct ourselves as though it were true).
? 34 Chapter One
derived from the universality and necessity of the categorical imperative, but objectively insufficient because it is not based upon knowledge proper. Hegel's professor of logic and metaphysics at Tu? bingen, Johann Friedrich Flatt, for example, insisted that Kant's "moral faith amounts to blind faith. " In his Briefe u? ber den moralishen Erkenntnisgrund der Religion u? berhaupt, und besonders in Bezeihung auf die Kantische Philosophie, Flatt argued:
Should you opt for this kind of faith, you might indeed be able to hold to it, provided you are comfortable with it, and stand by Kant's reassurance that it is legitimate for the righteous to say: I will that God exist. But then you must not ask me to approve of a system that, short of falling into contradiction, can leave nothing for the most important of truths but blind faith, or to believe that such a system is of greater use than all what has been done in speculative philosophy over half and two thousand years (1789: 72).
Kant attempts to draw a very fine line between the alleged fanaticism or irrationalism of Jacobi, whom he asks to consider "where [his] attacks on Reason [were] leading," and the dogmatism of the Berliners. So construed, the contested authority of reason is a burden which the critical philosophy alone can bear. This tentative truce between faith and reason was, however, and for reasons that Hegel is eager to rehearse in Glauben und Wissen, ultimately unsustainable.
The first sustained polemic against Kant's doctrine of rational faith came from the oft forgotten Thomas Wizenmann, whom Kant accused of embarking on a dangerous course, i. e. , one that led to Schwa? rmerei and the dethronement of reason. In Wizenmann's reply, An den Herr Professor Kant von dem Verfassor der Resultate (1786), Kant is himself accused of Schwa? rmerei (i. e.
, excessive enthusiasm or sentiment) in his illicit inference from a practical and subjective need to a belief in an object which satisfies that need; in short, Kant "mistakes a wish for reality. " To this charge, Kant retorts - in his second Kritik - that there is a difference between believing in a thing because one would like to, a desire rooted in the sensibility, and believing because one ought to believe, which is rooted in reason and justified by a necessary and universal law. But Wizenmann is quick to point out that the most that one can infer is that we ought [sollen] to think as though, say, God exists; but, says Wizenmann, such a procedure can merely justify a regulative but never a constitutive principle. In this sense, it would be a glaring non sequitur to infer existence from moral obligation. Similarly, Wizenmann contends that
Der Zeitgeist 35
Kant is caught in a vicious circle that bases morality on faith and faith on morality. It is also suggested that the Kantian notion of a need of reason is thoroughly contradictory: if one justifies a belief on need, all rational argument comes to a stymied halt - the task of reason, argues Wizenmann, is to determine truth and falsity, not the good. And while these objections were addressed, some to a greater degree than others, in the "Dialektik" of the second Kritik, Wizenmann's criticisms were ominous.
The best known of the early polemics against the Kantian notion of a rational faith, however, came from none other than Jacobi. The Kantian philosophy - especially as refined by Fichte - was seen from here on out as the paradigm of all philosophy and, thus, at least for Jacobi, the very epitome of nihilism (i. e. , in this context, a solipsism that dissolves all reality into our own representations). It was Jacobi who first claimed that Kant had uncovered the principle of all knowledge, namely, that of the "subject-object identity. " This principle holds that reason only knows what it creates, the products of its own activity. It is no surprise that Jacobi, like most of his contemporaries, saw this "self-knowing" as ending in nihilism. Thus philosophy is caught inside the circle of consciousness, a circle consisting of nothing but representations that, in the end, represent nothing at all. Kant insisted, of course, especially in his "Refutation of Idealism" [B274] and the Fourth Parlogism, that these representations represent a great deal more than nothing - namely, the things-in-themselves. But Jacobi claims that the thing-in-itself is merely Kant's last-ditch effort to save his philosophy from falling off into the abyss of nihilism. The Critical Philosophy can avoid this inconsistency, of course, which according to Jacobi was precisely what Fichte proposed to do, but only at the cost of revealing its inner spirit of "nihilism. " Jacobi argues that insofar as the things-in-themselves are wholly unknown to us, we cannot - a fortiori - know that they are the cause of our representations; following Jacobi, these representations are caused neither by empirical nor transcendental objects. And though these causes are mutually exclusive, they are also necessary.
