' Hegel's philosophical
exposition
of Kant and Jacobi and Fichte, which he undertakes on behalf of Aufhebung, sets a fair precedent for how to read Hegel: plastically, speculatively, critically.
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Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Translation of Klaus Du? sing's "Spekulation und Reflexion:
Zur Zusammenarbeit Schellings und Hegel in Jena" (Hegel-Studien, 1969)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank those individuals who have encouraged me, each in their own special way, to continue working on my revisionist reading of Hegel: Howard Kainz, Daniel Breazeale, Klaus Du? sing, George di Giovanni and Frederick Beiser. I would also like to thank the Marquette University Philosophy Department for funding my initial stint of research in Germany. I am similarly grateful to the Fulbright Scholar Program for a generous stipend that enabled me to continue my work on Hegel at Martin Luther Universita? t in Halle-Wittenberg. I want to express my gratitude to Omar Bozeman for his constructive criticisms and thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Special thanks must also go to Valta Ross: his support and enthusiasm at all stages of my research have meant much to me.
I want to thank Professor Du? sing for his generous permission - so many years ago - to translate "Spekulation und Reflexion: Zur Zusammenarbeit Schelling und Hegel in Jena" (Hegel-Studien, 1969), which I provide as an appendix to this book. Earlier versions of several chapters of this manuscript were published in the following philosophical journals: "Making Room for Reason: Hegel, Kant, and the Corpse of Faith and Knowledge" (Philosophy and Theology, 2001); "The Principle of Protestantism: On Hegel's (Mis-)Reading of Schleiermacher's Speeches" (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2003); and "The Theological Foundations of Hegel's Phenomenology" (Heythrop Journal of Philosophy and Religion, 2009).
PREAMBLE
'To judge that a thing has substance and solid worth is quite easy, to comprehend it is much harder, and to blend judgment and comprehension in a definite description is the hardest thing of all' (Hegel 1807/B: 14).
The following manuscript aims at a revisionist reading of Hegel's 1802 essay, Faith and Knowledge, which is itself a revisionist reading of the various reconciliations of faith and reason proposed by his contemporary faith philosophers [Glaubensphilosophen] - namely, Kant, Jacobi, Schleiermacher and Fichte. Hegel's reading of his contemporaries, who he reads as settling for a form of reason that is 'no longer worthy of the name' and a version of faith that 'no longer seems worth the bother,' demonstrates his growing facility with the dialectical method for which he is best known and anticipates also his own speculative reconciliation of faith and reason. To view Hegel's reading of his contemporaries as a series of misreadings, which is not uncommon among scholars, misses the more interesting critical point: Hegel, who was viewed by others if not also by himself as a philosophical latecomer, appropriated the thought of his predecessors with an eye toward overcoming them. What serves as a criticism of his contemporaries is at the same time a speculative pronouncement of what Hegel considered to be a more adequate reconciliation. Faith and Knowledge is best read as an early expression of Hegel's speculative Religionsphilosophie.
If Fackenheim is right, theologians have never taken Hegel seriously (1967: 119). And yet Hegel's entire philosophical system could - and perhaps should - be read as fundamentally theological in its orientation, since it is preoccupied to the extreme with God construed as 'the Absolute. ' Indeed, the inspirational economy behind the epigraph for which Hegel is best known, i. e. , that 'the truth is the whole,' was at least initially a theological ideal in which God was conceived as "an eternal desire for self-revelation. " In general, most theologians simply haven't taken the time to read Hegel. But even if theologians are unable to take Hegel seriously as a theologian in his own right, he really should be taken seriously as a critic of his contemporary Glaubensphilosophen. So while I am interested in Hegel as a philosopher of religion, in how he might
xii Preamble
clarify issues of faith and reason, the dialectical method that begins to surface in Faith and Knowledge - i. e. , the resolve to reflect oneself outside reflectivity - is significant to a better understanding of the entire Hegelian corpus and the perennial work of Hegel's "Aufhebung. " I want also to understand Hegel, the scholar, in Emerson's sense of that term, but to do that I have found it necessary to trace things back to the decisive initial encounter and the response that began him. With all due respect, and much is due, Harris is simply mistaken when he claims that the pages of Faith and Knowledge are "essentially dreary because the material contained in them has no life" (1972: xxxix). These pages represent, I shall argue, the occasion on which Hegel discovered himself, his voice as well as the trajectory of his philosophical epicycle. Bergson claimed, as did Heidegger, that every strong philosopher thinks one thought and one thought only, and then spends his or her entire life thinking it through to the end; perhaps the string on which Hegel harped, repeatedly and with cadenced pathos, was first discovered in the very process of writing Faith and Knowledge. If I am right about this, that Faith and Knowledge represents the birthplace of the Hegel we know best, i. e. , Hegel as a critical theorist, this early essay is actually teeming - albeit largely beneath the surface, to use Hamann's metaphor - with life.
An accurate reading of Faith and Knowledge, I suggest throughout the following manuscript but especially in the conclusion, must include an examination of "influence" as itself influential in shaping Hegel's interpretive "practice" during this stage of his career. One of the central functions of the present analysis, though by no means its only function, is to draw attention to the phenomenon of belatedness, or as I shall more frequently term it, in deference to Harold Bloom's two-volume treatment of the topic, the "anxiety of influence," as decisive to Hegel's intellectual evolution. By the time he arrived in Jena, which he described as a "literary whirlwind" and what Schelling called a "battlefield of metaphysics," Hegel was in grave danger of being viewed and indeed viewing himself as a latecomer. "Faith and Knowledge" is ostensibly concerned with the influence of Hegel's contemporaries, primarily but not exclusively with Kant and Jacobi and Fichte. The unnamed target of Hegel's 1802 analysis, however, the darkest if not the longest shadow from which he would struggle to free himself, may well have been his co-editor of the Critical Journal, Schelling.
Perhaps Nietzsche had Hegel in mind when he suggests, in his Untimely Meditations (1873), that "[t]he belief that one is a late-comer in
Hegel: Hovering Over the Corpse of Faith and Reason xiii
the world is, anyhow, harmful and degrading; but it must appear frightful and devastating when it raises our late-comer to godhead, by a neat turn of the wheel, as the meaning and object of all past creation, and his conscious misery is set up as the perfection of the world's history" (II, ? 8). This anxiety of influence, and this "neat turn of the wheel," constitutes the central thematic preoccupation in what might otherwise appear to be a fairly straightforward reading of Faith and Knowledge. According to Bloom, whose critical theory is discussed in greater detail below, "the revisionist strives to see again, so as to esteem and estimate differently, so as then to aim correctively. " On this definition, or formula, the critical journalists were themselves revisionists to the extreme. Perhaps it is fair for us to read Hegel as Hegel read his precursors. Answering the persistent question of how best to read Hegel, Jean-Luc Nancy suggests - in his own Preamble to One of Hegel's Bons Mots - that to "read Hegel's text is thus, if not to rewrite it, at least to repeat its exposition plastically" (2001: 13). Nancy is following Hegel's own conviction that a text must "be read over and over [wiederholt gelesen werden] before it can be understood" (Hegel: 1806, 39) - i. e. , before "philosophical exposition can . . . achieve the goal of plasticity [plastisch]" (1806: 40), which is necessary for what Nancy calls 'the work of Aufhebung' or 'the speculative act.
