No More Learning

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).
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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.
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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).
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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. And not unlike Kant, Fichte thought that it was possible to regard one and the same event as being in one respect merely an effect of nature and in another aspect due to freedom (see KRV: A. 543, B. 571). And yet, both Kant and Fichte agree that the demand to regard oneself as a moral agent, or the subject of freedom (i. e. , as noumenon), and at the same time from the point of view of physical nature (i. e. , as phenomenon) in one's own empirical consciousness is "paradoxical" (Kant 1788: 6). At its most extreme, Kant suggests that while we cannot comprehend the fact of moral freedom, wedo comprehend its incomprehensibility, and this is all that can be fairly demanded of a philosophy that strives to carry its principles to the very limit of human reason (1785: 463). In the Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte similarly admits that "as for myself qua subject-object, I am
Der Zeitgeist 45
incomprehensible [unbegreiflich]; within experience, I divide myself into a subject and an object, which, to be sure, should be thought of as originally one" (1794: B. 419-20; D. 211).
And while Hegel praised Fichte for a genuinely speculative insight into the absolute (i. e. , what Harris calls "an intellectual vision of all things within the universal logos"), he severely reprimanded him for failing to provide the promised demonstration of the subject-object identity. According to Hegel, the speculative insight inherent in the Wissenschaftslehre (1794) had deteriorated into dogmatism - albeit with a "hue of inwardness" - by the time Fichte published the Bestimmung des Menschens (1800); and while there are those who sharply distinguish the earlier work from the later work, such that it would be a misreading of Fichte to assess the one on the basis of the other, Hegel was convinced that the Bestimmung essay "not only unveils the essence of Fichte's philosophy most completely for a popular audience, it is also the only one among his expositions that sets forth his philosophy in its totality as a system" (NKA, IV: 505). The practical conclusions of Fichte's system of knowledge, which are suggested in his Vocation of Man but more explicitly in his 1806 Guide to the Blessed Life, contributed - suggests Hegel - to the swelling tide of thinkers who conceived of religion as essentially rooted in aesthetic and moral feeling. (This romantic tendency is embraced and espoused most unabashedly in the religious thought of Schleiermacher, but it is also to be found in Hamann as well as Jacobi and Schlegel. ) But this reconciliation is considered by Hegel to be superficial: it is, he suggests, a truce that is quickly conceded because there is nothing very significant to be gained or loss.
The theoretical shortcomings inherent in Fichte's theory of knowledge, which concede and abstract if not empty reconciliation, were seemingly surmounted - at least in principle or to Hegel's satisfaction at the time that he wrote the Differenzschrift - by the emerging Schellingean "system"; Hegel is presumably referring to the system presented within Schelling's "Presentation of My System" (1801) rather than the earlier "System of Transcendental Idealism" (1800). The critical project, which was initiated in German thought by Kant and subsequently purified by Fichte, was intended to legitimate, simultaneously and by mutual restraint, the claims of both knowledge and faith. The dominant or recurrent Hegelian critique of this reconciliation is that the forms of knowledge and faith for which they shrewdly negotiated were, in both cases, relatively impoverished substitutes. When faith and knowledge were reduced to their lowest
46 Chapter One
common denominator, in order to facilitate a quick and seemingly painless truce, it hardly seemed to Hegel "worth the bother. " An enduring or sustainable reconciliation would require that we retain a conception of reason that makes truth possible, i. e. , a construal of reason "worthy of the name," as well as a form of faith that is raised above subjectivity and finitude.
1. 8 Hegel's Early Identity Philosophy
Although Hegel was well aware of the controversies stirring beneath the philosophical surface at the end of the eighteenth century, he was still paralyzed by the dogmatism of Tu? bingen and, shortly thereafter, the solitude of Berne. These years, though, were neither idle nor unimportant to the strictly philosophical ideals and methods indicative of the later, Jena, period. Indeed, it is not at all difficult to construe Hegel's development - as H. S. Harris so convincingly contends - as a continuous, conscientious and thoughtful progression; his earliest philosophical preoccupations as well as the "ideal of his youth" are always present.