Kant retains the thing-in-itself as a means of explaining one of the seemingly undeniable facts of consciousness, namely, passive sensibility (i. e. , the impact of sensible experience); for Jacobi, similar to Wizemann, this contradiction discloses a fatal flaw hidden deep within the Kantian system. So construed, Jacobi could quip that "one needs the assumption of the thing-in-itself in order to enter the Kantian system, but with this assumption it is not possible to remain inside it" (Werke, II, 304). Jacobi
36 Chapter One
similarly criticized Kant's doctrine of rational faith: not only is it hopelessly subjectivist (i. e. , unable to produce knowledge of independent reality), thus susceptible to skepticism if not solipsism, or both, it is also grounded - perhaps necessarily but insufficiently - upon an empty maxim of morality. Jacobi goes so far as to say that "nothing fills [him] with more disgust than Kant's attempt to introduce reason into morality. " It should also come as no surprise that the sole antidote to the ills of Kant's rational faith, according to Jacobi's Briefe an Fichte (1799), was his own "natural faith," i. e. , a form of faith that provides an intuition of an ultimate and indeed independent reality which is both the source of and motivation for moral behavior. Not altogether unlike Fries, there is a close connection between faith [Glauben] and feeling [Gefu? hl] but also between each of these and cognition [Wissen]; but unlike Jacobi, Fries construes feeling if not also faith as a function of reason's spontaneity. Shortly after arriving in Jena in 1805, suggests di Giovanni, "Jacobi began to rely on [Fries's] system as an expression of his own views" (1997: 224). Though Hegel is keen to distinguish himself from Jacobi in Glauben und Wissen, his reconciliation of faith and knowledge displays significant similarities with the one proposed by Fries in Wissen, Glauben und Ahnung, where intimation [Ahnung] arises from the "conviction that finite being is the appearance of eternal being, that eternal being itself appears to us in nature" (1805: 60).
1. 6 The Reflective Philosophies of Subjectivity: From Reflection to Speculation.
Reason is a power of principles, and its ultimate demand aims at the unconditioned. Understanding, on the other hand, always serves reason under a certain condition, one that must be given to us.
--Kant, Critique of Judgment, ? 76.
The ideal of Hegel's youth was preoccupied to the extreme with apprehending the absolute, or what Kant calls the unconditioned [das Unbedingtes]; but in his youth, perhaps into early manhood, until his years in Frankfurt, Hegel was convinced that the infinite lay beyond the reach of discursive thought (i. e. , the categories of the understanding). Philosophical metaphysics is bound to flounder, as indeed it has, says Kant, whenever it ventures out beyond the world of the senses.
The light dove [reason], cleaving to the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too
Der Zeitgeist 37
narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance - meeting no resistance that might, as it were, serve as a support [beneath his wings], to which he could apply his powers, and so let his understanding in motion (CPR, A5 = B9).
The empty space of the pure understanding, the domain of the unconditioned, is an intriguing expanse into which, thought Kant, "unfortunately our powers do not extend" (1790: 282; CJ, 76; Ak 400). It is indispensible and necessary for human understanding, writes Kant, "to distinguish between the possibility and the actuality of things, and this fact has its basis in the subject and in the nature of his cognitive abilities" (1790: 284). And although Kant believed that intellectual intuition was thinkable, i. e. , that it entailed no contradictions, and thus possible, it is a ideal form of cognition reserved for God alone. For God, Kant suggests, there is no distinction between the actual and the possible; for persons, by contrast, the actual depends - whereas the possible does not - on what is "given to us" through sensible intuition according to the categories of the understanding. Kant's solution to the problem of synthetic a priori statements, discussed in the following chapter, restricts human cognition to the domain of experience, the conditioned, of receptivity and subjective reflection.