' Hegel's philosophical exposition of Kant and Jacobi and Fichte, which he undertakes on behalf of Aufhebung, sets a fair precedent for how to read Hegel: plastically, speculatively, critically. The plasticity of our reading of Hegel, though, in response to Rosen's request, should also be informed by "an elucidation of the concept or the concepts involved" as well as "the point of the concept" (1982: 3).
Hegel's Faith and Knowledge is important to our understanding of the remainder of the Hegelian corpus: it serves as a bold expression of the programme that was to preoccupy if not haunt Hegel for the rest of his days. Hegel here implements for the first time the dialectical strategy by which philosophical reflection was to set about reflecting itself out of the limitations of reflection itself; that strategy aimed not only at apprehending the Absolute, but apprehending it in such a manner as to keep it on this side of consciousness - i. e. , 'completely determined, exoteric, comprehensible, and capable of being learned by all' (1807/M: 7). Without a systematic sublimation of the illusion, thought remains indeterminate, esoteric and incomprehensible; until the infinite 'consumes and consummates finitude,' philosophy collapses into poetry - i. e. , philosophers become, as Plato turned it in the Apology, 'diviners and soothsayers who say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them. ' Hegel
xiv Preamble
had longed since his days at Tu? bingen for 'the free upsurge of the most various living shapes in the philosophical gardens of [ancient] Greece,' but all around him he saw only 'the tortures of the damned. ' This "speculative Good Friday," as Hegel calls it in his terse conclusion to Glauben und Wissen, when belabored and endured rather than evaded, facilitates a transition to genuine philosophy - it is at such moments, he thought, that the spirit of philosophy feels the strength of her growing wings most acutely. The triumphal free flight of the spirit of philosophy by which the corpse of faith and reason was supposed to be resurrected is, however, no easy task; indeed, as a result (that is, as the product of the 'seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative'), it is - says Hegel, perhaps thinking of Spinoza's claim that all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare - 'the hardest thing of all. ' It must be conceded from the outset that Hegel does not provide, perhaps could not have provided, at the time that he wrote Glauben und Wissen, his own reconciliation of faith and knowledge. Rather than glossing over the godforsaken impact of Good Friday in order to celebrate Easter Sunday, following Hegel's metaphor, Hegel invites his readers to languish in the prosaic grief inherent in "the death of God" (1802b: 69) and, almost morbidly, to hover over "the corpse of faith and reason" (1802b: 55). But this "infinite grief" [unendlichen Schmerz] and "harsh consciousness of loss" as well as this sense of "godforsakenness," as Hegel puts it in Glauben und Wissen, or the "Golgotha of absolute spirit" (1807/M: 493), as he expresses it in the Phenomenology, this potentially debilitating labor of the negative, is ultimately unavoidable, absolutely necessary even, since it is at the same time the "secret abyss of that finitude which is infinity. " The corpse of faith and reason, construed as the highest totality, "can and must achieve its resurrection solely from the harsh consciousness of loss, encompassing everything, and ascending in all its earnestness and out of its deepest ground to the most serene freedom of it shape" (1802b: 190).
INTRODUCTION
Even to those who know him best, that is to say, to those who appreciate him most, Hegel is occasionally exasperating. Adorno, whose appreciation of Hegel is undeniable yet ambiguous, suggests that: "In the realm of great philosophy Hegel is no doubt the only one with whom at times one literally does not know and cannot conclusively determine what is being talked about, and with whom there is no guarantee that such a judgment is even possible" (1993: 89). The doubleness of Hegel's dialectic, as Adorno calls it, by which he means that "everything is to be understood only in the context of the whole, with the awkward qualification that the whole in turn lives only in the individual moments" requires us to read Hegel - suggests Jean-Luc Nancy (2001: 13) - with a certain degree of plasticity. Aiming at a revisionist reading of Hegel's Faith and Knowledge, itself an experiment in philosophical criticism, I want to understand what Hegel says - at a decisive stage in his development - as well as what he tries to say but cannot about the "speculative task" of reconciling faith and knowledge.
The title of my analysis of Hegel's Jenaer Zeit Religionsphilosophie, from 1800 to 1806, i. e. , from his Differenzschrift to the Pha? nomenologie, respectively, which entails also an examination of his critical theory, alludes to a peculiar metaphor in the opening paragraph of Faith and Knowledge:
The newly born peace that hovers [schwebt] triumphantly over the corpse of reason and faith, uniting them as the child of both, has as little of reason in it as it has of authentic faith (1802b: 55).
The metaphor is thick if not mixed and hermetic; it is telling and thus itself worth hovering over. The rational faith for which the critical philosophy made room, by limiting the reach of reason, which constituted a clever but ultimately inadequate solution to a difficult problem, thought Hegel, "no longer appeared to be worth the bother. " And victorious but deflated reason, let us call her "enlightened," hovering but by no means soaring, suggests Hegel, no longer seemed to be "worthy of the name. " Suspended overhead, reservedly aloof, one senses something pyrrhic; below, a
2 Introduction
distended or otherwise distorted corpse. The central elements of the metaphor, as I understand it, point back to the Phaedo and the purification of the soul. Germany experienced something akin to a renaissance of Platonism, including Platonic idealism, in the late eighteenth century. We know that this doctrine was inspirational to Hegel, as well as Schelling and Ho? lderlin, from its presence in other texts. If, at the time of its release, the soul is tainted and impure, bogged down with the corporeal and thus hovering above tombs and graveyards (81d), it quickly falls back into another body, where it takes root and grows (83e). But if this is the mystery to which Hegel alludes, the hovering in question would tend more toward falling than a form of flight. And indeed, this draws us rather close to the moral of Hegel's story in Glauben und Wissen.
But let us suppose for a philosophical moment, mixing still further an already mixed metaphor, that the hovering [das Schwebende] in question does in fact suggest something akin to flight. Recall Kant's claim that
[t]he light dove [reason], cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance - meeting no resistance that might, as it were, serve as a support upon which he could take a stand, to which he could apply his powers, and so let his understanding in motion" (CPR: 47; A5/B9).