While at Berne, perhaps even earlier, Hegel's writings are seemingly (anti-)theological34 if not anti-Christian in their emphasis and tone; and yet, it is important to note that the Jugendschriften are preoccupied solely with critiquing the "positivity"35 inherent in Christianity. It would be a mistake, surely, to characterize these earlier writings as "anti-religious. "36 At this point in his development, Hegel was quite satisfied with Kant's doctrine of moral faith. Hegel's ideal of a folk religion, i. e. , the organic unity of life as expressed within a society and as valuable for society, is judged - according to his Religion ist eine37 - in terms of three central concerns: (i) its doctrines must be founded on universal reason, (ii) fancy,
34 See Kaufmann 1972: pp. 63-71; also Lukas, 1973: I, 34 ff.
35 For Hegel, "positivity" refers to institutional efforts to base religion on ecclesiastic or institutional authority rather than "reason alone"; similarly, Beiser suggests that during his years in Tu? bingen and Berne Hegel is less interested in "objective religion," i. e. , with dogma and doctrines, than with subjective religion, i. e. , religion as expressed in action and feeling (2005: 127-128).
36 Nowhere is this ideal better captured than in Hegel's poem to Ho? lderlin, Eleusis, an English translation of which can be found in Mueller's Hegel: The Man, his Vision and Work, pp. 60-62. Civic or folk religion aims at a reconciliation between life and thought, faith and reason, and spirit and intellect.
37 See Nohl, pp. 20-1; and for an extended treatment of this period and these canons, see Harris' Hegel's Development, Ch. III, esp. section 6 ff. .
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heart, and sensibility must not go away empty, and (iii) that it be so constituted that all the needs of life, such that the public activities of the State were also implicated. So construed, Christianity (as understood by Hegel in this period) can, at best, meet the first of these three tenants; with regard to the second and the third, Christianity was sad and melancholy (as opposed to the festive and imaginative temper of Hellas) on the one hand and regrettably private (as opposed to the mentality epitomized within the walls of the Parthenon) on the other. For Hegel, as for most of the Romantics of the period, Christianity paled in comparison to the organic unity of Greek paganism, which expressed itself in terms of imagination, enthusiasm, beauty, and community. In the Berne Fragments, Hegel still considered Socrates to be better suited than Jesus as a teacher of morality or civic religion. It was Hegel, rather than Nietzsche, who first pronounced that "God is dead" (1802b: 191; see Jaeschke, 1992)38; and it is with this in mind that Hegel hovered over the "corpse of faith and reason" in search of an enduring reconciliation or, sticking to the metaphor, a resurrection of a new civic religion.
As reported by his sister, Hegel's experience in Berne was not altogether pleasant. Hegel himself claims to have suffered at this time from what he called hypochondria - i. e. , at least in part, a period of painful recognition of the immensity of the task that lay before him and the unlikelihood of his prospects for achieving those goals. It was within this period that Hegel was to reassess - perhaps inspired by his friend Ho? lderlin - the arsenal of Christianity, especially the love ethic and moral beauty of Jesus, for grounding a folk religion. Perhaps it was not a revolution in his thought at all: perhaps it was merely his turning away from the critical task, i. e. , culling out that which hinders spirit, looking instead toward the constructive task of salvaging the best of whatever remained, representing the spirit of Christianity in its dialectical purity, and weaving those remnants into a healthier mythology. But by the time
38 Although the declaration that "God is dead" is first found in Hegel, the connotation is quite different from its use in Nietzsche and subsequently Heidegger. In the Positivity Essay, Hegel goes so far as to claim that our preoccupation with personal salvation demonstrates our failure to discover immortality within the republic. Whereas Nietzsche and Heidegger seem to be referring to the irrelevance of Christianity as a societal fact, as it were, Hegel is alluding to the withdrawal of God from the world as a moment of negation and infinite grief that must itself become negated by speculative philosophy: it marks the end of traditional Christianity, as exemplified by "positivity," and the emergence of a new religion (see Beiser 2005: 135-139).
