No More Learning

It is admittedly difficult to resist the impulse to read Jacobi as a fideist of the most radical sort - that is, as an "irrationalist. " Not only does Jacobi seem to propose that faith constitutes the foundation or ground of reason, he seems to think also that reason is wholly hostile to the products of faith; this conviction is captured most poignantly in his claim that
. . . faith affirms what the understanding denies. Meanwhile, the understanding cannot bring itself to the affirmation [of faith] without sinking everything into a spiritless necessity. Therefore, nothing or God. If it is not to turn its back on reason straightaway, the understanding can have nothing more than a knowledge of its ignorance when it comes to God (IV, xliv, my italics).
Whereas the understanding, for Jacobi, is a "mere faculty of perceiving relations distinctly, that is, to forming the principle of identity and judging according to it" (Hegel 1802b: 97), faith or natural belief and sensibility are faculties of immediate or intuitively direct knowledge and certainty [unmittelbar Gewissheit] (II, 101). Faith exhibits, and understanding destroys, "the principle of life" [das Prinzip des Lebens] (II, 22); in short, this principle - important also to Fichte - insists that "life and consciousness are one" and that "things are only the creation of life" and not "life the creation of things" (II, 258). Where unity and genuine individuality ceases, there too ceases all truth; and indeed, for Jacobi, it is precisely the "indivisible in any being [which] determines its individuality, or makes it a real whole (II, 209). 4
4 In some sense, namely, the conviction that the understanding distorts the unity of life, Hegel would tentatively agree; Hegel, too, thinks that the understanding produces an incomplete and inadequate conception of the way things really are. The proper posture toward the understanding is not, however, one of disavowal and retreat into a fluidity of subjectivity and a faculty of immediate cognition; on the contrary, Hegel thinks that a proper grasp of life would involve a movement of mediation through which thought attains its completion, i. e. , taking up the incomplete or arrested modes of thought (understanding) - beginning from what is other than itself, permeating it, and in this movement changing it into what is universal. For Hegel, "to know is to think" and when thinking becomes complete,
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One of the consequences of Jacobi's theory of cognition would seem to be that whatever does violence to the unity or individuality of any perception that is accompanied by a feeling of certainty is a distortion of the immediate veracity of the impression. Crawford contributes to this interpretation of Jacobi as an irrationalist when he claims that "his indisposition to systematize what he conceived to be the revelations of reason is no doubt due to his vein of mysticism, which was a relic of his early pietistic training. He seemed afraid to analyze carefully, lest he should lose the actual in thought, the true in truth" (1905: 41). Knowledge, for Jacobi, perhaps not altogether unlike Pascal, depends less on mediated or discursive rational processes than it does on immediate intuitions. In Jacobi's Allwill, an early and essentially literary piece, the protagonist boasts that "[a]ll his mighty convictions rest" - and rightly so, we are led to believe - "upon immediate intuitions" (I, xliii). Zirngiebl similarly suggests that for Jacobi, not merely in his Allwill but in his more philosophical writings as well, "the validity of sensible evidence is superior to every rational conclusion" (1867: 71). For Jacobi, argues Hegel, faith and rational cognition are utterly irreconcilable; Jacobi reconciles the conflict between faith and reason by simply declaring the conflict absolute. (Jacobi seems to concede this point in his notorious 1818 correspondence with Schleiermacher. ) Expressed in its harshest form, surely too harsh, Jacobi's infamous salto mortale5 is animated by his deeply held conviction that "[e]very principle of mediate knowledge and wisdom must be false, and the opposite necessarily true" (Kuhn: 82).
The sole remaining point of contact with the absolute or unconditioned, for Jacobi, claims Hegel, is in the yearning of the individual for the infinite which it cannot possess but of which it is constantly aware. (It is in this sense, perhaps, that Fichte can be read as an heir to Jacobi: Beck claims that "Jacobi's true heirs in the nineteenth century were Fichte, Fries, and Schleiermacher, who developed voluntaristic, psychological, and emotionalistic criticisms of Kant initiated by him" (1969: 369). All tangled up in finitude, empirical contingency, and subjectivity, "immovably impaled on the stake of absolute antitheses," Jacobi takes "refuge in feeling, in yearning and sentimentality as his remedy against actuality" -
all abstraction falls away and thought attains perfect rationality, universality, actuality, and unity.
5 Lessing treats Jacobi's prescribed leap, one that at any rate his own "old legs and heavy head" were no longer able to take, to be the fallout of a false dilemma; Ho? lderlin - and presumably Hegel - rejected Jacobi's "salto mortale" in the early 1790s.
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but, says Hegel, he will do so "like bats that are neither bird nor beast, and belong neither to earth nor to sky" (1802b: 65). In Jacobi's philosophy, says Hegel, in brief, "the subjective and the finite prevail" (1802b: 148).
3. 2 Jacobi's Critique of Kant and Fichte.
Without the assumption [of the thing in itself] I cannot enter into the [Kantian] system, and with it I cannot remain. (Jacobi, Werke, II, 33).
Although Kant and Jacobi agree that finitude prevails, subjectivity in the critical philosophy operates according to the concept, i. e. , in a rule- governed and objective fashion. Subjectivity itself confesses, when subjected to Kant's transcendental critical methods, its own inner laws of subjective-objectivity. In Jacobi, and also in Schleiermacher, the principle of subjectivity is exaggerated to an opposite extreme: Shunning all inner tendencies toward universality, as if dialectically compensating for a deficiency in Kant's Religionsphilosophie, the reflective philosophers of subjectivity sought to restore "inner life" and an "aesthetic sensibility" [die Emfindung der Scho? nheit] to Protestantism. Kant staked out the boundaries of human knowledge in order to make room for faith, but the faith for which he made room - thought Jacobi, like most members of the literary intelligentsia of his day - was far too restrictive. In his earliest theological writings, comparing Protestantism with Greek folk religions, writings influenced by romanticism in general and Ho? lderlin in particular, Hegel expressed similar concerns and criticisms.