Hegel's 1802 essay, Glauben und Wissen, signals a significant shift in his philosophical development: what had once been merely an object of faith, beyond the reach of discursive or reflective thought, was now an accessible object of speculative cognition. Although Hegel continued to stress that the absolute, whether construed as pure being or the universe as a whole, transcended the range of discursive thought [Verstand] and the categories of the understanding, he became increasingly convinced that they could be apprehended through the dialectic of reason [Vernunft]. Among other things, Hegel calls into question the then fairly common assumption - confirmed, as it were, by modern science - that philosophy begins with an investigation into the limits of human cognition. Though the reflective philosophers of subjectivity include Kant as well as Fichte and Jacobi, Hegel singles out Locke as the source of all our sorrows: it was Locke, suggests Hegel, who transformed "philosophy into empirical psychology" (1802b: 63); indeed, Hegel begins his analysis of Kant with an extended citation from Locke's Introduction to his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and suggests that "[t]hey are words which one could just as well read in the introduction to Kant's philosophy"
38 Chapter One
(1802b: 69). The specific quotation from Locke's Essay (II. 1), and how Hegel uses it, is telling: Reflection is "that notice which the mind takes of its own operations, the manner of them, by reason whereof, there come to be ideas of the operations of understanding. " In the portion of the Essay quoted by Hegel, Locke treats reflection as a means by which to restrict thought from wandering into "those depths where they can find no sure footing," to set the bounds "between what is and what is not comprehensible by us" and thus avoid questions which lend themselves to "perfect skepticism. "
In the Differenzschrift, Hegel claims that "[d]ichotomy is the source of the need of philosophy" (1801: 89). Once the subjective turn has been taken, whether by Descartes or by Locke, Hume cannot be far behind. For Hume, says Hegel, "all so-called philosophy comes down to a mere delusion of supposed rational insight" (1802b: 69). Although the Critical Philosophy was officially opposed to the conclusions suggested by Hume, Kant remains completely within the genus of what Hegel would come to call the reflective philosophies of subjectivity. 27 Strictly speaking, Kant is equally well convinced that rational cognition - as opposed to the cognition of appearances or an immanent metaphysics - is impossible, i. e. , human cognition is strictly restricted to finitude. If pure reason ventures out beyond the domain of sensible intuition, the sphere in which the concepts of the understanding have their legitimacy and objectivity, it is doomed - at best - to the antinomies discussed in the "Transcendental Dialectic. " When Kant suggests that the only intuition proper to human cognition is sensibility, he restricts cognition to phenomena; comprehending the unconditioned, the thing-in-itself, is impossible in principle. The self- limitation characteristic of the critical qua reflective project, in its attempt to "enter upon the secure path of science" and avoid the "mere groping of metaphysics," results in a brand of philosophy which not only stops short of the cognition of God but stops short also of its severely limited goal (namely, the mere cognition of experience28). The unifying theme that cuts
27 The genus here is the "antithesis" between concept and existing thing (see 1802b: 67, 76); so while Kant means to solve the epistemological problems raised by Hume, the problematic remains essentially unchanged - indeed, Kant reproaches Hume for "thinking the task of philosophy with far too little definiteness and universality" (1802b: 69).
28 Recall Kant's claim in the Critique of Judgment, ? 76, that we cannot reasonably hope to become familiar with, much less explain, the principles of nature (the domain of human cognition) without thinking of it as a product of an intelligent cause (the domain of the supernatural into which our powers do not extend); it
? Der Zeitgeist 39
across these reflective philosophers of subjectivity, suggests Hegel and Schelling, is their stubborn and allegedly pious conviction that the absolute lay beyond the boundaries of human cognition [jenseits die Grenze der menschlichen Erkenntnis]; similarly, one is left to assume that the phenomenal world only receives its objective coherence "through the good offices of human self-consciousness and intellect" (1802b: 74). In short, the shared principle of subjectivity is the "absoluteness of finitude and, resulting from it, the absolute antithesis of finitude and infinity" (1802b: 62). According to the reflective philosophers of subjectivity, as Hegel calls them, we can at best think the ideas of reason (e. g. , God, freedom and the immortality of the soul); but beyond that, knowledge of the absolute is absolutely impossible. 29 As a consequence of these self- imposed30 epistemological restrictions, the reflective philosophers of subjectivity take refuge in faith. This is not necessarily bad. After all, Kant announced from the outset that his system was inspired by the measured conviction that "we must deny knowledge in order to make room for faith. "31
Though pure reason is denied cognitive access to the infinite and is forced to content itself instead with merely thinking the idea of reason, practical reason smuggles the absolute in "through the backdoor" (1802a: 369) - i. e. , through an analysis of the subjectively necessary conditions for morality in the Critique of Practical Reason and teleology in the Critique of Judgment. The "idea of reason," as Hegel calls it, is scattered throughout the Kantian corpus: The idea appears in Kant's principle of the deduction, as the supersensible substrate of nature (i. e. , the indeterminate
would follow, then, that our cognition of the former is parasitic on the latter - i. e. , our cognition of nature, too, is a matter (though somewhat remote and unacknowledged) of faith. Also see Hegel, 1802b: 65.
