No More Learning

For a consciousness shot through with finitude, religion has its sublime aspect only in feeling and the "empty shell of subjective conviction" (1822: 245); resigned to finitude, writes Schelling, philosophy "is supposed to prettify itself with the surface colour of the supersensous by pointing, in faith, to something higher" (1802a: 369).
In their Introduction on the Essence of the Philosophical Criticism Generally, and its Relationship to the Present State of Philosophy in Particular, the critical journalists argue that the shared assumption "ineradicably implanted" in the reflective philosophies of subjectivity is the conviction that "in order to be genuinely real, the 'in itself' must be independent of the ego outside it" (1802a: 277). The reflective philosophers of subjectivity met the demand of their age by carefully crafting an absolute being "which is all and does all, but never itself makes an appearance" - indeed, far from an appearance, the absolute is politely
? 9. Hegel, Science of Logic, I, 169 (1969, Miller).
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escorted into the unattainable beyond. This reflective enterprise is doomed, thinks Hegel, not only because the truce is precarious and insubstantial, it is more serious than that, but much more because a faith of this sort, one steeped in a reflective attitude toward finitude, cannot - in principle - lift itself above subjectivity. The Hegelian critique of the Reflexionskultur focuses on the terms of the truce and what, if successful, it hopes and sometimes promises to accomplish. The reflective reconciliation leads to a brand of faith that seemed to Hegel no longer worth the bother, a victorious reason that no longer merited the name, and a preoccupation with empirical existence that was utterly vulgar. Thus Hegel found it necessary to deny or otherwise re(de)fine [aufheben] faith in order to make room for reason; such is the task of philosophical criticism (as applied to religion).
2. 2. Toward a Speculative Reconciliation.
For the sake of a more lasting reconciliation, the Kantian dictum must be reversed. It is serendipitous, we might suppose, that Kant uses a term with which Hegel was to become associated, Aufhebung, in his claim that we "deny [aufheben] reason in order to make room for faith"; when we, for Hegel, reverse the dictum (i. e. , Wir mussten also das Glauben aufheben, um zu Wissen Platz zu bekommen), we retain the word but transfigure it in Hegel's technical sense. Not only does Hegel annul the negative features of reflectivity, he also preserves the positive - thus both senses of the term, Aufhebung, are satisfied. The reflective philosophy of subjectivity has, according to Hegel, a "positive, genuine though subordinate position within true philosophy" (1802b: 190). Hegel repeats this conviction in the Preface to the Phenomenology:
It must be said of the Absolute that it is essentially a result and that it is only truly what it is in the end . . . One misunderstands reason, therefore, when reflection is excluded from the truth and not grasped as a positive stage of the absolute. It is reflection which makes the truth a result. 10
Though Hegel found it necessary to "sublimate"11 or re(de)fine faith in order to make room for faith, he certainly did not mean to imply that the claims of faith were wholly untrue; on the contrary, for Hegel, strange as it
10 Hegel, Pha? nomenologie, Vorrede, 22 (my italics).
11 This translation of "Aufhebung," sublimation, belongs to W. Kaufmann; but for this translation to pull its weight, so to speak, we must understand sublimation in its alchemic rather than its psycho-analytic sense.
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may sound, faith is a necessary precondition to knowledge. That is not to say that Hegel was a closet Medievalist, but it seems undeniable that Hegel acknowledged a developmental sequence in religious consciousness. 12
Absolute religion differs from absolute knowledge only in form, the content is true in both; religion represents with images what philosophy grasps conceptually. 13 If knowledge is the "conscious identity of the finite and infinite," and if identity is never simple for Hegel, then one misunderstands reason when faith is "excluded from the truth and not grasped as a positive stage of the Absolute. " On this point, at least, Hegel understood reason. The task of the philosophy of religion includes an explanation of how the individual human subject rises above all that is finite to absolute universality and, at the same time, remains within the scope of finite self-consciousness. 14 This task requires, of course, the "seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative. " Hegel's explanation hinges on the role of thinking in relation to feeling. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel suggests that
[i]n thinking I raise myself above all that is finite to the absolute and am infinite consciousness, while at the same time I am finite self- consciousness, indeed to the full extent of my empirical condition (LPR, 211-212).