In Kant, as well as in Jacobi, finite cognition "becomes absolute because it is not to be transcended" (103) - i. e. , we are forbidden or restricted absolutely from venturing beyond finitude. Infinite cognition, which aims at understanding God's thoughts, at grasping the divine logos, at knowing or perhaps even communicating directly with God, at intuiting the unity which is more than its parts, is the stuff of hubris or impiety. Whereas Kant describes knowledge as a synthesis of categories and intuitions, and thus always limited to finite conditions, Jacobi follows Hume in suggesting that our knowledge is always the result of derivative or discursive associations [Verknu? pfungen]. In Kant and Jacobi, though in different ways, "formal knowledge" is the product of two heterogeneous constituents. Rational conclusions are a matter of analogical entailment: "quidquid est, illud est" (Jacobi: Werke, IV, 1, 210). For Jacobi, then, derivative cognitive judgments are - in principle - incapable of providing greater certainty [Gewissheit] than what is afforded to us in immediate
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revelation. The conviction that we exist, for example, or our faith in the laws of cause and effect, which Jacobi explains along the lines of Hume's "habits of the mind," is rooted more in an immediate intuition - a form of faith - than in rational proof. The decisive difference between Kant and Jacobi, thought Hegel, is that in Kant
. . . all these concepts of cause and effect, succession, et cetera, are strictly limited to appearance; the things in themselves in which these forms are objective as well as any cognition of them are simply nothing at all in themselves. The in-itself and reason are wholly raised above these forms of finitude and kept clear of them. This is the very result which gives Kant the immortal merit of having really made the beginning of a philosophy. Yet it is precisely in this nothingness of finitude that Jacobi sees an absolute in- itself (1802b: 101).
Thus what appears on first blush to be an improvement on Kant, an improvement because Jacobi's deduction extends beyond conscious into non-conscious intellect, quickly deteriorates into a variant form of what Hegel's calls "absolute dogmatism with a hue of inwardness. " Jacobi's deduction sets out from the presupposition that "there exist single beings that are aware of themselves and [also that they are] in community with one another" (Hegel, 1802b: 100). Although Jacobi appears to extend the concept of relation beyond the mere subjectivity of conscious intellect, applying it to real things rather than phenomena only (i. e. , beyond the reach of Kant's "relative identity"), Jacobi conceives of the intellect as standing "independently and dualistically alongside" things - thus, the relationship (or identity) of the subjective and objective intellect is beholding to something "external and alien. " Defending Kant against Jacobi in this regard, Hegel claims that:
Though we must still conceive the intellect as something subjective in Kant, still there is no external and alien relation of things; so that there is only one intellect, and in this Kant expresses at least the formal aspect of philosophy (1802b: 103).
Hegel retains Jacobi's general criticism of Kant, e. g. , that our knowledge of cause and effect applies to appearances only (that is, not indicative of how things are in themselves), but he cannot accept Jacobi's alternative. To Jacobi's boast of providing a deduction exhibiting "a far greater degree of unconditioned universality," Hegel quips: "Does the unconditioned have degrees? " (1802b: 102). What Jacobi means, but expresses poorly, is his intention to extend the reach of our concepts - e. g. , cause and effect or
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substantiality - beyond the horrors of epistemological solipsism and skepticism.
Jacobi was indeed horrified by Kant's relegation of finitude to the domain of mere appearances, i. e. , to things as they are for-us but not in- themselves. Hegel took this to be Jacobi's chief objection to Kant - namely, to the nihilism inherent to the critical philosophy. According to Jacobi, and Hegel quotes him at length on this point, the Kantian philosophy claims that:
our senses teach us nothing of the qualities of things, nothing of their mutual relations and connections, they do not even teach us that, in a transcendental sense, things are actually there. This would be a sensibility that represented nothing at all of the things themselves, a sensibility that is decidedly empty of objective reference. Our intellect is supposed to connect with this sensibility in order to give radically subjective forms to radically subjective intuitions according to radically subjective rules. . . . In that case I am everything and, properly speaking, nothing exists outside me. I, and everything of mine, am in the end also nothing but a mere delusion of something or other, the form of a form . . . a ghost (as quoted in Hegel 1802b: 102; Jacobi, Werke, II. 214 - 217).
Hegel draws our attention to this passage in Jacobi not only because it captures the much celebrated "charge of nihilism," he also wants us to recognize the importance of this accusation to the shape of Fichte's philosophical system. (For the purposes of Glauben und Wissen, Fichte represents a synthesis or sublation of Kant's objectivity and Jacobi's subjectivity. ) But what Jacobi considers to be abhorrent in Kant, Hegel reads as a speculative breakthrough: Hegel intends to show that "Kant's great theory that the intellect cognizes nothing in itself" is mistaken and thus incomplete only because he failed to recognize the genuinely cognitive dimension of rational ideas; Kant fails to see this, thinks Hegel, because his speculative intuitions were restricted to the form or conceptual vocabulary of reflectivity.
Hegel is especially interested in those philosophical moments when Kant is closest to 'reflecting himself beyond the confines of reflectivity,' where the critical philosophy is most genuinely speculative in its suggestiveness, and thus also where it is most vulnerable to reflective critique. For his transcendental nullification of empirical truth, as well as for disrupting our faith in sense cognition and denying reality to the Ideas, Kant is unfairly accused - by Jacobi, quips Hegel - of "an act of sacrilege or temple robbery. " Hegel sympathizes with the speculative spirit of the
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critical philosophy, sensing that Jacobi is himself guilty of something worse still. By volunteering for the guillotine, happily even, by renouncing our cognitive capacity to know God and resigning ourselves instead to merely intuiting the attributes of the Absolute, Hegel thinks that Jacobi reduces the human subject's relationship with the Absolute to sub-human levels.