29 The reflective philosophies of subjectivity are committed to the ontological assumption that "in order to be genuinely real the 'in-itself' must be independent of the Ego outside it" (1802a: 368-369).
30 I say "self-imposed" in deference to Hegel, but I think one could supplement this assumption with the following sort of argument: Traditionally, critics of Hegel have asked for a justification for the assumption that rational cognition of the absolute is possible; but the alternative - viz. , that rational cognition is not possible for humans - might well be equally unjustified. Indeed, Hegel thinks that "the prejudice against which philosophizing on the subject of religion in our time has to fight . . . [is] the prejudice that the divine cannot be conceived" (1802a: 266).
31 For an examination of Hegel's dialectical reversal of this Kantian dictum, in the Hegelian strategy of limiting faith in order to make room for reason, see Jensen (2001).
? 40 Chapter One
solution to the four antinomies), as an intricate part of his account of the moral law (i. e. , as the final cause and moral author of the universe), and in his treatment of aesthetic and teleological judgment. Nonetheless, phenomena and finitude are considered to be altogether absolute - i. e. , they exhaust the class of objects suitable for cognition. Though the suspension of finitude "hovered very clearly before Kant" (1802b: 80), avers Hegel, it was officially renounced because subjectivity is central to his refutation of skepticism; in his "we get out of experience what we put into it" strategy, Kant renders the conflict between faith and reason rationally insuperable. The speculative solution to the pernicious dualisms characteristic of reflective philosophies of subjectivity, suggests Hegel, is hinted at in the Critique of Judgment. Though the critical philosophy consciously limits itself to an exposition of the conditions necessary to finite experience, understood as the product of two heterogeneous faculties (sensibility and the categories of the understanding), Kant occasionally refers to "a single higher principle and common source. " This common source, however, "does not admit of any explanation" (CJ, V, 412). The post-Kantians, beginning with Fichte, as we shall see, were preoccupied with explaining this unifying but allegedly inexplicable source.
According to the Critical Journal of Philosophy, in both Hegel's Differenzschrift as well as the Introduction co-authored by Schelling and Hegel, philosophy emerges at a time when the unity or totality of life has been disrupted. At times of unrest, writes Hegel, "the spirit of philosophy itself, which feels the strength of its growing wings all the more when it is submerged and crushed together in this broad sea, . . . strains upward toward a new life our of the putrefication of the deceased culture" (1802a: 384). How might philosophy, seen as the symptom of a deceased culture, what Hegel calls the "Reflexionskultur," reflect itself beyond the limitations of reflectivity? Both Schelling and Hegel were committed to restoring a unity that was lost, remains lost, in Kant's dualisms: God and humanity, objective nature and subjective experience, sensible intuitions and categories of understanding, reason and heart, thought and being, universal and particular, and faith and knowledge. Hegel and Schelling are critical of what they viewed as the "fundamental error that has lurked unchallenged at the base of all recent [philosophical] efforts": namely, "the unconditional requirement that the Absolute must be kept outside oneself" (1802a: 368), the assumption that "in order to be genuinely real the 'in-itself' must be independent of the Ego outside it" (ibid, 369). In their attempt to "enter upon the secure path of science" and thus avoid the "mere groping of metaphysics," the Reflexionsphilosophen from Locke to
Der Zeitgeist 41
Fichte restricted themselves to an epistemological agenda that not only "stops immediately short of its goal" (i. e. , apprehending the unconditioned) but stops short also of its enormously limited goal (i. e. , knowledge of experience). For the critical journalists, the reflective philosophies of subjectivity were fated, as it were, to oppose and segregate as well as divide and distort what is ultimately - and in truth - perfectly unified and harmonious. But by the time he arrived in Jena, Hegel no longer conceives of all thinking in terms of the understanding (Beiser 2005: 119), i. e. , in terms of reflective or discursive thought; by the time he was reunited with Schelling, Hegel was convinced, increasingly, that the absolute, which is infinite, was amenable to speculative or dialectical cognition. 32 Not only is reflective thought unable to grasp the infinite, the understanding - since its concepts are finite, conditioned and divisive - "destroys such an object in the very act of conceiving it" (Beiser 2005: 163). But unlike Schelling, Hegel seems to have been convinced from the Jenaer Zeit forward that the understanding as well as the reflective philosophies of subjectivity had a positive role to play in speculative metaphysics: indeed, speculative reason is inherent in and arises from within reflective understanding.