Hegel's bird is by no means a light dove. But, truth be told, neither was Kant's. Looking up, toward that which hovers, and then at the corpse below, Hegel bends down, kneeling perhaps, himself now hovering, over the corpse in question. This is where I find Hegel, on the road from Frankfurt to Jena, leaving Ho? lderlin and heading toward Schelling's influence, but loyal to both, at dusk, of course, and hovering over the corpse of faith and reason. And this is where Hegel, our dialectical alchemist, goes to work performing autopsies and resuscitating corpses and, well, if nothing else, clearing away the ash. The pace is sometimes a bit frenzied and the procedure is experimental. But eventually, as the embers begin to glow, Hegel's sacred owl takes flight. Metaphors, and similar literary devices, what I should like to call "the divine language of intuitive reason," a phrase used by Kant in a letter to Hamann, in reference to Herder's Oldest Document of the Human Race (1774-6), crop up everywhere in Hegel's Jenaer Zeit writings. This essay - Glauben und
Hegel: Hovering Over the Corpse of Faith and Reason 3
Wissen - may well represent one of Hegel's most accomplished albeit hurried and thus imperfect performances as a philosophical dialectician. Indeed, even Goethe claimed that Hegel's "skills as a critic" were "always quite excellent. "
The "new born peace," to which Hegel refers, hovering over the corpse of faith and reason, a ghostly bat, suffering from a truce suggested in the Preface to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (B xxx), consisted in "limiting" [aufheben] - Kant's verb, translated by Kemp Smith as "to deny," is now associated with Hegel ("to sublate" or "sublimate") - "knowledge in order to make room for faith. " It is tempting to argue that Hegel simply reverses, though he would insist on his technical use of the verb, this popular dictum in Kant, in which case, Hegel's speculative thesis consists in claiming that we must sublimate faith in order to make room for knowledge [i. e. , Wir mussten also den Glauben aufheben, um zum Wissen Platz zu bekommen]. Though mistaken or otherwise misleading, because it oversimplifies and because it accepts the general terms of the conflict, but also because it suggests that Hegel wished to limit or deny faith, which is not his intention, this characterization of Hegel's revisionist Religionsphilosophie would take us some distance - though not far enough - in the direction of what Hegel has in mind at this early stage of his philosophical career.
In Hegel, as in Kant, the very terms of the debate, i. e. , faith [Glauben] and knowledge [Wissen], are thick with connotation and thin in stipulation; and it is important to remember this. According to Hegel's Differenzschrift, written in 1801, knowledge is stipulated as "the conscious identity of the finite and the infinite, the unity of both worlds, the sensible and the intellectual, the necessary and the free in consciousness. " Faith, on the other hand, refers to "a relation of restriction to the absolute, a relation through which one becomes conscious of the opposition alone in consciousness, indeed, in which one is entirely unconscious of the identity" [hingegen u? ber die Identita? t eine vo? llige Bewusstlosigkeit vorhanden ist]; this construal of "faith does not express," argues Hegel, "the synthesis of feeling and intuition. " The faith of the Glaubensphilosophen, among his theological and philosophical contemporaries as well as the tradition they personify, demonstrates what Hegel treats as a "posture of reflection to the Absolute. " Enlightened faith, the child of enlightened reason, which hovers over the divided corpse of faith and reason, has - thought Hegel - 'as little of Reason in it as it has of genuine faith. ' This bold hypothesis simplifies things considerably: The task that Hegel sets for himself in
4 Introduction
Faith and Knowledge is nothing more or less than a "speculative" synthesis, one that extends beyond the reflective reconciliation, of the finite and the infinite, feeling and intuition, the necessary and the free in consciousness. The "identity" to which Hegel here refers, the speculative relationship or synthesis, "is by no means a simple identity"; in the end, Hegel will argue - drawing on Spinoza's logic - for "an identity of identity and non-identity" or, perhaps better, "a differentiated unity. " The real genius of Hegel's distinctive version of a speculative reconciliation, one influenced perhaps by religious mysticism, consists in showing how the infinite, the absolute, when rightly understood, both "consumes and consummates finitude" [die Endlichkeit aufzuzehren] (1802b: 66).
"The fundamental principle common to the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte," writes Hegel, "is the absoluteness of finitude and, resulting from it, the absolute antithesis of finitude and infinity, reality and ideality, the sensuous and the supersensuous, and the beyondness of what is truly real and absolute. " From a religious point of view, these philosophers embody "the principle of Protestantism" (1802b: 57). These reflective philosophies of subjectivity form a dialectical triad that, for all intents and purposes, exhausts the inherent principle entirely: Kant illustrates the objective standpoint, Jacobi represents the subjective antithesis, and Fichte presented a synthesis of both (1802b: 62). And while the artificial triadics for which Hegel is now renowned - the thesis- antithesis-synthesis model in which the component part is subsumed under the synthetic whole - are conspicuously absent from his actual texts, he is as close to that model in Faith and Knowledge as he is anyplace else. (Hegel's dialectic became increasingly nonhierarchical. ) The effort of criticism, as Hegel applies it to these philosophies, consists in "tearing off the masks of subjectivity" (1802a: 277) which disguise and distort as well as disgrace perfect objectivity - that is, in facilitating the transition from a finite to an infinite standpoint. The reflective philosophers of subjectivity, afflicted as it were with finitude, hyperpolarized - that is, exaggerated to the point of mutual exclusion - the opposition of faith to knowledge; but, quips Hegel, "this makes the transition to genuine philosophy easier. "
The task of the philosophy of religion - Hegel's Religionsphilosophie - includes an adequate explanation of how the individual human subject rises above all that is finite to absolute universality and, at the same time, remains within the scope of finite self-consciousness (1821, I, 211-212). This task requires, in the words of the Preface to the Phenomenology, the sustained "seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the
Hegel: Hovering Over the Corpse of Faith and Reason 5 negative. " Hegel's explanation hinges on the role of thinking in relation to
feeling. Hegel thinks that
[i]n thinking I raise myself above all that is finite to the absolute and am infinite consciousness, while at the same time I am finite self- consciousness, indeed to the full extent of my empirical condition (1821, I, 212).
The speculative enterprise in Hegel consists in organizing the manifold shapes of restriction and defect into an integrated totality or organic unity which elevates common understanding to rational knowledge; indeed, for Hegel, "non-knowing becomes knowledge by becoming organized" (1801, 165). According to the Logic, an adequate religion would demonstrate in some manner that though "[w]e usually suppose that the absolute must lie far beyond, it is precisely what is wholly present" (1817, 59). In a telling passage from Faith and Knowledge, Hegel claims that
[i]n the true faith the whole sphere of finitude, of being-something-on- one's-own-account, the sphere of sensibility sinks into nothing before the thinking and intuiting of the eternal. The thinking and the intuiting become one and all the midges of subjectivity are burned to death in this consuming fire, and the very consciousness of this surrender and nullification is nullified (1802b, 141, my italics).