3. 3 Jacobi's Misreading of Spinoza
As discussed earlier, in ? 1. 3 ("The Pantheism Debate"), Jacobi unwittingly contributed - perhaps second only to Herder's influence - to a revival of Spinozism in 18th century Germany. And while he is himself sometimes critical of Spinoza, Hegel - not unlike most Goethezeit philosophers - believed that Jacobi misread or otherwise mishandled Spinoza (as well as Lessing and Mendelssohn). In his defense of Spinoza against Jacobi, following Herder's lead, Hegel presents his own theory of infinity - one indebted to Spinoza - as "consuming and consummating finitude. " Though it might be tempting to dismiss Hegel's examination of Spinoza as inessential to the critical purposes of the essay, we should probably view this section of Glauben und Wissen as among the most crucial to understanding Hegel's mature system. Perhaps this text marks the birthplace of the Hegel we seem to appreciate most, the womb from which the so-called ideal of Hegel's youth was decisively transformed into a philosophical system, where he himself first "expresses at least the formal aspect of philosophy. "
Although most commentators are quick to point out that Hegel was not as sophisticated as Spinoza, and despite the fact that Hegel's treatment of Spinoza is inexact (e. g. , providing inaccurate references the Spinoza or misquoting Spinozistic formulae, his criticisms - even misreadings - serve as a lens through which to discover Hegel's own theory of "determination as negation" and "infinity as absolute affirmation" (i. e. , double negation). Hegel's reading of Jacobi dovetails into his exposition of Spinoza by means of a distinction drawn between reflective and speculative conceptions of the principle of sufficient reason [Satz des Grundes]. Though he acknowledges this principle as a necessary counterpart to the principle of non-contradition, Jacobi insists - dogmatically, thinks Hegel - on a sharp distinction between the logical analysis of sufficient reason from its separate function as a causal principle. The causal principle includes, whereas the logical principle excludes, thinks Jacobi, temporality. Indeed, Jacobi thought that it was the common mistake of naturalists from
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Spinoza to Schelling to have collapsed the principle of causation into the principle of sufficient reason. According to Hegel, Jacobi rightly recognizes the significance of the Satz des Grundes "as the principle of rational cognition: totum parte prius esse necesse est" [the whole is necessarily prior to the part] (1802b: 99); but what Jacobi fails to recognize "in the totality is the parts," claims Hegel, and he has to fetch them from somewhere outside the whole. " For Jacobi, we might say, the parts are essential to an adequate cognition of a compositional totality but inadequate for explaining the principle of generation and development. For Jacobi, says Hegel, cognitive analysis according to the principle of sufficient reason is "merely something subjective and incomplete. " From the reflective point of view, quoting from David Hume, "the objective becoming and the succession are still lacking, and for their sake the causal relation must still supervene to the reality" (Hegel 1802: 99). Because Jacobi views the totality in question to be a lifeless and abstract compositional totality, as opposed to a vitalistic unity, one constructed according to the principle of sufficient reason, everything is lost in necessity and simultaneity.
As mentioned earlier, Jacobi insists on a sharp distinction between the causal and the logical version of the principle of sufficient reason: as a logical principle, warns Jacobi, everything is lost in necessity and simultaneity; thus finitude and temporality perish in the highest Idea (i. e. , of the Eternal). Jacobi's admonition - beware that finitude might be consumed by the infinite - expresses, though incompletely, Hegel's speculative aspiration from the very beginning. Indeed, Hegel claims that
[t]hese warnings are very much like the famous signals of that worthy sentry of the Town Walls, who shouted to the approaching enemy who was ready to fire, not to shoot because this might cause misfortunes - as if the misfortune was not what was intended in the first place (1802b: 105).
If reason were indeed restricted - and restricted absolutely - "to the form of finitude" (1802: 64), which Hegel identifies as common ground for reflective philosophers of subjectivity, then Jacobi is correct in counting "everything lost" in speculative thought. But Hegel's critical point is that reason was unnecessarily restricted to finitude in Kant, Jacobi and Fichte.
It is Spinoza who offers the critical journalists with a speculative alternative to the reflective philosophies of subjectivity. For Spinoza, finite knowledge resides at the penumbral regions of rational thought: imaginatio. Following Spinoza, Hegel claims that "measure and time originate in us
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when we conceive quantity in abstraction from substance and duration in abstraction from the way it flows from the eternal things" (1802b: 107). Hegel is particularly interested in Part I of Spinoza's Ethics, which suggests that philosophical reflection must begin with an adequate concept of the infinite, and the principle that "every determination consists in negation" [omnis determination est negatio]. In the Ethics, Spinoza stipulates that something is "finite in its own kind" and "can be bounded by another thing of the same nature. " For Hegel this means that, in Spinoza, "single things are to be strictly nothing in themselves" (1802b: 108). In this sense, the infinite "consumes" finitude. But the highest idea is also the "consummation" of finitude, which is to say that finitude is but a partial negation of "an essence that includes the particular and the finite" (1802b: 107). Hegel's speculative conception of the infinite involves an absolute identity between the infinite and finite, an identity such that "the infinite on the one side, and the finite on the other, are once more nullified as to the antithesis between them" (1802b: 108). Within the infinite, the oppositions and partial negations or abstractions of the imagination (i. e. , the source of number, measure, and time) might be said "to vanish altogether. "
Jacobi's anxiety about the vanishing of finitude reflects, as it were, a speculative achievement. For Jacobi, the finite is 'not-infinite' and the infinite is 'not-finite'; thus, thinks Hegel, infinitude is as dependent on finitude as finitude is dependent on infinitude; viewed as separate and antithetical entities, both terms are "strictly nothing in themselves. " For speculative philosophy, however, "the negation of partial negation is absolute affirmation" (1802b: 107) - and indeed, this captures Spinoza's definition of the infinite (Ethics, I, VIII, Sch. I). For reflective philosophy, the empirical infinite remains fixed within an abstract antithesis with finitude; and to the extent that the infinite is determined by or "tangled up with" the finite, the former is as limited as the latter. Speculative philosophy recognizes that finitude is what it is only in abstraction from what it originally was; the speculative task would then consist in restoring finitude to that from whence it was taken, echoing Ho? lderlin's "Fragment of a System," and perhaps also to comprehend empirical reality - as if for the first time - "as it flows from all eternity. " But how do all things flow in eternity?
Drawing on one of Spinoza's geometrical similes used by Jacobi, the point of which is to drag "the empirical infinite back from imagination's endless pushing on and on" (1802: 111), Hegel hopes to demonstrate that
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neither measure nor time are infinite, but rather that they are mere aids to the imagination (i. e. , that they should not be confused with how things really are). Imagine a space enclosed by two non-concentric circles. Hegel says: "The mathematicians conclude that the inequalities possible in this space are infinite, and they conclude this because it is the nature of the thing that it surpasses any numerical determination. " This shows, thought Jacobi, and Hegel concurs, that "there is in . . . bounded space an actual infinite, an infinitum actu" (1802: 111 - 112). Hegel thinks that Jacobi fails to understand how Spinoza uses this example to prod us on to an authentic concept of the infinite. Infinitude, in the geometric example, is expressed in terms of an absolute affirmation: as "an essence which includes the particular or finite in itself at the same time, and is unique and indivisible" (107). This empirical infinity arises, for example, "in the infinite series [of functions of curved lines] of the mathematicians" (112). For Spinoza, quantity can be conceived of either abstractly (and superficially) or "secundum modum quo a rebus aeternis fluit [according to the mode in which it flows from eternal things]" (1802b: 106). Hegel cites Spinoza:
If then we consider quantity as it is presented in imagination (which we more often and readily do), we find it to be finite, divisible, and constructed of parts. But if we consider it intellectually and conceive it as substance (which is very difficult), then it will be found to be infinite, one, indivisible . . . matter is everywhere the same, and there are no distinct parts in it except insofar as we conceive matter to be modified in various ways. Then parts are distinct, not really, but only modally (Ethics, Proposition 15).