The speculative enterprise in Hegel consists largely of organizing the manifold shapes of restriction and defect into an integrated totality which lifts common understanding to rational knowledge - i. e. , to a consciousness of the actual presence of the infinite; indeed, "non-knowing becomes knowledge by becoming organized" (1801: 165). According to the Encyclopedia, an adequate religion would demonstrate in some manner that though "[w]e usually suppose that the absolute must lie far beyond, it is precisely what is wholly present" (EL, 59, Section 24, Z2). In an extremely telling passage, Hegel claims that
12 The dialectical movement from feeling to representation to thought is characteristic of Hegel's thought from the Phenomenology forward; in his philosophy of religion, the sequence - which is animated by negation - is most explicit in his 1824 Concept of Religion.
13 See LPR1, 260; this aspect of Hegel's philosophy of religion has been discussed at length in both Fachenheim's The Religious Dimensions of Hegel and Williamson's Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Religion. More generally, "[t]he sole interest of Reason is to suspend such rigid antitheses" (1801: 90).
14 See Hegel's LPR, 211-212.
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Chapter Two
[i]n the true faith the whole sphere of finitude, of being-something-on- one's-own-account, the sphere of sensibility sinks into nothing before the thinking and intuiting of the eternal. The thinking and the intuiting become one and all the midges of subjectivity are burned to death in this consuming fire, and the very consciousness of this surrender and nullification is nullified (1802b: 141, my italics).
Finitude's "sinking into nothing" occurs to some degree, e. g. in song, among the simple and naive faiths, but to the fullest extent this can occur only in speculative philosophy or a speculative brand of faith (where the negation characteristic of reflection has been thoroughly sublated). Hegel characterizes, perhaps caricatures, Protestantism as a conscious flight from objectivity, i. e. as "subjectivity holding fast to itself. " And if Hegel is right about this, how - and to what extent - is faith able to raise itself above subjectivity, shed its particularity, and melt into a universal objective harmony? 15 How might reflectivity move beyond a mere longing for and toward the actual possession of eternity? How is reflection able to reflect itself outside the confines of reflectivity [i. e. sich aus Reflexion hinauszureflektieren]? This question constitutes the core of Hegel's project in Jena: Hoc opus, hic labor!
2. 3 Speculative Religion and Hegel's Appropriation of Kant
Speculative religion is largely dedicated to overcoming the one-sided abstractions characteristic of the reflective philosophy of subjectivity on the one hand and cognizing conceptually the unity of the finite and the infinite on the other; that the former is related, if not identical, to the latter is distinctive to Hegelian thought. According to his 1821 Lectures, the philosophy of religion aims at reconciling religion to reason; in short, philosophy articulates conceptually what is already experienced in religion. In the 1824 Concept of Religion, Hegel claimed that religious consciousness begins in feeling;16 thus, from the outset, faith is steeped in
15 Recall Jacobi's claim, in Jacobi an Fichte, that he will "pluck the ears of wheat on the Sabbath for no other reason save that I am hungry, and because the law is made for man and not man for the law . . . For I know, I know with the most holy certainty within me--that the privilegium aggratiandi, for crimes of this sort against the pure letter of the absolutely universal law of reason, is man's authentic right of majesty, the seal of his dignity, of his divine nature" (Jacobi, Werke III, 37-38; quoted in 1802b: 143-44).