Finitude's "sinking into nothing," which is felt but not fully cognized by primitive religious consciousness, e. g. in song, argues Hegel, is wholly explicable within the sphere of speculative thought. Hegel characterizes, perhaps even caricatures Protestantism as "a conscious flight from objectivity" or as "subjectivity holding fast to itself. " And if Hegel is right about this, the question shifts to how - and to what extent - faith is able to elevate itself above its subjectivity, shed all particularity, and thus participate in the universal objective harmony? How might reflectivity move beyond a mere longing for and toward the actual possession of eternity? And how is reflective thought, borrowing a phrase from Heidegger, who seems to have understood the Hegelian project as well as anyone has, "to reflect itself out of this reflectivity" (i. e. , sich aus dieser Reflexion hinauszureflektieren)? Adorno turns it nicely when he suggests, in his Three Studies, "only through reflection can reflective thought get beyond itself" (1993: 73). Answering this question, or this set of questions, i. e. , teaching reflection how to jump over its own shadow, constitutes Hegel's methodological preoccupation at the time of his Jenaer Zeit collaboration with Schelling.
6 Introduction
The speculative philosophy of religion proposed by Hegel if not also by Schelling is dedicated to overcoming the one-sided abstractions inherent in the reflective philosophy of subjectivity on the one hand and cognizing conceptually the unity of the finite and the infinite on the other; that the former is related to - if not identical with - the latter is distinctive to Hegelian thought. According to his 1821 lectures, the philosophy of religion aims at reconciling religion to reason; in short, philosophy articulates conceptually what is already experienced in religion. And in the revised Concept of Religion, Hegel claimed that religious consciousness begins in feeling (1824, 1: 140); thus, from the outset, faith is steeped in interiority. But the interiority of devotion when limited to feeling and representation - i. e. , of the reflective philosophy of subjectivity - is not, argues Hegel,
the highest form of interiority. It is self-determined thinking which has to be recognized as this purest form of knowing. It is in this that science brings the same content to consciousness and thus becomes that spiritual worship which, by systematic thinking, appropriates and comprehends what is otherwise only the content of subjective sentiment or representation (1827b, 1: 143).
Thus, what was originally interior is further internalized by elevating itself into self-determining thinking; this must be done, of course, without losing one's sense of adoration for the Divine. In his "Tu? bingen Fragment," thinking of Kant and Fichte, but closer to Ho? lderlin, Hegel claimed that "the Ideas of reason enliven the whole web of human feeling - their operation penetrates everything, like subtle matter and gives a peculiar tinge to every inclination and impulse" (1793, 511-512). Thus, religious consciousness in its truest form transcends the traditional bifurcation between thinking and feeling. And this, Hegel wants to suggest, would constitute a lasting reconciliation between faith and reason. But how do we get from here to there, from hovering over the corpse of faith and reason to a form of intellectual devotion that is more interior than the interiority of feeling? This question was decisive for Hegel en route from Frankfurt to Jena.
If the resolution of a difficulty constitutes the discovery of the truth, as Aristotle suggests, a judicious assessment of Hegel's reconciliation would depend on a thorough grasp of the difficulty for which the Hegelian answer was intended to serve as a solution. Without attending to the wide range of questions to which Hegel's philosophy of religion is intended to be an answer, the answer itself - cast in the dizzying language of the time
Hegel: Hovering Over the Corpse of Faith and Reason 7
- must appear to us monstrously difficult if not utterly unintelligible. "The task, therefore, of one who lives in another age and wants to appreciate that work correctly, consists precisely in rediscovering the varied information and complexes of ideas which the author assumed to be the natural property of his or her audience" (Parry 1971: 2). This task, the task of criticism, as described by Milman Parry, in his L'e? pithe`te traditionnelle dans Home`re, is daunting at best. But with Hegel, it is worse than daunting. In his Foreword to Hegel's Logic, the Wallace translation, Findlay suggests that:
Hegel is better seen macroscopically than microscopically, even though the latter may be a necessary preliminary to the former: the broad drifts of the dialectic, fixed as to starting-points and goal, do not depend on the minuter eddies that can with some strain be seen in it. One has to let the headaches produced by continuous Bacchantic riot subside into the calm of a more distant, critical vision if one is to profit from the majestic assault of Hegel's genius (Wallace 1975: vii).
I think that Findlay is right about this. And I think that Findlay and Adorno, though they diverge in other ways, are suggesting similar strategies for how to read Hegel. The difficulty, however, for which the following study is meant as a corrective, consists in the proclivity of many casual students of Hegel, especially his critics, to latch onto the latter, i. e. , the macroscopic metaphysical maxims, and dispense with the former. This tendency has led to what I consider to be an egregious misreading of the Hegelian project. I do not propose to build sepulchers to Hegel, nor do I plan to exaggerate his importance, but I am convinced that we have yet to appreciate his work - his philosophical corpus - correctly.
According to Bloom, and substituting philosophy for poetry, philosophical history is "indistinguishable from [philosophical] influence, since strong [philosophers] make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves"(1973/1997: 5). If this thesis can rightly be applied to philosophical history, a scandalous suggestion in itself, it would be more accurate - or at least more fruitful - to view Hegel's early critique of his contemporaries as having less to do with them and more to do with himself. (This in no wise trivializes Hegel's accomplishment. ) Hegel was, borrowing Bloom's adjective, a "strong" philosopher; thus rather than idealizing his influences, by whom he was formed and malformed, Hegel appropriated them for himself. In Faith and Knowledge, Hegel offers a philosophical interpretation of what he then considered the "present state of philosophy. " Rather than merely
8 Introduction
expositing upon or simply rehearsing the thought of his precursors, Hegel reads or interprets them "plastically" with an eye turned toward a speculative "Aufhebung. " To view Hegel's reading of his contemporaries as a misreading, therefore, misses the critical point of the Critical Journal of Philosophy as well as what is most instructive in Hegel's belabored critique of the reflective philosophies of subjectivity.