In Spinoza, thinks Hegel, the infinite both "consumes and consummates finitude. "
3. 4 On Jacobi's Reply to Glauben und Wissen
Jacobi provides a scathing review, though perhaps his comments constitute something more along the lines of a rant or harangue than a review, of Glauben und Wissen in a series of three open letters to Friedrich Ko? ppen. (In 1803, Ko? ppen described Schelling's Identita? tsphilosophie as "the philosophy of absolute nothingness. ") Dripping with sarcasm, Jacobi writes: "What I understood appeared to me extremely suitable to the occasion and entirely appropriate to the circumstances" (1802: 142). After fastidiously rehearsing the many slanderous things said about him by "those gallant men," Hegel and Schelling, Jacobi suggests that the sheer
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repetition of reproaches in Glauben und Wissen is severe and repugnant: "As is well known, one believes oneself in the end what one has often repeated and increasingly vehemently asserted" (1802: 144). Jacobi claims that his philosophical disputes, whether with Mendelssohn or Herder, or with Kant and Fichte, were conducted with honor as well as respect and affection. But now that the etiquette had been breached, by Hegel and Schelling, Jacobi considers himself to be released from the bonds of honorable discourse. What makes his satisfaction complete, writes Jacobi, "is that Kant and Fichte have been simultaneously expelled and banished with me; we are brothers in one and the same crime, completely similar sinners and deserving of death" (1802: 147). The central thesis of Glauben und Wissen is expressed by Jacobi in this way:
The Kantian is 'the objective dimension,' the Jacobian 'the subjective,' and the Fichtean 'the synthesis of both. They integrate and differentiate like the three dimensions of the body. . . Seen in daylight, the triune Kantian- Jacobian-Fichtean philosophy is 'nothing but completed and idealized empirical psychology, Lockeanism, eudaemonism, enlightenment in its nakedness (1802: 148).
Jacobi provides a concise summary or compendium of the central ideas expressed in Glauben und Wissen. Reduced to its simplest expression, Jacobi quips that these gallant gentlemen, Hegel and Schelling, do battle "a philosophy which is the death of philosophy is brought to death and destroyed just in the nick of time by philosophy is in the strictest sense philosophically just" (1802: 149).
Eventually, however, Jacobi's sarcasm is transformed into a small set of pointed criticisms: Jacobi objects not only to the clumsy or otherwise poor literary style (e. g. , Hegel's muddled metaphor of the bat as well as the vulgar image of the philosophy of subjectivity as impaled at the stake of finitude) and irresponsible scholarship (e. g. , claiming that Hegel falsely cited Jacobi in several ways), he is also convinced of several instances of "deliberate chicanery. " Perhaps the most damning reprimand is that the authors of Glauben und Wissen are deluded, impiously, in inflating themselves - analogous to the 'fable of the frog' - beyond their proper place and assuming the status of gods. With reference to their maltreatment of his essay in the Reinholdian Contributions and "Kapucinade," Jacobi claims that "nothing in the world can be more ridiculous than the screaming, slandering, rumbling and rapping, etcetera, etcetera, which the gentlemen Schelling and Hegel claim to have read in it" (1802: 156). Hegel's reproaches, claims Jacobi, are disingenuous: they are, in short,
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based solely on fabrication rather than fact. By contrast to the critical journalists, Jacobi says that he sought the unbiased truth honestly and humbly rather than, and by contrast to Hegel and Schelling, from "idle curiosity" and "feigned satisfaction. " According to Jacobi, he "needed a truth which would not be my creature, but whose creature [he] was" (1802: 156). Jacobi concludes his August letter on a note of optimism: Perhaps the work of Schelling and Hegel will make a difference, somehow, by shifting the focus of the discourse. But even then, Jacobi's optimism - assuming that it is genuine - also serves as reprimand; adopting the speculative Sprachspiel of the critical theorists, he asks, "Will not impartiality on the part of the object now be able to consume and destroy partiality on the part of the subject just as absolute infinity has already done with absolute finitiude" (1802: 157)? Earlier in the paragraph, however, the plea for impartiality has a personal rather than speculative connotation, namely, when Jacobi asks Ko?
ppen: "Is it asking too much of them if one want to have them impartial? "
Though he was a philosophical gadfly, often extreme if not harsh and unfair, Jacobi exercised a significant influence on the trajectory of German idealism as well as early romanticism. This is especially true of his influence on Fichte. Perhaps Breazeale is correct in suggesting that "almost everything Fichte published during his first year at Berlin [1799], including the Vocation of Man, was designed not only to demonstrate the falsity of the charge of atheism, but also to reveal the deep confusion underlying Jacobi to Fichte" (1994: xviii). Beyond the influence of his charge of nihilism and atheism, Jacobi was important for his doctrine of the primacy of existence over consciousness. In his Briefe u? ber Spinoza, Jacobi writes:
In my judgment, the greatest merit of the [philosophical] investigator is to disclose [enthu? llen] existence, to reveal it . . . Explanation is only a means, a path toward the goal - never the final end. His goal is that which cannot be explained: the irresolvable, immediate and simple" (IV/1, 72).