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that he writes his essay on the Spirit of Christianity, Hegel revisions Christianity as an uncanny and indeed beautiful fusion between the better aspects of the Greek soul and Kantian reason; at the same time, Hegel now feels able to circumnavigate the harmful dualisms intrinsic in Kant as well as the positivity inherent in traditional Christianity and Judaism. The altered status of Christianity and the almost mystical tone of Hegel's works in this period seem to suggest that the shift in his thought was decisive. The concept of the Divine, as opposed to the submissive fear engendered by the alienating commands of positive religion, allows the subject and object or freedom and nature to be united; indeed, subject and object cannot be separated from one another without misconstruing either - this is, suggests Hegel, the ideal of every religion. Only in love, writes Hegel, as though enthralled if not recently converted, are such dichotomies overcome: "Since the Divine is pure life, anything and everything said of it must be free from any implication of opposition. "39 Love and Divinity, in form if not content, are during this period of Hegel's thought virtually synonymous: "Genuine love excludes all oppositions. " But even here, Hegel is unwilling to say that all separation or opposition is obliterated - indeed, a separation remains but as no longer fixed in its opposition. Difference is taken as a duplication of the same: both within the lover and beloved, within the subject and object. This mystery of identity and difference - if not also the identity inherent in identity and difference - is not to be grasped by thought, however, at least not yet, but rather by spirit. It is important to notice that the doctrine of identity of identity and non- identity, which is what distinguishes Hegel from Schelling in Jena, is already present in Hegel's earliest reflections on the nature of love in Plato, Shakespeare and the Scriptures.
If the speculative ideal consists in an apprehension of organic wholeness or unity, then the structure for its realization is to be found in the formula or structure of an "identity of identity and non-identity. " Following Kant, the reflective philosophers of subjectivity retained an ultimate opposition between an infinite reality, often construed as nature in-itself or the absolute, and the finite self. It was generally thought that reconciling the ego and the non-ego could only be accomplished by collapsing the former into the latter, which is how most commentators interpreted Spinoza, or the latter into the former, which is how many of his contemporaries interpreted Fichte. There is, however, a third possibility: the one envisioned by the Identita? tsphilosophie. Briefly put, it is to
? 39 Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 255.
Der Zeitgeist 49
conceive of these seeming antitheses as coinciding and mirroring aspects of one, ultimate reality. It is only in this way, as Hegel put it in his Differenzschrift, that we might "give nature its due" without obliterating or otherwise explaining away as non-essential if not illusory the reality of the self.
In his review of Krug, Hegel described the main idea of the Identita? tsphilosophie as the effort "to put God back again at the peak of philosophy, absolutely prior to all else as the one and only ground of everything, the unique principium essendi and cognoscendi" (1802c: 299). And while that alone is too thin to be useful, it is thickened in two ways: First, nature must no longer be conceived as something dead, or merely mechanistic, as it was in Fichte, and wholly other-than or independent of the self. And while this solution is clearly modeled after Spinoza, it has now been filtered through the post-Kantian conceptual apparatus on the one hand and purged of the mechanistic presentation of nature to which Spinoza remained victim (see ? 1. 2, above, apropos of Herder's vitalism or organicism). Similarly, the self and its knowing capacities must no longer be limited to the activities proper to apprehending that which is dead, i. e. , knowledge must no longer be limited to the discursivity of the understanding [Verstand], which merely analyzing or divides things into discrete parts. Hegel's solution, or his discovery in Frankfurt, as it were, consists in his organic construal of nature and his emerging confidence that reason [Vernunft] is a faculty adept at grasping things synthetically (i. e. , in terms of the unifying whole rather than merely the totality of parts).
The so-called "Ho? lderlin fragment," published as Urteil und Seyn, which Harris dates at April of 1795, seems to have anticipated if not directly inspired Hegel's so-called reversal in Frankfurt; it was there, in a fragment that may well have served as a speculative manifesto for Hegel, who was one of his most loyal friends, that Ho? lderlin claimed that:
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.