16 See LPR1, 140; quoted in Merklinger, 126.
? Making Room for Reason 69
interiority. But the interiority of devotion limited to feeling and representation is not, says Hegel,
the highest form of interiority. It is self-determined thinking which has to be recognized as this purest form of knowing. It is in this that science brings the same content to consciousness and thus becomes that spiritual worship which, by systematic thinking, appropriates and comprehends what is otherwise only the content of subjective sentiment or representation. 17
Thus, what was originally interior is further internalized by elevating itself into self-determining thinking; this must be done, of course, without losing its sense of adoration. In his "Tu? bingen Fragment" of 1793, thinking of Kant and Fichte, Hegel claimed that "the Ideas of reason enliven the whole web of human feeling - their operation penetrates everything, like subtle matter and gives a peculiar tinge to every inclination and impulse. "18 Thus, religious consciousness in its truest form transcends the traditional bifurcation between thinking and feeling.
Within the sphere of religious consciousness, the finite is consumed and consummated in the infinite by passing beyond a merely historical attitude toward religion. Speculative philosophy attempts to mirror speculatively the dialectical correlation of the finite human subject and the infinite divine object that takes place in and through religious consciousness. In this way, faith is converted into vision. Without philosophy, religious content remains indeterminate and thus "esoteric";19 prior to the speculative reconstruction of an infinite "which contains its other," religion collapses into poetry (and poets, according to Plato's Apology, "say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them"). And while Hegel swerves away from Kant when it comes to the restriction of theoretical reason to the domain of the phenomena, he does believe that the speculative idea shines through the critical project. And in the end, the Hegelian reconciliation is undeniably indebted to Kant's general formula that "human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts and ends with ideas" (KRV: B 730).
17 Hegel, Vorstellung ueber die Aesthetik, I, 143.
18 Hegel, "Tu? bingen Fragment," translated by H. S. Harris, in Hegel's Development, Toward the Sunlight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 511-12.
19 See Pha? nomenologie, Vorrede, XXII, 21.
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Did Hegel misread Kant? Of course he did; but to what extend did Hegel misread Kant and what was the shape of his misreading? That depends on how one reads Kant and, I think, equally, how one reads Hegel. 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, Kant) is itself something to be understood. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard says that his age was "not willing to stop at faith, with its miracle of turning water into wine; it goes further, it turns wine into water. "20 Though witty, Kierkegaard's epigram betrays a misreading of the Hegelian enterprise. Though correct in saying that Hegel was unwilling to stop at faith, Kierkegaard is mistaken in thinking that Hegel hoped to "suck worldly wisdom out of the paradox" and turn wine back into water. Hegel's 1802 Critical Journal essay, Faith and Knowledge, and the 1827 Concept of Religion may well be viewed as bookends to a life-long meditation on the role of faith and reason in the apprehension of the Absolute. According to his 1822 Foreword to Hinrich's Die Religion im inneren Verha? ltnisse zur Wissenschaft, Hegel considered "faith, in the genuine sense of the term, as involving both phases [the subjective and the objective], the one just as much as the other, and I place them together, bound up in a differentiated unity" (HHS: 245). And while it may be true that Hegel possessed a certain proclivity to bite the apple that Adam bit, I think that he is far less hostile to religious thought than religious thinkers tend to think. 21
? 20 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, in A Kierkegaard Anthology (New York: The Modern Library), 1946: 118.
21 That said, I think also that while Hegel sometimes possessed a certain proclivity to express his thought in patently religious terms, he is far more hostile to religious thought than non-religious thinkers tend to think. The "whole truth" is that left- and right-winged Hegelians are both mistaken; as a philosophical theologian, Hegel believed that flight required both wings.