Citing this passage in his German Idealism, Beiser suggests that "[n]o single statement of Jacobi has a greater impact on the romantic generation" (Beiser 2002: 384). Fichte's failed attempt to explain the irresolvable, or, alternatively, to "comprehend the incomprehensible" [das Unbegreifliches zu begreifen], constitutes the speculative task for Hegel if not also Schelling in Jena. For Kant, the Hegelian demand is unfair: "we comprehend this incomprehensibility, and that is all that can be fairly demanded of a philosophy which strives to carry its principles to the very
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limit of human reason" (1795: 463). When it comes to comprehending the incomprehensible, or at least comprehending incomprehensibility, Jacobi agrees - more or less - with Kant and Fichte. But for Jacobi, faith provides us with an immediate or intuitively direct knowledge and certainty [unmittelbar Gewissheit] (II, 101). Though they differ from one another, Hegel suggests that Jacobi as well as Kant and Fichte deny knowledge and surrender philosophy to faith; ultimately, they agree that - as Fichte put it in his ber der Grund unsers Glaubens an eine Go? ttliche Weltregierung (1798) - "faith is the basis of all certainty" and "the condition of all other truths. "
Before turning to Hegel's reading of Fichte, however, it seems important to address the dialectical if not historical influence of Schleiermacher on Hegel's speculative reconciliation of faith and knowledge. Although Hegel claims that Jacobi provides "the most comprehensive expression of the principle of Protestantism, an exemplary representative of its species," Schleiermacher is characterized as "a higher and nobler shape" (Hegel 1802: 148) of the same fundamental principle; at best, this is a very left-handed compliment. That said, Schleiermacher may well have been pleased by the association alleged by Hegel. And indeed, Jacobi expresses a certain degree of satisfaction at having been maligned in such good company - together, that is, with Kant and Fichte. (Conspicuously, no mention is made of Schleiermacher. ) Although it was Jacobi who first accused Fichte of 'nihilism,' in his Open Letter to Fichte (1799), Hegel appropriated Jacobi's indictment for himself and applied it not only to Fichte but also Kant and the entirety of transcendental idealism. As representatives of the reflective philosophy of subjectivity, Hegel associates Jacobi with Kant and Fichte; so to the extent that Jacobi, not unlike Kant and Fichte, or Locke and Hume, "denies that speculation is the standpoint of truth" and that "empiricism still remains the highest site of the human intellect" (1799: 129), Jacobi is himself guilty - by association - of skepticism if not also nihilism.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE HEGEL-SCHLEIERMACHER CONFLICT
In his Introduction to Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion, Richard Crouter concedes that "analysis must sometimes appear as the betrayal of a friend, if only to get inside the arguments in an objective manner" (1996: xxxi). Schleiermacher, to whom Lu? lmann refers as "the church-father of the nineteenth century," is by some accounts the dominant theologian of modernity, correctly ranked together with Luther and Calvin in his significance to Protestant thought, since what began in 1799 with the Speeches ended - according to Barth, who some read as Schleiermacher's "twentieth-century nemesis" - with the Schleiermacher renaissance as embodied in the romantic orientation of Troeltsch, Ritschl, and particularly W. Herrmann. Schleiermacher's importance as a theologian has not been underestimated; and his centrality to hermeneutics is also secure. But as a philosopher of religion, whose task it is - says Hegel - to articulate conceptually what is already experienced in religion, Schleiermacher's reputation has been tarnished from the very beginning. Nearly all of Hegel's early criticisms of Schleiermacher (and Jacobi) stem from his life-long preoccupation with resolving "the discord [between reason and religion] in a manner appropriate to us, a reconciliation in [the form of] philosophy" (1821: 161). According to the philosophy indigenous to Halle, where Schleiermacher studied Wolff by day and Kant and Herder by night: "Everything must be proved by reason, as on the philosopher's stone. " I am interested in Schleiermacher's "night thoughts. "
Traditionally, perhaps not altogether unjustifiably, philosophers of history and historians of philosophy alike have tended to characterize Hegel's relationship to Schleiermacher as constituting - it should come as no surprise - a dialectical Gegensatz (antithesis) between, say, were we to state the dilemma in its most extreme form, philosophical gnosticism and religious emotivism. Although Schleiermacher's programme came to set the standard for Romantic theology, he was "by no means only a Romantic" (Barth: 228). And if we were to follow Beiser's reading of Hegel, implicit in The Fate of Reason (1992) and Enlightenment, Revolution, Romanticism (1998), we might be tempted to say that much if
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not most of what Hegel gets right, he got from the Romantics. For those who work through the popular caricatures of what Hegel stressed as a philosopher and what Schleiermacher advocated as a theologian, it is not the differences but very often the similarities, with regard to inspiration and method and literary style, which secretly animate continued analysis into the alleged conflict. But Schleiermacher and Hegel were latecomers or perhaps outsiders, each in his own way, Hegel to a greater degree, and "nothing is less generous than the poetic self [and I would amend this with the philosophical self] when it wrestles for its own survival" (Bloom 1973: 18). In what follows, I focus on Hegel's side of the story as told albeit cryptically in his 1802 Faith and Knowledge.
In a very telling essay, titled "Hegel and Schleiermacher at Berlin: A Many-Sided Debate" (1980), Richard Crouter "pauses," briefly, before turning his attention to the alleged conflict in Berlin in 1814, to examine Hegel's earliest criticisms of Schleiermacher's Speeches. The initial and, I suggest, for Hegel, decisive Zusammenstoss [clash] in the Hegel- Schleiermacher conflict occurred in 1802, when, in the process of mounting a more general critique of the reflective philosophies of subjectivity, Hegel refers - almost parenthetically - to the Speeches as but a slight variation on the philosophy of Jacobi; and because Jacobi's philosophical standpoint is maligned, Schleiermacher - or, as it were, "the author of the Speeches" (Hegel 1802: 150) - is guilty by association. Hegel's Jena period critique (1800-1802) signals, thinks Crouter, "a foreshadowing of differences" - differences that, according to Jeffrey Hoover (1988), are explained as much in terms of political alliances as philosophical conviction. While agreeing with Crouter that it is important "to examine this [Jacobi-Schleiermacher] association and ask whether it has any basis in fact," an adequate answer to this question requires - or so I shall argue - substantially more than a pause. And while it is true that the debate in Berlin was markedly political, Hegel's later criticisms - most notably in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1821) and his Foreword to Hinrichs's Die Religion im inneren Verha? ltnisse zur Wissenschaft (1822) - are remarkably consistent with the philosophical criticisms of 1802. The conflict between Schleiermacher and Hegel, though undeniably exacerbated by political alliances and personal grievances, I am convinced, was essentially philosophical.
In Part I of what follows I quickly rehearse what we know about the Jacobi-Schleiermacher association alleged by Hegel. But since the association alleged by Hegel turns on a philosophical association, treating
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Schleiermacher and Jacobi as representative of the subjective side of the reflective philosophies of subjectivity, I turn in Part II to the central argument of Hegel's Faith and Knowledge essay. In Parts III and IV, I examine the principle of Protestantism in Jacobi and Schleiermacher. I suggest by way of conclusion that while Hegel may have misread Schleiermacher, the association alleged by Hegel is based on an instructive and quite arguably accurate reading of Schleiermacher's and Jacobi's respective philosophies of religion.
4. 1 The Historical Association
Jacobi was acquainted with Schleiermacher through a mutual friend, Brinkmann, who first met Schleiermacher in 1800. In a letter sent to Brinkmann in May of that same year, Schleiermacher wrote apropos of the Speeches:
I can only hope to be understood by a few; but most importantly, and sacred to me, would be Jacobi's judgment. You are familiar with my respect for this humane and independent thinker; I cannot deny that I have always thought of him, if nothing better comes to mind, as a judge. You must not conceal anything of his comments. Even his conditional praise would make me proud, though his reproach would not discourage me. This is my first literary attempt - it certainly is not excellent, but I should not give up the hope to one day present something good.