Ho? lderlin also expresses this ideal in the penultimate version of the Preface to his Hyperion (1795):
The blessed unity, Being, in the only sense of the word, is lost to us and we had to lose it if we were to strive for it and win it. . . . We have fallen away
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from nature and what, one might surmise, was once unified now struggles in opposition, and rule and slavery alternate between the two sides.
Although this insight or speculative formula is most prominent in his philosophy of religion and phenomenology of experience, it is detectible also in Hegel's later conception of metaphysics and logic, i. e. , the study of the necessary concepts proper to being (see Forster, 1989: 48). The structure of this ideal remains strikingly consistent throughout its semiotic development, whether construed in terms of the "divine moment" and the "experience of love" (as described in The Spirit of Christianity in 1799) or in terms of organicity, Life, or Being (as intimated within the Systemfragment of 1800) or in terms of the method and metaphysics inherent in his mature writings (as expressed in the dialectic of the Phenomenology of 1806 or the Encyclopedia of 1816).
In his redolent "Systemfragment," Hegel maintains - though it should be noted that the authorship of this fragment is alternatively attributed to Schelling or, occasionally, to Ho? lderlin - that the structure of life, considered in its organicity, is simultaneously union and non-union, life as unified within the individual and life as differentiated into the manifold of living beings - both of which are defined and conditioned in terms of the other. From this point forward, the individual - as contextualized within an organic whole or unity that is greater than the sum of its parts - is characterized as much by separation as with unity. These polar concepts, e. g. , identity and non-identity, suggested Schelling, internally include or inhere in one another and, therefore, fall outside the conventional realm of logic and, a fortiori, reflective philosophy. This was surely one of the most fetching elements of the Schellingean system: it aimed at a unity within thought, at thinking or at least intuiting nature and thought as coinciding, i. e. , at nature becoming thought and thought becoming nature. And while this subject-object identity was anticipated by the Fichtean system, at least in the spirit of the Wissenschaftlehre (1794), the unity of nature and self or alternatively of the world and God is, according to the letter of his Vocation of Man (1800), indefinitely if not infinitely postponed into the future as the goal of our infinite striving. In the end, and indeed in principle, we can merely postulate - indeed, we must postulate - the coincidence of these two domains within the noumenal realm.
Der Zeitgeist 51 1. 9 Schelling's Naturphilosophie and the Ausfu? hrung
of Fichte's Idealism
It would be difficult to overestimate, although it has surely been done,40 the extent of influence that Schelling exercised over Hegel when he, Hegel, entered the fray of the post-Kantian idealism discussion in Jena. 41 In deference to the alleged influence, and Hegel's anxiety of influence, something needs to be said about the Schellingian system that lay "before the eyes of the public"42 at that time and which Hegel was considered to be an advocate. Schelling, like most of those who participated in speculative idealism's storied "march from Fichte to Hegel," considered himself to be a child of Kant who, as a reasonable service, wished to render those doctrines clearer, more systematic, and more extensive. And like most of his philosophical siblings, that service consisted in showing - as Fichte had tried but failed - how the self- determining activity of the self was constitutive of objective knowledge of nature qua other-than-the-self; the singular goal of the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), according to Schelling, consisted in the discovery of a system in human knowledge, i. e. , to explain the principle by which human knowledge was possible. More generally, Schelling, not unlike Fichte before him, sets out to explain how subjective spontaneity is the ground or origin of nature as well as the content of empirical consciousness. As mentioned above, in ? 1. 5, Fichte had already set the terms of the problematic in his sustained suggestion and attempted demonstration that self-consciousness can - or, at least, should - serve as a speculative paradigm for the identity of subject and object. But that suggestion remained, thought Schelling and Hegel, perhaps in principle, incomplete. It is precisely this speculative task that fuelled the many
40 Perhaps by Schelling himself, who once quipped that every idea Hegel ever had was stolen from him.
41 For a helpful account of this relationship, see Du? sing's "Spekulation and Reflexion. Zur Zusammenarbeit Schellings und Hegels in Jena," Hegel-Studien, V, 95-128 (Appendix 1, below) and Po? ggeler's "Hegels Jenaer Systemkonzeption" in his Hegels Idee einer Pha? nomenologie des Geistes, Freiburg/Munich, Karl Alber, 1973.