1. 7 Reinhold and Fichte: Beyond the Critical Philosophy
Although the Critical Philosophy was attacked from the left as well as from the right, on theoretical as well as practical grounds, it continued to gain - slowly but surely - admirers and advocates. Among the ablest of these advocates was Reinhold. Although he wrote a bold rebuttal of Kant's scathing review of Herder's Ideen, Reinhold was rather dramatically converted to Kantianism in 1785. Reinhold's Briefe u? ber die Kantische Philosophie (1790) explains how the Critical Philosophy, and it alone, can navigate us - as it had him - through the Scylla of rational disbelief and the Charybdis of irrational belief, between the straits of what Reinhold dubbed the 'neologists' and the 'fideists. ' Indeed, Reinhold claims that Kant had settled the dispute between Mendelssohn and Jacobi, by which he means the pantheism debate, four years before it broke out. From the success of the Briefe, Reinhold received both Kant's official blessing (in the January 1788 issue of Merkur) and a professorship at the University of Jena, which was to become the epicenter of Kantianism in Germany. After
32 Following Beiser: "While the understanding is an analytic faculty that divides and analyzes, failing to grasp objects as wholes, reason is a synthetic faculty that unites parts into a whole, showing how no part exists on its own apart from the whole" (2005: 119); also see Klaus Du? sing, 1969.
? 42 Chapter One
two short years as a loyal expositor, however, Reinhold began to bemoan the letter - though not the spirit (which he claimed to know better than its author) - of that same Critical Philosophy. His dissatisfactions would soon give birth to Reinhold's own "philosophy without a nickname," i. e. , the Elementarphilosophie, which he initially articulated in a series of essays and later revised into a set of manuscripts: Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermo? gens (1789), Beytra? ge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Missversta? ndnisse der Philosophen, Erster Band (1790), and Ueber das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens (1791).
But what was wrong with the critical philosophy that only a few years earlier had served as his salvation? Reinhold's primary dissatisfaction stemmed from the failure of the Critical Philosophy to provide the philosophical consensus and unanimity that it had predicted; this failure was due not only to its forbidding style but also to the opacity of its fundamental principles or foundation. The programmatic task of the Elementarphilosophie, then, was to define and clarify these presupposed principles, thereby grounding - without essentially altering - the edifying conclusions of the critical philosophy. In short, Kant had failed to place his philosophy upon sufficiently systematic and critical foundations. If for no other reason, Reinhold should be remembered in the history of post- Kantian idealism for his early his insistence on systemicity; the Critical Philosophy, argued Reinhold, needed to be supplemented with or grounded in a singular but infinitely rich first principle. It was not, however, the fate of Reinhold to provide us with such a principle; instead, Reinhold was condemned - according to Hegel - to Sisyphean toil of endless preambles and introductions to such a system.