CHAPTER THREE
JACOBI AND THE POETRY OF PROTESTANT GRIEF
The reflective philosophies of subjectivity are portrayed in Glauben und Wissen as exhausting the possible forms of finitude and subjectivity. Although Hegel is primarily preoccupied with the reflective limitations and speculative suggestions he discovers in Kant, the principle of finitude - as well as the principle of Protestantism - reaches beyond itself only when the distinctively Kantian expression of reflectivity is drawn into a dialectical relation with the philosophies of Jacobi and Fichte. Kant represents, as mentioned earlier, the objective side of the subjective principle, where the absolute exists as a regulative principle of practical and teleological reason, a rational faith; Jacobi represents the subjective side of the principle, where the absolute is directly perceived by means of a faculty - which Jacobi calls "faith" - that extends beyond and lies at the foundation of cognitive reasoning; Fichte, then, is presented as a synthesis between these antitheses. The uniquely Hegelian form of speculative thought focuses on how these reflective philosophies, when organized dialectically, point beyond themselves: Hegel wants to show how reflective understanding [Verstandserkenntniss] somersaults into speculative or rational cognition [Vernunftserkenntniss]. Jacobi, by contrast, was keen to "bring reason to understanding. "
Reflection, borrowing once again Heidegger's phrase, "reflects itself beyond the limits of reflectivity" in Hegel by means of organization or reconfiguration: "Non-knowing," wrote Hegel in his earlier Differenzschrift, "becomes knowing through systemicity. " Recalling the programmatic introduction to the Critical Journal, the speculative task consists in "peeling away the [reflective] shell that keeps the inner [read: speculative] aspiration from seeing daylight" (1802a: 277). Hegel strives not only "to recount how this negative side expresses itself and confesses its non- being" but also demonstrate subjectivity's own tendency to perfect objectivity" (1802a: 278). The infinite purpose is achieved, as he puts it in
72 Chapter Three
the Encyclopedia, "only in sublating the illusion that has not yet been accomplished" (286, ? 212 Zusatz).
Hegel's reading of Jacobi, which constitutes the lengthiest chapter in his essay, is central to the critical purposes of Glauben und Wissen: Not only were the seeds of authentic idealism in Kant to be "avenged through him," as Jacobi himself turns it in his 1803 "On Faith and Knowledge," Jacobi also serves an exemplary representative of what Hegel then called the 'principle of Protestantism. ' Despite his maltreatment in Glauben und Wissen, Jacobi seems to have taken at least some consolation in the fact that he was "expelled and banished" in such good company - together, that is, with Kant and Fichte. While it is probably true that we have misrepresented Jacobi's philosophical orientation if not also his conclusions, as Giovanni suggests (2003, 2005), it is certainly true that we have traditionally underestimated his influence on the direction of post- Kantian idealism. In America, at least, we have avoided misreading Jacobi by simply not reading him at all. Hegel's preoccupation with Jacobi in Glauben und Wissen, however, demonstrates his importance to 19th century philosophy. Though this chapter will conclude with the suggestion that Hegel may have misread Jacobi, the Hegelian misreading is perhaps less egregious than those of, say, Heine and Crawford and - in more recent times - Isaiah Berlin. Indeed, Pinkard goes so far as to say that the view of Jacobi as "one of the chief instigators of German irrationalism is more of a caricature than it is fair to his thought" (2002: 91). That said, the rhetorical extremes of Jacobi's style certainly contributed to the caricature.
3. 1 Jacobi's "unmittelbare Gewissheit"
Not unlike Kant, Hegel suggests, Jacobi is thoroughly committed to the "absolute restriction of reason to the form of finitude" (1802b: 64) - that is, to the denial of rational cognition and the subsequent relegation of the ideas of reason to the faculty of faith. (This is not to say, as Hegel shows, that Kant and Jacobi agreed on the workings and status of such a faculty - indeed, nothing could be further from the truth. ) The rational cognition of the absolute is denied by Kant on the grounds that, though not contradicting the understanding, the absolute - not unlike the ideas of freedom and immortality or even the self, as it is in-itself - lies beyond the reach of the categories of the understanding; rational cognition of the absolute is denied by Jacobi, however, on the grounds that "reason is a born Spinozist," i. e. , an atheist and a determinist. Although the reflective philosophers of subjectivity share the "common ground of absolute
Jacobi and the Poetry of Protestant Grief 73
finitude" (1802b: 97) as their point of departure, Jacobi's philosophy - rooted in his theory of cognition, which he calls "die Wahrnehmung des Wirklichen" [i. e. , the perception of the real or actual] - "forms the opposite pole" to Kant. Jacobi's theory of cognition, one that is beholden to Hume and Reid, asserts that "the elemental factor in all human knowledge [Wissen] is belief [Glauben]. "1 Jacobi's poignant critique of Kant, as well as his own theory of cognition, both of which were implicit in his earlier On Spinoza's Doctrines in Letters to Herr Moses Mendelssohn, was published as David Hume on Faith in 1787. It was in the supplement to David Hume, "On Transcendental Idealism," that Jacobi accused Kant of contradicting himself on the role of things-in-themselves; consequentially, argues Jacobi, Kant failed to refute Hume. Kant's failure signaled the need, thought Jacobi, for faith in the form of a salto mortale (Werke, IV, 59, 74).