Brinkmann cited this very portion of Schleiermacher's letter in his correspondence with Jacobi. In Dilthey's words, "Jacobi empfand keine Sympathie" [Jacobi was indifferent to, or felt no real sense of kinship with, Schleiermacher] (Dilthey: 371). Above all else, Jacobi was shocked by the incipient Fichtianismus he detected in the Speeches. While admitting his reserved affinity with Fichteanism to Jacobi, again through Brinkmann, Schleiermacher stressed the points of divergence; nevertheless, Jacobi - whose "Open Letter to Fichte" (1799) associated Fichte with Spinozism and thus atheism - withheld even so much as his "conditional praise" for Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher understood that Jacobi's accusation of Fichteanism was tantamount to the charge of atheism. 1 Schleiermacher confided to Brinkmann that he had been wounded to the heart.
1 Schleiermacher's critics typically concur with Jacobi that Schleiermacher was a Spinozist. Robert Adamson, whose work on Fichte was influential on the appropriation of German idealism by the classical American pragmatists, is representative: "The truth is that Schleiermacher never advanced, philosophically,
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The Speeches (1799) are mentioned briefly in two of Hegel's Jenaer Zeit essays: "The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy" and "Faith and Knowledge," published in 1801 and 1802 respectively. According to the earlier essay:
A phenomenon such as the Speeches on Religion may not immediately concern the speculative need. Yet they and their reception - and even more so the dignity that is beginning to be accorded, more or less clearly or obscurely, to poetry and art in general in all their true scope - indicate the need for a philosophy that will recompense nature for the mishandling that it suffered with Kant and Fichte's systems, and set reason itself in harmony with nature, not by having reason renounce itself or become an insipid imitator of nature, but by reason recasting itself into nature out of its own inner strength" (1801: 83).
And while it might be possible to read Hegel's earliest references to the Speeches as "far from being critical" (Crouter 1980: 24), even "laudatory" (Harris 1977a: 75), there can be little doubt about Hegel's decidedly negative assessment one year later in Faith and Knowledge. Recalling the programmatic introduction to the Critical Journal of Philosophy to which these essays whole-heartedly or, as in the case of Hegel, almost whole- heartedly subscribed, it is clear that Schleiermacher was to be considered one of the "abundantly flourishing weeds" which then jeopardized the "few good seeds that [had] been sown. "
Crouter claims that "Jacobi appears to have made no formal reply to Hegel's attack on his teaching in Faith and Knowledge" and that "Schleiermacher [regretted] that Jacobi did not respond to Hegel's remarks" (1980: 25). But while it may be true that Schleiermacher regretted that Jacobi did not comment explicitly on the association alleged by Hegel, Jacobi was quite thorough if "repetitively long-winded" in his response to Hegel's remarks: Jacobi's response, in the form of three letters, one of which was titled "On Faith and Knowledge," was published in 1803 as part of an appendix to Friedrich Koeppen's Schellings Lehre oder das Ganze der Philosophie des Absoluten Nichts, Nebst drei Briefen
beyond Spinozism, the principles of which are only disguised under the mystically pious tone of feeling on which all his speculation rested" (Adamson 1884: 73). On the question of Schleiermacher's alleged pantheism, Julia Lamm argues convincingly that "Schleiermacher's notion of a living God, while indeed influenced by his appropriation of Spinoza and neo-Spinozism, is developed in the Glaubenslehre in such a way that it is free from the charges of pantheism commonly made against it" (1996: 6).
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verwandten Inhalts von Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (Hamburg). And indeed Schleiermacher discusses the mentioned essay in several tormented letters to Brinkmann. Perhaps this is a very minor point; and perhaps Jacobi's published letters to Koeppen cannot be taken seriously as a "formal response" to Hegel's critique. Nevertheless, Schleiermacher considered Jacobi's "silence" concerning their alleged association - which Schleiermacher readily accepted - to be conspicuous; indeed, Schleiermacher treats the silence as indicative of "eine unumgeschra? nkteste Verachtung" [an unlimited disdain]. There is, however, a happy ending to this biographical sketch: Fifteen years later, in 1818, Schleiermacher finally met Jacobi. By Schleiermacher's account, the belated encounter was more than conciliatory. Indeed, Schleiermacher - prior to Jacobi's death in 1819 - intended to dedicate his forthcoming publication (The Christian Faith [Glaubenslehre], published in 1821-1822), which constitutes a subtle but significant refinement in Schleiermacher's position, to "old Fritz. " These biographical comments simply set the stage for a more substantive investigation into the "facts" of the philosophical association alleged by Hegel in 1802.
4. 2 Schleiermacher and the Principle of Protestantism
Since Hegel's early assessment of Schleiermacher is parasitic on - perhaps even incidental to - his critique of Jacobi, we are now in a position to better "examine [Hegel's association of Schleiermacher with Jacobi] and ask whether it has any basis in fact" (Crouter 1980: 25). But what qualifies as a fact in this case? The "association question" presupposes an understanding of Hegel's reading or misreading of the reflective philosophies of subjectivity, the principle of Protestantism, the philosophy of Jacobi, and then the philosophy of religion articulated in the Speeches. And at this point, one may well be tempted to abandon the "association game" altogether; but before that happens, let us examine the philosophical association in Hegel's own mind - for surely, our reading of Hegel's reading of Jacobi and Schleiermacher will precede our criticism that Hegel misread Schleiermacher. Should we take seriously Schleiermacher's claim that he "remained the same since the Speeches"? Perhaps, but out of fairness to Hegel, we must focus on what Schleiermacher actually said in the 1799 (as opposed to the 1806, 1821, or 1831) edition. That said, let us not forget Schleiermacher's own intimation - in the second Speech, the speech on which Hegel focuses his attention - that "we must learn to read between the lines. " Hegel's criticisms, like Jacobi's, are primarily concerned with what was going on between the
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lines or behind the veil of Schleiermacher's prose. With this in mind, I think that Hegel's criticism is as far-reaching as it is terse.