So while I am certainly interested in the accuracy of Hegel's interpretation of Kant as well as Jacobi and Fichte in his Faith and Knowledge essay, that is by no means my only concern: reading misreading teaches us more about the one misreading than it does about those misread. Strong philosophers, such as Hegel, like Bloom's "strong poets," are never disinterested readers of philosophy, nor are they philosophical critics "qua common readers raised to the highest power. " In the work of their precursors, a strong reader discovers not only their "own rejected thoughts, [which] come back to [them] with a certain alienated majesty," as Emerson put it, but they search also for the place where the precursor shall be overthrown. Hegel, I have discovered, is an apotheosis of philosophical strength. But even if all strong readings were a misreading of a kind, since philosophical reading is all-but-impossible, that is not to say that there are not better and worse readings. On the contrary, recognizing our tendency to misread - whether because we have lost "the varied information and complexes of ideas which the author assumed to be the natural property of his or her audience" or because we recognize that "there is no such thing as a disinterested reader" or even as a means of staking a claim to an intellectual territory - is at the very core of our task of an increasingly more accurate reading of Hegel' philosophical corpus. Although Hegel's philosophy of religion has received a good deal of attention within the past decade, especially in America but also in Germany, the development of Hegel's concept of God from the early Jena essays to the later Berlin lectures - writes Jaeschke in Reason in Religion (1990) - "has not yet been investigated as it should, and it has not infrequently been entirely disregarded. " And while much of the recent scholarship focuses exclusively on the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, which were delivered in Berlin, it was - again Jaeschke, but acknowledged more recently also by Pinkard (2002) and Hodgson (2007) as well as Desmond (2003) and Beiser (2005) - "during the Jena years that Hegel made his weightiest decisions. "
Hegel: Hovering Over the Corpse of Faith and Reason 9
But the debate that Hegel rehearses as if to appropriate in his 1802 manuscript, Faith and Knowledge, is also timeless: it is as old, or as new, as philosophy - and theology - itself. Though the history of the debate reaches back to ancient Greek philosophy, from Heraclitus to the Neo- Platonists, the basic questions that constitute the character of the conflict have a strangely contemporary ring to them. The medieval period is replete with treatises on the notion of double-truths, the truths of reason and the truths of faith, which some viewed as complementary (e. g. , Aquinas) and others viewed as adversarial (e. g. , Averroes, Duns Scotus, and Ockham). The Enlightenment in general and the Deutsche Aufkla? rung in particular was itself fuelled by the dispute between the dictates of reason and the demands of the heart. By the time that Hegel wrote Faith and Knowledge, the philosophy of Kant provided - in spirit if not in letter - the dominant though contested reconciliation of faith and knowledge. The alternatives to Kant's moral theology were pantheism, e. g. , Spinoza or Lessing or Herder, which was the sub rosa doctrine of most heterodox Protestants at the time, and the theology of feeling (e. g. , Jacobi and Schleiermacher). Hegel considered these proposed solutions to be woefully inadequate because they, one and all, but each in their own way, consist in degrading reason as well as deflating faith. Beyond his critique of the prominent faith philosophies of his age, especially Kant and Jacobi and Fichte, which Hegel casts as constituting a dialectical triad, Hegel offers - in Faith and Knowledge - his own version, in nuce, of speculative theology and doctrine of God.
CHAPTER ONE
DER ZEITGEIST
The conflict between faith and reason gave rise to an astonishing number of varied and often ingenious if not ultimately unsatisfactory reconciliations prior to Hegel's remark - in Glauben und Wissen - that the time had finally come to "give philosophy the shape it has always been trying to reach, a shape in which the old conflicts of religion on the one hand and the sciences on the other are suspended once and for all. " In his Faith and Knowledge (1802), an early contribution to the short-lived Kritischer Journal, which he co-edited with Schelling in Jena, more or less in Fichte's stead, Hegel claimed that the 'imperfect philosophies' of his day rendered the conflict as extreme as possible and subsequently assumed the "edifying" role of cutting Gordian knots rather than untangling them. (Five years later, in the Preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel claimed that philosophy must "beware of the wish to be edifying. ") The greatest achievement of that era, the Kantian system, polarized the respective standpoints of faith and knowledge to the extreme. The Kantian philosophy of the first Critique, construed by the faith philosophers as a paragon of the Enlightenment principles, seemed to collapse into Humean skepticism if not solipsism when disencumbered of the Ding an sich or, if the Ding an sich was retained, into dogmatism; but the Critical philosophy was commonly supposed - based on Reinhold's popularist reading of Kant - to do away with both of these. For transcendental or subjective idealists, argues Hegel, according to which we "know a priori of objects only what we produce in them" (Kant 1781: B xviii), the rationality of the world has its source in the knowing subject alone - indeed, quips Hegel, it would seem that the world would implode altogether were it not for the good services of the categories of the understanding. Of the noumenal, the in- itself or the Absolute, following the limitations of transcendental idealism, we know nothing. Our understanding of the real scheme of things, therefore, and strictly speaking, is a matter of faith rather than knowledge. It is against this view that Schelling and Hegel conceived of their objective if not absolute idealism. Hegel also claimed that transcendental criticism is quickly transformed into dogmatism if not Philistinism once it takes the
12 Chapter One
form of a system in Fichte. The rival model of rationality, namely, scientific naturalism (i. e. , the thesis that everything in nature happens according to ineluctable laws), which was often associated with Spinoza, was summarily dismissed as leading to atheism and fatalism. And while there are exceptions to this view, e. g. , Lessing and Herder, this critique of naturalism carried the weight of tradition; indeed, it was practically a matter of protocol to prove one's orthodoxy in the eighteenth century by publicly renouncing Spinozism. The faith philosophers viewed Lessing as a paragon of the Aufkla? rung1; and Lessing, according to Jacobi, as we shall see, was secretly a Spinozist. After a formidable reign, enlightened reason was suffering a severe and painful setback. Though the enlightenment philosophers, including those who developed the critical theory of knowledge, viewed themselves as defending knowledge against the tyranny of religious faith or authority, Hegel argues that it took the brilliance of Kant to disclose the affinities between the finite knowledge and Protestant faith; in both cases, suggests Hegel, for both the reflective philosophers of subjectivity and the faith philosophers of Protestantism, these philosophers exhibit "merely a negative relation to the Absolute. " The alternative to the skepticism or solipsism if not atheism and fatalism inherent in the eudaimonian principles of the enlightenment was the salto mortale of fideism or irrationalism.
And while Hegel's solution is no great secret, namely, that the infinite is not transcendent but rather immanent in the finite, or that "the Absolute is the identity of identity and non-identity," or more simply that while we "usually suppose that the Absolute must lie far beyond, it is precisely what is wholly present," we have tended to neglect the contextual significance of his proposed reconciliation of faith and reason. We have, as a result, in large part lost the philosophical orientation requisite to what Schleiermacher called "reading behind the lines" of the speculative metaphysical systems of post-Kantianism. Laurence Dickey argues convincingly that the Frankfurt school strategy of "going 'back to the text' is misguided, for so much of the intellectual context of what Hegel wrote is unfamiliar to us. " Only after having familiarized oneself with, e. g. , the Pantheism Controversy
1 This term is often used to signify the uniquely German dimension of the Enlightenment;, although committed to the education of the general public (i. e. , to its liberation from superstition, ignorance, and servitude as well as to the cultivation of taste, manners, and reason) and Deism, similar to the Enlightenment outside of Germany, the Aufkla? rung expressed these views, for good or ill, with reference to the distinctively German philosophical tradition, e. g. , often in Liebnizian-Wolffian terms.