42 This is precisely what Hegel claimed in the Differenzschrift with reference to Schelling's Presentation of My System, 1801, which signals a movement toward a philosophy of identity and a departure away from the earlier, very Fichtean sounding preoccupations of the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800); interestingly, Schelling seems to return to his earlier concern in his Philosophical Investigations of the Nature of Human Freedom (1809).
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systems that were to become the rather infamous trademark of Schelling's long speculative career. Hegel's Differenzschrift was originally conceived, however, as a sustained apologia in defense of Schelling's Naturphilosophie. At this point in his thought, Schelling presents nature as the complementary pole in an interaction of spirit and nature; this philosophy of identity expresses an ideal-realism, or 'absolute idealism,' i. e. , a complete synthesis of subject and object. According to Schelling, in his second edition to his Ideas on a Philosophy of Nature as an Introduction to the Study of This Science (1803), nature appears as visible spirit and spirit appears as invisible nature. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel puts it this way: "Nature thus drives toward spirit, just as spirit drives toward nature. "
In opposition to the deflated conception of nature in Fichte, i. e. , as a mere construct of practical reason or a posited resistance to our ethical vocation, Schelling attempts a total and faithful account of the objective particularity of the physical world. Schelling's presentation of "that which is utterly other independent of our freedom" is not, however, contra Fichte if not also Kant, to be understood as merely a stage or an occasion for moral purification but rather as something intrinsic to a "process through which the self sees itself develop through a necessary but not consciously observed act of self-positing" (Werke, X, 97). The dialectical activity of the self and the limitation necessary to such a process, Schelling argues, are essential to the conscious activity of the Ego. This Schellingian version of the identity of identity and difference was, to be sure, among the most alluring aspects of the system to which Hegel felt, at least on his arrival at Jena, an ambivalent allegiance. The self is, speculatively construed, both subject and object, freedom and necessity, activity and limitation. The Fichtean ego was sure to pale, indeed appear wholly empty, in comparison to this - infinitely rich - self and increasingly organic conception of nature.
And although Schelling begins his quest for the Absolute in terms of this absolute self, and as an enthusiastic disciple of the Wissenschaftslehre, he never forgets his promise to "recompense nature for the mishandling that it suffered at the hands of Kant and Fichte. " The absolute must be construed in a manner that overcomes opposition between spirit and nature, subject and object; the goal, namely, an Identita? tsphilosophie, was really never in question since the Tu? bingen years. Reconciling the conflict or opposition between the ego and the non-ego is presented, in Schelling, as a point of indifference. It was precisely this conception of absolute
Der Zeitgeist 53
indifference, built on the analogy of magnetism, which Hegel later characterized if not caricatured as "die Nacht, worin, wie man zu sagen pflegt, alle Ku? he schwarz sind" [the night in which, so to speak, all cows are black]. Fichte's relatively impoverished conception of the self entailed an equally empty notion of the absolute; and to the extent that Schelling remained within the Fichtean paradigm, he was similarly limited to a conception of the absolute that was impotent to explain either the self or nature. At about the same time that Hegel arrived in Jena, Schelling was moving away from the subject-oriented Fichtean strategy and, increasing, in the direction of a Naturphilosophie inspired by Spinoza and Herder if not also Oetinger and Boehme. But Schelling also offered something new: in short, nature was construed as the finite self's pre-self; similar to Fichte, nature is an unconscious force, but unlike Fichte, for whom the 'non-Ego' was dependent on the self, Schelling argues that the finite or conscious self emerges from - and thus depends on - nature (Werke, I, 10: 93-94; also see Fackenheim, 1996: 64 ff. ).