Hegel argues that Kant and Jacobi represent similarly one-sided abstractions and "for both of them what is truly Absolute is in an absolute beyond in faith and in feeling; for cognitive Reason, it is nothing" (1802b: 147-148, italics added). Though Jacobi readily admits that the human faculties of understanding and rationality amount to nothing with regard to the apprehension of the absolute, saying that "the understanding can have nothing more than a knowledge of its ignorance" (IV: xliv), this "hallowing of subjectivity" (Hegel 1802b: 143) quickly passes over into what Hegel would later characterize as a "frenzy of self-conceit" (1807/B: 395-399). Hegel suggests that the reflective philosophy of subjectivity contributes to an acute awareness of the finite subject's separation from the infinite; this estrangement or alienation constitutes the "poetry of Protestant grief. " According to the Differenzschrift, knowledge is stipulated as "the conscious identity of the finite and the infinite, the unity of both worlds, the sensible and the intellectual, the necessary and the free in consciousness. " Faith, on the other hand, refers to "a relation of restriction to the absolute, a relation through which one becomes conscious of the opposition alone in consciousness, indeed, in which one is entirely unconscious of the identity" [hingegen u? ber die Identita? t eine vo? llige Bewusstlosigkeit vorhanden ist] (1801: 100). But in this acknowledged estrangement from the absolute, claims Hegel, "Protestant subjectivity seems to return out of the Kantian conceptual form to its true shape, to a subjective beauty of feeling [Empfindung] and to a lyrical yearning for heaven (Hegel 1802b: 147).
? 1 Jacobi, Ueber die Lehre (Scholz, 90), as cited in Beck, 1969: 369.
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Because the "poetry of Protestant grief" (1802b: 61) - as Hegel understood it - excludes rational cognition of the Divine, "it makes communion with God and consciousness of the divine into something inward that maintains its fixed form of inwardness" (1802b: 148). And when "the testimony of the senses is accepted as a manifestation of truth, and feeling and instinct are assumed to contain the rule of conduct" (1802b: 149), the beauty which belongs to Protestant subjectivity deteriorates into ugliness. So whereas Jacobi's way of doing philosophy "exalts the individual and the particular," compensating as it were for Kant's opposite tendency, the beauty of religion is restored only when "the very consciousness of this surrender and nullification is nullified" (1802b: 141). This "sinking into nothing" occurs, suggest Hegel, harkening back to his analysis of Christianity in the Berne Fragments, "in song among the simple and nai? ve faiths," but it occurs to the fullest degree only in the sphere of speculative philosophy. By negating the negation inherent in reflectivity, speculative philosophy facilitates an evolutionary shift in religious consciousness by which the interiority of yearning is transformed into something more interior still. The critical question for Hegel still hovers: Are the reflective philosophies of subjectivity, focusing now on Jacobi as representative of the species, able - and if so, by what means are they able - to shed "all the wrappings of finitude" and sink into "nothing before the thinking and intuiting of the eternal"?