? Der Zeitgeist 13
(which began in the Summer of 1783), and how it exercised an influence comparable with the publication of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft (published in May 1781), and the latter not only as the alternative to Hume's skepticism and Leibniz's rationalism, but also with Hamann and Jacobi's irrationalism, and perhaps even Swabian Pietism, can we hope to appreciate the considerable subtlety of the Hegelian reconciliation. We can surely apply to Hegel what Herder once said of Spinoza, namely, that "if you read a philosopher of the last century in the language of contemporary philosophy, then he must needs appear a monster to you. " For this reason, it is important to read Hegel against the backdrop of - at the very least - the most prominent philosophical personalities and problems of this rather remarkable era. Without attempting to provide an exhaustive or even altogether adequate index of influences on Hegel's earliest - i. e. , Jenaer Zeit - philosophical system, which has been a preoccupation of Hegel interpretation since Dilthey, a project culminating in the Jena project, the following pages are intended merely as an introduction to an array of diversely formative influences on Hegel's reconciliation of faith and knowledge. The twenty years that separated the publication of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft and Hegel's Glauben und Wissen essay may well be said to be among the most animated and embittered epochs in the history of western philosophy.
Following the textbook reduction of early nineteenth century German idealism to a dispute over post-Kantian epistemological subtleties, which is an unfair treatment of the cultural movement during the Goethezeit, philosophers at the end of the eighteenth century were faced with a seemingly unavoidable dilemma: rational skepticism (represented more or less by the Kantian and Spinozistic models of rationality) or irrational fideism (represented, though perhaps unfairly, by Jacobi).
Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Translation of Klaus Du? sing's "Spekulation und Reflexion:
Zur Zusammenarbeit Schellings und Hegel in Jena" (Hegel-Studien, 1969)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank those individuals who have encouraged me, each in their own special way, to continue working on my revisionist reading of Hegel: Howard Kainz, Daniel Breazeale, Klaus Du? sing, George di Giovanni and Frederick Beiser. I would also like to thank the Marquette University Philosophy Department for funding my initial stint of research in Germany. I am similarly grateful to the Fulbright Scholar Program for a generous stipend that enabled me to continue my work on Hegel at Martin Luther Universita? t in Halle-Wittenberg. I want to express my gratitude to Omar Bozeman for his constructive criticisms and thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Special thanks must also go to Valta Ross: his support and enthusiasm at all stages of my research have meant much to me.
I want to thank Professor Du? sing for his generous permission - so many years ago - to translate "Spekulation und Reflexion: Zur Zusammenarbeit Schelling und Hegel in Jena" (Hegel-Studien, 1969), which I provide as an appendix to this book. Earlier versions of several chapters of this manuscript were published in the following philosophical journals: "Making Room for Reason: Hegel, Kant, and the Corpse of Faith and Knowledge" (Philosophy and Theology, 2001); "The Principle of Protestantism: On Hegel's (Mis-)Reading of Schleiermacher's Speeches" (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2003); and "The Theological Foundations of Hegel's Phenomenology" (Heythrop Journal of Philosophy and Religion, 2009).
PREAMBLE
'To judge that a thing has substance and solid worth is quite easy, to comprehend it is much harder, and to blend judgment and comprehension in a definite description is the hardest thing of all' (Hegel 1807/B: 14).
The following manuscript aims at a revisionist reading of Hegel's 1802 essay, Faith and Knowledge, which is itself a revisionist reading of the various reconciliations of faith and reason proposed by his contemporary faith philosophers [Glaubensphilosophen] - namely, Kant, Jacobi, Schleiermacher and Fichte. Hegel's reading of his contemporaries, who he reads as settling for a form of reason that is 'no longer worthy of the name' and a version of faith that 'no longer seems worth the bother,' demonstrates his growing facility with the dialectical method for which he is best known and anticipates also his own speculative reconciliation of faith and reason. To view Hegel's reading of his contemporaries as a series of misreadings, which is not uncommon among scholars, misses the more interesting critical point: Hegel, who was viewed by others if not also by himself as a philosophical latecomer, appropriated the thought of his predecessors with an eye toward overcoming them. What serves as a criticism of his contemporaries is at the same time a speculative pronouncement of what Hegel considered to be a more adequate reconciliation. Faith and Knowledge is best read as an early expression of Hegel's speculative Religionsphilosophie.
If Fackenheim is right, theologians have never taken Hegel seriously (1967: 119). And yet Hegel's entire philosophical system could - and perhaps should - be read as fundamentally theological in its orientation, since it is preoccupied to the extreme with God construed as 'the Absolute. ' Indeed, the inspirational economy behind the epigraph for which Hegel is best known, i. e. , that 'the truth is the whole,' was at least initially a theological ideal in which God was conceived as "an eternal desire for self-revelation. " In general, most theologians simply haven't taken the time to read Hegel. But even if theologians are unable to take Hegel seriously as a theologian in his own right, he really should be taken seriously as a critic of his contemporary Glaubensphilosophen. So while I am interested in Hegel as a philosopher of religion, in how he might
xii Preamble
clarify issues of faith and reason, the dialectical method that begins to surface in Faith and Knowledge - i. e. , the resolve to reflect oneself outside reflectivity - is significant to a better understanding of the entire Hegelian corpus and the perennial work of Hegel's "Aufhebung. " I want also to understand Hegel, the scholar, in Emerson's sense of that term, but to do that I have found it necessary to trace things back to the decisive initial encounter and the response that began him. With all due respect, and much is due, Harris is simply mistaken when he claims that the pages of Faith and Knowledge are "essentially dreary because the material contained in them has no life" (1972: xxxix). These pages represent, I shall argue, the occasion on which Hegel discovered himself, his voice as well as the trajectory of his philosophical epicycle. Bergson claimed, as did Heidegger, that every strong philosopher thinks one thought and one thought only, and then spends his or her entire life thinking it through to the end; perhaps the string on which Hegel harped, repeatedly and with cadenced pathos, was first discovered in the very process of writing Faith and Knowledge. If I am right about this, that Faith and Knowledge represents the birthplace of the Hegel we know best, i. e. , Hegel as a critical theorist, this early essay is actually teeming - albeit largely beneath the surface, to use Hamann's metaphor - with life.
An accurate reading of Faith and Knowledge, I suggest throughout the following manuscript but especially in the conclusion, must include an examination of "influence" as itself influential in shaping Hegel's interpretive "practice" during this stage of his career. One of the central functions of the present analysis, though by no means its only function, is to draw attention to the phenomenon of belatedness, or as I shall more frequently term it, in deference to Harold Bloom's two-volume treatment of the topic, the "anxiety of influence," as decisive to Hegel's intellectual evolution. By the time he arrived in Jena, which he described as a "literary whirlwind" and what Schelling called a "battlefield of metaphysics," Hegel was in grave danger of being viewed and indeed viewing himself as a latecomer. "Faith and Knowledge" is ostensibly concerned with the influence of Hegel's contemporaries, primarily but not exclusively with Kant and Jacobi and Fichte. The unnamed target of Hegel's 1802 analysis, however, the darkest if not the longest shadow from which he would struggle to free himself, may well have been his co-editor of the Critical Journal, Schelling.