Both Fichte and Spinoza fulfill, according to Schelling's "Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,"43 the speculative aims of genuine philosophy to the highest degree, i. e. , they are monistic, complete, and not susceptible to contradiction. Both start from the Absolute and return to it. This compliment to Spinoza and Fichte is equally a condemnation of reflective forms of philosophy or, as they turn it in Critical Journal, "unphilosophy" (i. e. , non-reflective forms of philosophizing which unconditionally require "that the Absolute be kept outside oneself"44). The reflective advances gained by non-speculative forms of philosophy, namely, reintroducing the absolute "through the back door" (i. e. , by "turning dogmatism around"), eventually collapse into an "in itself" which must be superseded if not entirely disavowed; the reflective philosophies of subjectivity, which Schelling treated as an impoverished form of idealism, "remains burdened with all the antitheses of dogmatism. " (This criticism expresses, in a speculative nutshell, the negative thesis of Hegel's Glauben und Wissen. ) Although Schelling held Fichte and Spinoza in high esteem, i. e. , especially in terms of their systemicity,45 perhaps even as the highest achievement of
43 This is also claimed by Fichte in his Wissenschaftslehre, Werke, I, 101.
44 Schelling, "On The Relationship of The Philosophy of Nature to Philosophy in General," in Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, trans. ,George di Giovanni and H. S. Harris, 368.
45 Hegel thought that the Spinozistic (or geometrical) method, i. e. , starting with a set of definition and preceding by implication, to be wholly unsuitable to the
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reflective philosophy, he thought that they similarly failed to make nature wholly intelligible: Fichte devoted entirely too little attention to the objectivity, otherness, and the impact of nature. The Fichtean sublimation of objectivity to subjectivity merely explains it away without making it comprehensible. 46 The problem with the Fichtean system resides in its manifest failure to work out an intelligible system of nature, which consists in demonstrating the inherent unity of nature with the absolute ego. Spinozism is condemned, on the other hand, for its abstract and mechanistic conception of nature. As he puts it in his Of Human Freedom:
If the doctrine that all things are in God is the basis of the entire system [of Spinoza], it must at least first be vitalized and severed from abstractness before it can become the principle of a system of reason. How general and vague is the expression that the eternal beings are modes or consequences of God; what a chasm there is, which needs to be filled in; what questions remain to be answered!
While both of these systems unify human knowledge under a single principle, Schelling attempts to combine the phenomenal as well as noumenal aspects of nature and spirit into, so to speak, a comprehensive field theory of human knowledge. Analogically, it is not only possible but also reasonable to consider space in terms of various geometries: under certain circumstances, one ought to work within the scope of Euclidean geometry, but under other circumstances one ought to employ non- Euclidean geometries (e. g. , Riemannian or Lobechevskian). Each of these geometries is complete and, in some sense, comprehensive; the most comprehensive geometry, however, would be one that would include and make comprehensible these various paradigms as varied expressions of a complete and thoroughly comprehensive system. So was it, analogically, with Schelling: the transcendental system advanced in the Wissenschaftslehre was to be paralleled by a philosophy of nature and joined together by means of a transcendental logic, a metaphysical theory of identity in identity and difference. 47 (Even later on in his career, in 1827, Schelling claimed that his System was an Ausfu? hrung - i. e. , the completion or actual realization - of Fichte's idealism. ) If one aims at providing a comprehensive
organicity and principle of life which both he and Schelling held to be central to any adequate conception of the Absolute.
46 Indeed, the "impact" [Anstoss] of an objective world must, for any form of subjectivity, remain always and ever theoretically incomprehensible.
47 Following Vater, "the System recognizes and allows only an intuitive approach to this transcendental logic of identity/difference, namely through the philosophy of art" (1978: xxii).
? Der Zeitgeist 55
system of the absolute which unifies the necessary but complementary opposition between transcendental idealism and a philosophy of nature, one which refuses to privilege either over the other, it becomes necessary to explain the coincidence between them that demonstrates or otherwise explains their identical principle or shared source [Quelle] within ideal or real orders of spirit or nature. It is precisely the identity of these differences, which the understanding grasps in terms of opposition, e. g. , between conscious and unconscious processes, which Hegel if not also Schelling means by the "absolute. " The absolute Ego is that which emerges as a result, i. e. , through the process of its development and coming-to-be: it is neither subject nor object, but essentially the indifference or unity of both which is achieved through the self- differentiation inherent in its development. The critical journalists claim that this is nothing new to philosophy: on the contrary, it is the perennial ideal of reason.