According to the "principle of Protestantism," whether in Jacobi or Schleiermacher,
beauty and truth present themselves in feelings and persuasions, in love and intellect. Religion builds its temples and altars in the hearts of the individual. In sighs and prayers he seeks for the God whom he denies to himself in intuition, because of the risk that the intellect will cognize what is intuited as a mere thing, reducing the sacred grove to mere timber" (Hegel 1802b: 57).
This mode of religious consciousness, which Hegel reads as characteristic of early 19th century German Protestantism, is rooted in the reflective philosophy of subjectivity; immersed in finitude, reason renounces all intuition and cognition of the eternal. Indeed, the philosophers of faith believed that "by drawing the veil over self-consciousness and surrendering understanding" (1807/M: 6), they became the beloved of God. 2 The
2 Following the Platonic account of desire prominent among the early Romanticists, one yearns only for what one does not yet - or perhaps cannot ever -
? Jacobi and the Poetry of Protestant Grief 75
intensity of our feeling, as expressed in the religious philosophy of Jacobi and Schleiermacher in Glauben und Wissen, because it is without a core, is "a rapturous haziness" and "is in no way distinguishable from superficiality" (1807/M: 6). Whenever the infinite is defined as "that which finitude is not," infinity too is "all tangled up in limitation" (Hegel 1802: 65). For a consciousness "infected with finitude," religion has its sublime aspect only in feeling - in the "empty shell of subjective conviction" (1821-1822: 245); resigned to finitude, writes Schelling, philosophy "is supposed to prettify itself with the surface colour of the supersensous by pointing, in faith, to something higher" (1802: 369). Cognizant only of his incapacity to cognize the Absolute, the reflective philosopher of subjectivity - who now finds himself "immovably impaled on the stake of absolute antitheses" - conspires to "reintroduce the Absolute as faith into philosophy through the back door" (Schelling 1802a: 369).
Similar to Hamann, with whom he corresponded during the pantheism debate and whose influence on the Counter-Enlightenment has yet to be appreciated completely, Jacobi claims that knowledge is the most abstract, corrupt, and untrue form of our experience, and it is only by means of feelings that - to use Hamann's expression - "abstractions get hands, feet, or wings" (Hamann: II, 112). 3 Thought, writes Jacobi, "is not the real way of life - the true way of life, rather, is mystical and not at all syllogistic or mechanistic" (IV, a, 112). This theory of cognition is adopted also by Herder, though he seems to have abandoned it subsequent to his discovery of Spinoza, in the Alteste Urkunde des Menschensgeschlechts: "If we weaken ourselves through abstraction, separate and split our senses, and shred our whole feeling into little threads which no longer feel anything wholly and purely, naturally the great sense of God, the Omnipresent in the world, must thereby become weakened and dulled" (Werke, VI, 273). This philosophy of subjectivity suggests that we should be suspicious of all forms of abstraction, i. e. , thought constructs that could never be more certain than their foundations in feeling or intuition. And it is not merely that the understanding - understood as a faculty for "analyzing and synthesizing and proving truths about the data of the senses" (Beck 1969: 370) - fails to grasp what feeling experiences, Jacobi believes that reason contradicts the revelatory aspect of experience: "this part of the mind [the understanding] sees only with concepts what the other [feeling or reason]
actually possess. Recall Herder's plea: "He would misunderstand humanity, who sought only to taste and feel the Creator without seeing or apprehending Him" (Conversations, V, 163).
3 For more on Jacobi's relationship to Hamann, see Olivetti 1971.
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does not see - it is with seeing eyes blind, as the other with blind eyes sees (1812-1825: III. 108). Perhaps it is not altogether inappropriate to mention here Hamann's claim, expressed in a letter to Kant from 1759, that "only a blind man with staring eyes can see [God]" (quoted in Beiser 1987: 31- 33).
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,
? Jacobi and the Poetry of Protestant Grief 77
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
Jacobi and the Poetry of Protestant Grief 79
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.