Perhaps Nietzsche had Hegel in mind when he suggests, in his Untimely Meditations (1873), that "[t]he belief that one is a late-comer in
Hegel: Hovering Over the Corpse of Faith and Reason xiii
the world is, anyhow, harmful and degrading; but it must appear frightful and devastating when it raises our late-comer to godhead, by a neat turn of the wheel, as the meaning and object of all past creation, and his conscious misery is set up as the perfection of the world's history" (II, ? 8). This anxiety of influence, and this "neat turn of the wheel," constitutes the central thematic preoccupation in what might otherwise appear to be a fairly straightforward reading of Faith and Knowledge. According to Bloom, whose critical theory is discussed in greater detail below, "the revisionist strives to see again, so as to esteem and estimate differently, so as then to aim correctively. " On this definition, or formula, the critical journalists were themselves revisionists to the extreme. Perhaps it is fair for us to read Hegel as Hegel read his precursors. Answering the persistent question of how best to read Hegel, Jean-Luc Nancy suggests - in his own Preamble to One of Hegel's Bons Mots - that to "read Hegel's text is thus, if not to rewrite it, at least to repeat its exposition plastically" (2001: 13). Nancy is following Hegel's own conviction that a text must "be read over and over [wiederholt gelesen werden] before it can be understood" (Hegel: 1806, 39) - i. e. , before "philosophical exposition can . . . achieve the goal of plasticity [plastisch]" (1806: 40), which is necessary for what Nancy calls 'the work of Aufhebung' or 'the speculative act.
' Hegel's philosophical exposition of Kant and Jacobi and Fichte, which he undertakes on behalf of Aufhebung, sets a fair precedent for how to read Hegel: plastically, speculatively, critically. The plasticity of our reading of Hegel, though, in response to Rosen's request, should also be informed by "an elucidation of the concept or the concepts involved" as well as "the point of the concept" (1982: 3).
Hegel's Faith and Knowledge is important to our understanding of the remainder of the Hegelian corpus: it serves as a bold expression of the programme that was to preoccupy if not haunt Hegel for the rest of his days. Hegel here implements for the first time the dialectical strategy by which philosophical reflection was to set about reflecting itself out of the limitations of reflection itself; that strategy aimed not only at apprehending the Absolute, but apprehending it in such a manner as to keep it on this side of consciousness - i. e. , 'completely determined, exoteric, comprehensible, and capable of being learned by all' (1807/M: 7). Without a systematic sublimation of the illusion, thought remains indeterminate, esoteric and incomprehensible; until the infinite 'consumes and consummates finitude,' philosophy collapses into poetry - i. e. , philosophers become, as Plato turned it in the Apology, 'diviners and soothsayers who say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them. ' Hegel
xiv Preamble
had longed since his days at Tu? bingen for 'the free upsurge of the most various living shapes in the philosophical gardens of [ancient] Greece,' but all around him he saw only 'the tortures of the damned. ' This "speculative Good Friday," as Hegel calls it in his terse conclusion to Glauben und Wissen, when belabored and endured rather than evaded, facilitates a transition to genuine philosophy - it is at such moments, he thought, that the spirit of philosophy feels the strength of her growing wings most acutely. The triumphal free flight of the spirit of philosophy by which the corpse of faith and reason was supposed to be resurrected is, however, no easy task; indeed, as a result (that is, as the product of the 'seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative'), it is - says Hegel, perhaps thinking of Spinoza's claim that all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare - 'the hardest thing of all. ' It must be conceded from the outset that Hegel does not provide, perhaps could not have provided, at the time that he wrote Glauben und Wissen, his own reconciliation of faith and knowledge. Rather than glossing over the godforsaken impact of Good Friday in order to celebrate Easter Sunday, following Hegel's metaphor, Hegel invites his readers to languish in the prosaic grief inherent in "the death of God" (1802b: 69) and, almost morbidly, to hover over "the corpse of faith and reason" (1802b: 55). But this "infinite grief" [unendlichen Schmerz] and "harsh consciousness of loss" as well as this sense of "godforsakenness," as Hegel puts it in Glauben und Wissen, or the "Golgotha of absolute spirit" (1807/M: 493), as he expresses it in the Phenomenology, this potentially debilitating labor of the negative, is ultimately unavoidable, absolutely necessary even, since it is at the same time the "secret abyss of that finitude which is infinity. " The corpse of faith and reason, construed as the highest totality, "can and must achieve its resurrection solely from the harsh consciousness of loss, encompassing everything, and ascending in all its earnestness and out of its deepest ground to the most serene freedom of it shape" (1802b: 190).
INTRODUCTION
Even to those who know him best, that is to say, to those who appreciate him most, Hegel is occasionally exasperating. Adorno, whose appreciation of Hegel is undeniable yet ambiguous, suggests that: "In the realm of great philosophy Hegel is no doubt the only one with whom at times one literally does not know and cannot conclusively determine what is being talked about, and with whom there is no guarantee that such a judgment is even possible" (1993: 89). The doubleness of Hegel's dialectic, as Adorno calls it, by which he means that "everything is to be understood only in the context of the whole, with the awkward qualification that the whole in turn lives only in the individual moments" requires us to read Hegel - suggests Jean-Luc Nancy (2001: 13) - with a certain degree of plasticity. Aiming at a revisionist reading of Hegel's Faith and Knowledge, itself an experiment in philosophical criticism, I want to understand what Hegel says - at a decisive stage in his development - as well as what he tries to say but cannot about the "speculative task" of reconciling faith and knowledge.
The title of my analysis of Hegel's Jenaer Zeit Religionsphilosophie, from 1800 to 1806, i. e. , from his Differenzschrift to the Pha? nomenologie, respectively, which entails also an examination of his critical theory, alludes to a peculiar metaphor in the opening paragraph of Faith and Knowledge:
The newly born peace that hovers [schwebt] triumphantly over the corpse of reason and faith, uniting them as the child of both, has as little of reason in it as it has of authentic faith (1802b: 55).
The metaphor is thick if not mixed and hermetic; it is telling and thus itself worth hovering over. The rational faith for which the critical philosophy made room, by limiting the reach of reason, which constituted a clever but ultimately inadequate solution to a difficult problem, thought Hegel, "no longer appeared to be worth the bother. " And victorious but deflated reason, let us call her "enlightened," hovering but by no means soaring, suggests Hegel, no longer seemed to be "worthy of the name. " Suspended overhead, reservedly aloof, one senses something pyrrhic; below, a
2 Introduction
distended or otherwise distorted corpse. The central elements of the metaphor, as I understand it, point back to the Phaedo and the purification of the soul. Germany experienced something akin to a renaissance of Platonism, including Platonic idealism, in the late eighteenth century. We know that this doctrine was inspirational to Hegel, as well as Schelling and Ho? lderlin, from its presence in other texts. If, at the time of its release, the soul is tainted and impure, bogged down with the corporeal and thus hovering above tombs and graveyards (81d), it quickly falls back into another body, where it takes root and grows (83e). But if this is the mystery to which Hegel alludes, the hovering in question would tend more toward falling than a form of flight. And indeed, this draws us rather close to the moral of Hegel's story in Glauben und Wissen.