The ideal of speculative reason consists in a holistic grasp of the whole, i. e. , an absolute synthesis of spirit and nature; the apprehension of this ideal, for Schelling, at least in the System, is the product of an aesthetic if not intellectual intuition. It is sometimes suggested that it was Schelling who first convinced Fichte that the self-positing activity of the ego was paramount to an intellectual intuition as defined by Kant in ? 77 of the Critique of Judgment. Intellectual intuition, for Kant, is a constitutive mode of thought proper to God alone (as opposed to the passivity intrinsic to human knowledge). Kant insisted, however, that "we cannot conceive even the conceptual possibility of a would-be intellectual intuition, or of an infinitely efficient causality, let alone assert any knowledge of either" (1793, AK XX: 267; di Giovanni, 2005: 23). But in his systematic analysis of Kant's celebrated "schematism," which is the constitutive apparatus behind objectivity (i. e. , rule-governed behavior), Fichte disclosed the speculative significance of transcendental apperception, i. e. , the "I am I. "48 And by fixating on the role of transcendental apperception and its synthesizing activity in Kant, Fichte brought increased attention to the self-positing act of self-consciousness as the source or condition of consciousness; the "I think" of pure apperception (i. e. , the I that emerges in the act of thinking of itself as thinking) is both subject and object. For
48 According to Kant, "there can be no modes of knowledge, no connection or unity of one mode of knowledge with another, without that unity of consciousness that precedes all data of intuition (and by relation to which representations of objects is alone possible). This pure, original, unchanging consciousness I shall name transcendental apperception" (CPR A107).
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Fichte, this is the "common source" to which Kant referred when he claimed that the Critique of Pure Reason was "a totally new science, one of which nobody has previously grasped even just the thought; of which even the mere idea was unknown and to which nothing so far available is of any use" (1783; AK 4:262). It was the great and breath-taking insight of Fichte to construe intellectual intuition as the first principle of all human knowledge. Increasingly, Fichte conceived of intellectual intuition as the "immediate awareness" of one's own existence as an Ego if not also the activity of free creation. Similar to Fichte, Schelling considered intellectual intuition to be "the universal mediating factor in our knowledge" as well as "a reconciling element between analytic and synthetic modes of thought" (1800: 18, 19-22); but Schelling also treated intellectual intuition as the hidden core of the self and the unconscious principle of consciousness. And it was Schelling who eventually suggested - in his Exposition of My System - that the "Ego of Fichte was intuitive identical with the 'God or Nature' of Spinoza. " But Fichte denied this. Perhaps for political reasons, Fichte could no longer collaborate with Schelling. 49 The fundamental flaw in Fichte's system, writes Schelling, is that "Fichte understands by Ego merely the human Ego, by no means the universal or absolute Ego" (1827: 106). To the extent that philosophy restricts itself to the finite Ego, nature will remain equally finite (i. e. , merely the other- than-self-for-self), and the opposition between self and nature cannot be transcended. The speculative task of the System, therefore, consisted in nothing less than transcending or otherwise sublimating the limitations of the finitude.
49 For Fichte, not unlike Kant, our knowledge of nature is limited solely to phenomena, which is the domain of natural science. Beyond the phenomenal realm, however, there is room for faith. The ideas of reason (e. g. , God, freedom, immortality of the soul) are accessible by means of practical reason alone. For Kant, morality leads to religion; and religion consists in the hope of reconciliation by citizens of two worlds, the natural and the moral, the phenomenal and the noumenal. But in Fichte, it was possible to rise above mere hope such that the natural was conquered by the moral: "the joy that is in the moral activity," writes Fichte in his U? ber den Grund unseres Glaubens an eine go? ttliche Weltregierung, "is nothing less than a share in God" (1799, Werke, V, 175). So while it is true that Fichte moves beyond finitude by participating in the 'moral order of the world,' thus verifying the presence of the noumenal-realm in the phenomenal-realm, nature is subsequently reduced to something less than phenomena: nature is transfigured into "the material of duty, rendered sensuous," and that which exists solely to be conquered by moral spirit. Schelling considered this moral bridge, as it were, between the self and nature-as-non-self to be altogether inadequate.