Hegel implicitly associates Schleiermacher with Jacobi insofar as Schleiermacher is associated with the fundamental principles of Protestantism: But is the truly Absolute, in Schleiermacher, as in Jacobi, an absolute Beyond in faith and in feeling? Is it nothing for cognitive reason? Is Schleiermacher all tangled up, along with Jacobi, in finitude? Did Schleiermacher, in the Speeches, like Jacobi, understand the eternal to be above or beyond the sphere of opposition, beyond the concept and the empirical (Hegel 1802b: 63)? Did Schleiermacher, in 1799, misled by his reading of Jacobi's misreading of Spinoza, and as part of an over-reaction to the Aufkla? rung, unjustly and paternalistically restrict the reach of reason [Vernunft] to the domain or dominions of the understanding [Verstand]? And is Schleiermacher, like Jacobi and Kant and Fichte, as alleged by Hegel, committed to an absolute antithesis between the finite and the infinite (1802b: 147)? Hegel takes the more obvious points of agreement between Schleiermacher and Jacobi for granted - namely, that nihilism is the admonitory lesson of idealism and that feeling is the highest form of interiority. 2
Hegel explicitly associates Schleiermacher with Jacobi in the following manner: First, because Jacobi's radical subjectivity is easily polluted with reflectivity and thus collapses in on itself, abandoning the beyond for the things of this world, Schleiermacher's more moderate subjectivity (a subjectivity tempered by intersubjectivity) achieves a higher pitch of intensity. Second, in Schleiermacher, much more than in Jacobi, the "deification of the subject [is] made into a more elevated object" (1802b: 149). Third, the "intuition of oneself and of the world [are] grasped in a more ideal [idealisch] way" in Schleiermacher than in Jacobi - i. e. , even
2 According to Jacobi, the honest transcendental idealist is forced to admit that "our senses teach us nothing of the qualities of things, nothing of their mutual relations and connections, they do not even teach us that, in a transcendental sense, things are actually there. This would be a sensibility that represented nothing at all of the things themselves, a sensibility that is decidedly empty of objective reference. Our intellect is supposed to connect with this sensibility in order to give radically subjective forms to radically subjective intuitions according to radically subjective rules. [. . . ] In that case I am everything and, properly speaking, nothing exists outside me. I, and everything of mine, am in the end also nothing but a mere delusion of something or other, the form of a form, [. . . ] a ghost" (1812-1825: II. 214-17).
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the highest intuition is turned into something subjective, something that remains private and personal. 3 Fourth, the quest of Protestantism for reconciliation in the here and now is achieved - in Schleiermacher - without stepping out of its character of subjectivity. Fifth, and last, that "even when the individual casts away his [or her] subjectivity, and the dogmatism of yearning dissolves its antithesis in idealism, still this Subject-Objectivity in the intuition of the universe [remains] something particular and subjective" in Schleiermacher (1802b: 150). Do these explicit associations have any basis in fact? One's answer to this question turns on what one means by "fact. " Hegel's association of Schleiermacher with Jacobi is part of a larger association; the reflective philosophies of subjectivity include not only Jacobi and Schleiermacher, of course, but Kant and Fichte as well.
4. 3 Schleiermacher at the Periphery
To what extent did Hegel misread or otherwise misrepresent Schleiermacher? That depends on how one reads Schleiermacher and, I think, equally, how one reads Hegel. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Hegel, at least to this point in his career, in 1802, actively ignored or otherwise evaded the speculative significance of the Speeches. But because Hegel, at least at this stage of his career, was often viewed as a mere apprentice to Schelling's genius, Hegel's alleged misunderstanding of his precursors - in this case, Schleiermacher and Jacobi - is itself something to be understood. In short, Hegel's alleged misreading is a philosophical interpretation; rather than a history of philosophy, Hegel is committed to a philosophy of history. Rather than merely rehearsing the thought of his precursors, Hegel intended to transform and complete them - and indeed, this is philosophical criticism as described in the programmatic introduction to the Critical Journal of which this 1802 essay is a part. Whether the association Hegel draws between Schleiermacher and Jacobi has any basis in fact, then, depends on whether Hegel's interpretation of the "reflective philosophies of subjectivity" has
3 Schleiermacher's philosophy, says Hegel, begins to compensate nature for the mishandling it received at the hands of the Critical philosophy: "Nature, as a collection of finite facts, is extinguished and acknowledged as the Universe" [i. e. , the identity of the jenseits and the diesseits]; because of this, "the yearning is brought back from its escape out of actuality into an eternal beyond, the partition between the cognitive subject and the absolutely unattainable object is torn down, grief is assuaged in joy, and the endless striving is satisfied in intuition" (Hegel 1802b: 150).
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any basis in fact. To view Hegel's reading of Schleiermacher as a misreading, therefore, misses the critical point of the Critical Journal and an essential feature of this "many-sided debate. "
But even if Hegel relegates Schleiermacher to the periphery of his analysis of his philosophical contemporaries, mentioning the Speeches en passant, and then only as a slight variation on Jacobi, Hegel must have been familiar with Schleiermacher's philosophy of religion by the time he wrote Glauben und Wissen. Hegel could have easily appropriated Schleiermacher along the lines of those proposed by Fackenheim in his God Within. But if that were the case, Schleiermacher would have been construed not as a variation on Jacobi but rather as a step beyond Fichte; but for Hegel, that honor belongs to Schelling. Following Fackenheim, Fichte represents a "historic breakthrough to God internalized, to the God within" (1996: 58). Though we will discuss Fichte in the following chapter, Fackenheim argues that whereas morality led to religion in Kant, the joy of moral activity constitutes religion in Fichte's system of idealism. For Schelling, at this same time, in 1800, the God within is found within art; and for Schleiermacher, the God within is found in the experience of the religious life. According to Fackenheim, who seems to understand the religious dimension of Hegel's thought as well as anyone, Hegel misunderstood Schleiermacher's assertion that religious experience is captured in the feeling of absolute dependence. "For Schleiermacher," claims Fackenheim, "to have reached this feeling [of absolute dependence] is to have gone beyond Fichte's self-activity: it is to have reached the ultimate" (1996: 59). What Fackenheim is claiming for Schleiermacher, namely, that he transcends Fichte's self-activity and reached the ultimate, is a speculative distinction that the critical journals reserved - as we shall see in the following chapters - for themselves. 4
4 The dialectical somersault from, say, Kant's 'transcendental realism' to Fichte's 'ethical idealism' and then to Schleiermacher's 'higher realism' if not also Schelling's 'realism-idealism' would have fit nicely into the program implemented in Glauben und Wissen. As Fackenheim turns it: "Divinity is present for this feeling, but it is not in it, let alone reducible to it, for the feeling is one of dependence, and this is on an Other. Schleiermacher therefore asserts a new 'realism. ' Rather than a lapse into the old, discredited realism, which is beneath Fichte's idealism, this is a realism beyond it. Divinity, to be sure, is present-as- other, but it is thus disclosed to the feeling of absolute dependence, and to it alone, and manifest as present only once Fichtean moral activity, which projects Divinity into the infinite future, is transcended. Fichtean idealism therefore paves for Schleiermacher the way for something higher still, a 'higher realism'" (1996: 59).
? CHAPTER FIVE
ON FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE IN FICHTE
As for myself qua subject-object, I am incomprehensible. Within experience, I divide myself into a subject and an object, which, to be sure, should [sollte] be thought of as originally one.
--Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre, ? 17 (B419-20; D211).
Hegel's 1802 reading of Fichte is based largely on his reading of Die Bestimmung des Menschens [The Vocation of Man], which was published in 1799 as a popular if not polemical presentation of Fichte's 1794 Wissenschaftslehre. And Hegel's reading of Fichte was certainly influenced by Ho? lderlin and Schelling. Hegel appropriates Fichte's solution to the faith and reason debate by situating it within its dialectical if not also historical context: though Fichte is associated with Kant and Jacobi by Hegel as the third stage or Aufhebung within the paradigm of reflective philosophy, Fichte distinguishes himself from his dialectical siblings in terms of his synthesis of the objectivism of Kant and the subjectivism of Jacobi or Schleiermacher. Not altogether unlike Herder, who was caught between Kant and Hamann, Fichte attempts to reconcile the spirit of the Aufklarung with the faith and feeling of the Sturm und Drang.
According to Hegel's reading of the Bestimmung des Menschens (1800), Fichte's compromise - not unlike the solutions posed by Kant and Jacobi - underestimates the scope of reason and misidentifies the source of faith. Although Hegel's reading of the Bestimmung might be viewed as misleading, since the Bestimmung is itself polemical to such a degree that it surely misrepresents Fichte's larger enterprise, as anticipated in the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre but perhaps best articulated in his later manuscripts on Naturrecht, it is - I think - instructive nonetheless: Hegel's (mis-)reading of Fichte teaches us something important about Hegel in terms of his goals as well as his methods. And Hegel's (mis-)reading of Fichte may well have exercised some influence on Fichte's subsequent theory of inter-
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subjectivity and the social origins of consciousness. Hegel may have been right to suggest that Fichte and Jacobi are ultimately preoccupied with the same problem and that they are suggesting a similar solution, something that both Fichte and Jacobi animatedly denied. What Hegel sees as minor differences, Fichte and Jacobi saw as utterly irreconcilable. 1 And while Jacobi complained that Hegel misread or otherwise misrepresented him,2 Fichte never responded to Hegel's criticisms; indeed, claims Wayne Martin, in "In Defense of the Bad Infinite," Fichte "never publicly acknowledged their existence. " Despite Fichte's alleged "speculative failure," and the remaining residue of reflectivity, the Wissenschaftslehre is a triumph when viewed as an attempt to turn systemicity back upon itself and thereby stretch the reach of reason beyond the phenomenal realm. Fichte's deduction is, on this reading, an elaborate attempt "aus Reflektion hinauszureflektieren. "
5. 1 'Egregious Misinterpretations' of Fichte.
In Fichte's Jena Wissenschaftslehre, philosophy is presented as a whole in which the various parts are united by an Act [die Tat], an intellectual intuition which is "the singular or sole secure standpoint for all philosophy" [der einzige festige Standpunkt fu? r alle Philosophie] (Werke: I. 466) and, thinks Fichte, the sort of consciousness underlying the categorical imperative in Kant. The Jena WL was in large part written in response to what Breazeale calls "the egregious misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the aim and the content of the [Foundations of the Wissenschaftslehre]" (1988a: xi). Two of the more prominent of these alleged misunderstandings or misinterpretations were promulgated by or at least associated with Hegel and Jacobi. The fact that Jacobi's misunderstanding was painful to Fichte is all too clear from the sustained cordiality - an anomalous gesture in Fichte's career - that he extended toward Jacobi in his comments in the "Second Introduction"; it is also
1 Freud discusses the "narcissism of minor differences" in "The Taboo of Virginity" (1917), "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego" (1922), and "Civilization and its Discontents" (1929). In the earliest essay Freud observes that "it is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them. "
2 Jacobi objected to Hegel's reading in an essay titled "On Faith and Knowledge in Response to Schelling and Hegel" (1803), which was published as an appendix to Friedrich Ko? ppen's Schellings Lehre oder das Ganze der Philosophie des Absoluten Nichts. Nebst drei Briefen verwandten Inhalts von Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (Hamburg, 1803).
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clear from the conciliatory comments at the conclusion of the 'second dialogue,' the transition from 'Wissen' to 'Glauben,' in the Bestimmung des Menschens essay.
The alleged Hegelian misunderstanding runs something like this: In the Differenzschrift, which apparently provided the "decisive nudge" for Schelling's split with Fichte, Hegel argues that although Fichte succeeded in purifying further the principle of Kant's deduction of the categories and identify if not remove its "unthinking inconsistency" (Haldane and Simson, III, 481), the Wissenschaftlehre is ultimately a speculative failure; in order to tie up the speculative loose ends, Hegel says that Fichte resorts to a strategy characteristic of the reflective philosophies of subjectivity (or, as he puts it in the Pha? nomenologie, "edifying philosophy") - i. e. , "to introduce the Absolute into philosophy through the backdoor" (1802a: 369). 3 According to Hegel's Glauben und Wissen, "the Third that is truly the First and the Only One is not to be found in the system" (1802b: 170); the task of the third principle "simply cannot be performed" (1802b: 173). Hegel and Schelling agree that Fichte's system "knows only the knowing, but is not the knowing itself"; the speculative task consists in an Ausfu? hrung of Fichtean idealism. Hegel complains that "if we accept the popular conception of philosophy and make explanation our business, the most interesting side of the objective world, the side of its reality, remains [in Fichte] unexplained" (1802b: 154); in short, Hegel argues that "formal idealism does not alter the common and incomprehensible necessity of empirical existence in the slightest. " Adding insult to injury, the Fichtean philosophy is characterized as but a slight dialectical variation on the faith philosophy of Jacobi. Jacobi, on the other hand, is critical of the Wissenschaftslehre because it leads - in short and as is clear from his Jacobi an Fichte (1798) - to nihilism; granted, the charge of "nihilism" was part and parcel of Jacobi's rhetorical arsenal (i. e. , marshaled at various times against Spinoza, Kant, Fichte and - eventually - Hegel), but given Fichte's response, there is good reason to think that it was the charge
3 In the Vocation of Man (hereafter VOM), Fichte seems to concede that the way of knowledge leads to nihilism: "All earnestness and all reality are banished from my life; and life, as well as thought, is transformed into a mere play which proceeds from nothing and tends to nothing" (88). Moreover, "[k]nowledge is not [the means by which to grasp my vocation]; no knowledge can be its own foundation, its own proof; every knowledge presupposes another higher knowledge on which it is founded, and to this ascent there is no end. It is faith, that voluntary acquiescence in the view which is naturally presented to us, because only through this view can we fulfill our vocation" (88-89).
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