The Elementarphilosophie was seriously challenged if not ultimately undermined by an anonymous work that appeared in 1792 under the lengthy title Aenesidemus, oder U? ber die Fundamente der von dem Herrn Professor Reinhold in Jena gelieferten Elementarphilosophie. The Aenesidemus, written by G. E. Schultz, shattered all the pretensions into which the Critical Philosophy - in either its Kantian or Reinholdian formulation - was starting to settle. The Author of the Aenesidemus argues that "the faculty of representation laid down in the Philosophy of the Elements is in fact nothing more than a definition of the characteristics of the very representation which was supposed to be the effect of the defined faculty, adorned however with the entirely empty title of power or faculty" (1792: 111). An appeal to some particular faculty in order to explain a given phenomenon "amounts to no more than a repetition of the
Der Zeitgeist 43
phenomenon or actual fact whose properties we wanted to explain, with the addition of the word power or faculty" (ibid). Although the influence of the Aenesidemus was as broad as it was diverse, our present concern is with its influence on Fichte and Hegel. Fichte claims that while the Aenesidemus completely confounded him, it nevertheless convinced him that both Kant and Reinhold had failed to provide an adequate foundation for philosophy. The proper foundation, thought Fichte, was to be provided within his own Wissenschaftlehre (1794).
Every event that occurs in nature is the result of a set of causal conditions without which the given phenomenon could not take place and with which it could not fail to occur; according to Kant's 'Analytic,' and Fichte follows suit, this is an "established principle" that "allows of no exception" (A. 536; B. 564). When this principle is extended to humans, considered here as but one more "link in the chain of the rigid necessity of Nature," the source of our actions is simply the product of the antecedent chain of causes. It would seem to follow that we are not really responsible for what we - construed as the last palpable link in an infinite chain - do; but this conclusion is altogether incompatible with if not repulsive to our moral consciousness. The philosophy that one chooses, e. g. , between dogmatism and determinism or idealism and freedom, suggests Fichte, ultimately depends on the sort of person one is (see Breazeale, 1988b). In his Bestimmung des Menschen, Fichte demonstrates that our empirical consciousness, i. e. , our perception of external things, this dense system of indifferent causes, is "in the first place only yourselves and your own condition"; indeed, it is "only your own condition. "33 The relation of this stream of sensible qualities to "external objects" can only be inferred from a general principle of cause and effect. This general principle can only be justified, or critically defended, as an "inward law of thought. " As such, the object, which we take to exist independently, is itself only the product
33 The discovery of the first principle of consciousness, Ich=Ich, as the foundation of all knowledge, requires that the second principle of consciousness (which cannot be deduced from the first) must be determined by it, i. e. , that the Ich must determine the nicht-Ich (which is, in effect, to say that the Ich determines itself-- by, of course, a self-limitation). How that is accomplished must remain, for Fichte and according to the Wissenschaftlehre, a mystery to theoretical knowledge. It can, however, be explained within the practical realm, by moral self-determination (albeit an eternal striving) by which the absolute self, and its activity of self- creation, should appear within humanity. And while it should exist, it need not actually exist (whereas Hegel's ideal - by the very fact that it can be formulated - must exist).
? 44 Chapter One
of our own thought. The first fundamental proposition (namely, the principle of identity, or A = A) expresses the identity of the subject and object in pure consciousness, the second principle (namely, the principle of opposition, or A -A) provides the transcendental conditions requisite to determinate determination, i. e. , that determinate identification (and differentiation) within empirical consciousness presupposes a determinate identification (and differentiation) within pure consciousness, and the third proposition or grounding principle of speculation (A = A & -A) expresses the identity as well as the mutual limitation of pure-self consciousness and empirical consciousness, i. e. , that the not-self posited by the self is not a not-self at all.
The remaining if not intractable problem, though, for Fichte but also for Kant, is that we know nothing other than the world of appearances and nothing at all about the reality that lies beyond them; this predicament is tantamount to Jacobi's charge of nihilism in his Open Letter to Fichte (1799). In response to Jacobi, perhaps, Fichte claims that we are delivered from this derivative difficulty by privileging the dictates of our moral consciousness, i. e. , by having faith that there is a world in which our duties can - because they ought to - be performed. Our moral activity can only be conducted in a sensible world, one filled with obstacles, i. e. , the material around which we might practice our virtue. But this Fichtean notion of Identity, with its absolute subjectivity, is doomed - according to Hegel - to a one-sidedness that lacks the symmetry and reflexivity necessary to a fully adequate notion of identity. The ultimate and perhaps most pernicious antithesis within the reflective philosophy of subjectivity is that which arises between freedom and necessity. According to Fichte, who was following Kant, we are compelled by practical reason to view the world as 'a field of moral action' and thus postulate the freedom of my will.