? Der Zeitgeist 57 1. 10 The Programme of the Critical Journal
The central thesis of Faith and Knowledge is not unlike the remainder of the Hegelian corpus; and as is often the case in the early formulations of a leitmotif, it is less elaborate than the latter stages of its articulation - it is, however, a distinctively clear if not elegant expression of the Hegelian enterprise. Although it is true that Hegel's critique is seasoned by a certain amount of "interminable polemic"50 (Harris 1977b: 25), the critical journalists - i. e. , Hegel and Schelling - were committed to clearing away the "abundantly flourishing weeds" which at that time jeopardized the "few good seeds that [had] been sown. "51 The title of Hegel's essay - Faith and Knowledge, or the Reflective Philosophy of Subjectivity in the complete range of its forms as Kantian, Jacobian, and Fichtean Philosophy - is rhetorically loaded and agenda laden; according to the Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy, which appeared in an earlier volume of the short-lived Critical Journal of Philosophy (1801-1803, co-edited by Schelling and Hegel), knowledge is "the conscious identity of the finite and the infinite, the union of both worlds, the sensuous and the intellectual, the necessary and the free, in consciousness" (1801: 96). In the same text, Hegel defines faith as a "relation or connection of the limited to the Absolute [in which] there is no consciousness at all of their identity [hingegen u? ber die Identita? t eine vo? llige Bewutlosigkeit vorhanden ist]" (1801: 100). Conscious of the opposition alone, the faith philosophers [Glaubensphilosophen] - similar to the reflective philosophers of subjectivity, because the principle is shared - restrict, rashly, in their rush to be edifying, the Absolute to the realm of "the incalculable, the inconceivable, [and] the empty" (Hegel 1802b: 60). Although the principle of subjectivity achieves "perfect formation and definitive self-expression" in the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte, it is "by no means a restricted expression of the spirit
50 Indeed, one may well concede to Harris that Hegel's "sarcastic wit and polemic gift" in this section of the essay are "in the end repellent because they are so unrelieved by that appreciation of positive achievement which he had himself declared to be the first essential of genuinely philosophical criticism" (Harris 1977b: 25).
51 This is how Fichte, in a letter to Schiller (2 Dec. 1800), described the programme that he and Schelling had in mind for the Kritischen Journal; Fichte eventually withdrew from the project and was replaced by Hegel. For a fuller account of the events surrounding the Journal, see Harris's Hegel's Development, II: Night Thoughts (1983: xxxiii ff. ) or Buchner's "Hegel und das Kritische Journal der Philosophie" (1965: 95-156).
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of a brief epoch or small group. " From a philosophical point of view, this "system of culture" becomes cognizant of itself in "the principle of the North [read: Kant52], and from a religious point of view, of Protestantism. " Because the finite is declared to be absolute, as the sole reality for cognition, "the Absolute is no more against reason than it is for it, it is beyond [u? ber] Reason" (Hegel 1802b: 56). Hegel's Glauben und Wissen essay served as the first part of the second volume of the Critical Journal that Hegel edited, after a long series and turning of events, with Schelling. In general, the Critical Journal was aimed at providing a critical forum for examining the present state of philosophy and, in the process, silencing what Fichte called "philosophical chatterers. "53
The Critical Journal originated with Schelling: In June of 1800 Schelling proposed - to J. F. Cotta, one of the major publishing houses in Berlin - that he edit, together with his celebrated colleague in Jena, Fichte, a purely scientific-philosophical journal; although Cotta would have preferred a more general literary review, they deferred to Schelling by early August. In the first volume, Schelling proposed to write a survey of the present state of philosophy as a whole, leaving the second volume to Fichte.