But let us suppose for a philosophical moment, mixing still further an already mixed metaphor, that the hovering [das Schwebende] in question does in fact suggest something akin to flight. Recall Kant's claim that
[t]he light dove [reason], cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance - meeting no resistance that might, as it were, serve as a support upon which he could take a stand, to which he could apply his powers, and so let his understanding in motion" (CPR: 47; A5/B9).
Hegel's bird is by no means a light dove. But, truth be told, neither was Kant's. Looking up, toward that which hovers, and then at the corpse below, Hegel bends down, kneeling perhaps, himself now hovering, over the corpse in question. This is where I find Hegel, on the road from Frankfurt to Jena, leaving Ho? lderlin and heading toward Schelling's influence, but loyal to both, at dusk, of course, and hovering over the corpse of faith and reason. And this is where Hegel, our dialectical alchemist, goes to work performing autopsies and resuscitating corpses and, well, if nothing else, clearing away the ash. The pace is sometimes a bit frenzied and the procedure is experimental. But eventually, as the embers begin to glow, Hegel's sacred owl takes flight. Metaphors, and similar literary devices, what I should like to call "the divine language of intuitive reason," a phrase used by Kant in a letter to Hamann, in reference to Herder's Oldest Document of the Human Race (1774-6), crop up everywhere in Hegel's Jenaer Zeit writings. This essay - Glauben und
Hegel: Hovering Over the Corpse of Faith and Reason 3
Wissen - may well represent one of Hegel's most accomplished albeit hurried and thus imperfect performances as a philosophical dialectician. Indeed, even Goethe claimed that Hegel's "skills as a critic" were "always quite excellent. "
The "new born peace," to which Hegel refers, hovering over the corpse of faith and reason, a ghostly bat, suffering from a truce suggested in the Preface to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (B xxx), consisted in "limiting" [aufheben] - Kant's verb, translated by Kemp Smith as "to deny," is now associated with Hegel ("to sublate" or "sublimate") - "knowledge in order to make room for faith. " It is tempting to argue that Hegel simply reverses, though he would insist on his technical use of the verb, this popular dictum in Kant, in which case, Hegel's speculative thesis consists in claiming that we must sublimate faith in order to make room for knowledge [i. e. , Wir mussten also den Glauben aufheben, um zum Wissen Platz zu bekommen]. Though mistaken or otherwise misleading, because it oversimplifies and because it accepts the general terms of the conflict, but also because it suggests that Hegel wished to limit or deny faith, which is not his intention, this characterization of Hegel's revisionist Religionsphilosophie would take us some distance - though not far enough - in the direction of what Hegel has in mind at this early stage of his philosophical career.
In Hegel, as in Kant, the very terms of the debate, i. e. , faith [Glauben] and knowledge [Wissen], are thick with connotation and thin in stipulation; and it is important to remember this. According to Hegel's Differenzschrift, written in 1801, knowledge is stipulated as "the conscious identity of the finite and the infinite, the unity of both worlds, the sensible and the intellectual, the necessary and the free in consciousness. " Faith, on the other hand, refers to "a relation of restriction to the absolute, a relation through which one becomes conscious of the opposition alone in consciousness, indeed, in which one is entirely unconscious of the identity" [hingegen u? ber die Identita? t eine vo? llige Bewusstlosigkeit vorhanden ist]; this construal of "faith does not express," argues Hegel, "the synthesis of feeling and intuition. " The faith of the Glaubensphilosophen, among his theological and philosophical contemporaries as well as the tradition they personify, demonstrates what Hegel treats as a "posture of reflection to the Absolute. " Enlightened faith, the child of enlightened reason, which hovers over the divided corpse of faith and reason, has - thought Hegel - 'as little of Reason in it as it has of genuine faith. ' This bold hypothesis simplifies things considerably: The task that Hegel sets for himself in
4 Introduction
Faith and Knowledge is nothing more or less than a "speculative" synthesis, one that extends beyond the reflective reconciliation, of the finite and the infinite, feeling and intuition, the necessary and the free in consciousness. The "identity" to which Hegel here refers, the speculative relationship or synthesis, "is by no means a simple identity"; in the end, Hegel will argue - drawing on Spinoza's logic - for "an identity of identity and non-identity" or, perhaps better, "a differentiated unity. " The real genius of Hegel's distinctive version of a speculative reconciliation, one influenced perhaps by religious mysticism, consists in showing how the infinite, the absolute, when rightly understood, both "consumes and consummates finitude" [die Endlichkeit aufzuzehren] (1802b: 66).
"The fundamental principle common to the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte," writes Hegel, "is the absoluteness of finitude and, resulting from it, the absolute antithesis of finitude and infinity, reality and ideality, the sensuous and the supersensuous, and the beyondness of what is truly real and absolute. " From a religious point of view, these philosophers embody "the principle of Protestantism" (1802b: 57). These reflective philosophies of subjectivity form a dialectical triad that, for all intents and purposes, exhausts the inherent principle entirely: Kant illustrates the objective standpoint, Jacobi represents the subjective antithesis, and Fichte presented a synthesis of both (1802b: 62). And while the artificial triadics for which Hegel is now renowned - the thesis- antithesis-synthesis model in which the component part is subsumed under the synthetic whole - are conspicuously absent from his actual texts, he is as close to that model in Faith and Knowledge as he is anyplace else. (Hegel's dialectic became increasingly nonhierarchical. ) The effort of criticism, as Hegel applies it to these philosophies, consists in "tearing off the masks of subjectivity" (1802a: 277) which disguise and distort as well as disgrace perfect objectivity - that is, in facilitating the transition from a finite to an infinite standpoint. The reflective philosophers of subjectivity, afflicted as it were with finitude, hyperpolarized - that is, exaggerated to the point of mutual exclusion - the opposition of faith to knowledge; but, quips Hegel, "this makes the transition to genuine philosophy easier. "
The task of the philosophy of religion - Hegel's Religionsphilosophie - includes an adequate explanation of how the individual human subject rises above all that is finite to absolute universality and, at the same time, remains within the scope of finite self-consciousness (1821, I, 211-212). This task requires, in the words of the Preface to the Phenomenology, the sustained "seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the
Hegel: Hovering Over the Corpse of Faith and Reason 5 negative. " Hegel's explanation hinges on the role of thinking in relation to
feeling. Hegel thinks that
[i]n thinking I raise myself above all that is finite to the absolute and am infinite consciousness, while at the same time I am finite self- consciousness, indeed to the full extent of my empirical condition (1821, I, 212).
The speculative enterprise in Hegel consists in organizing the manifold shapes of restriction and defect into an integrated totality or organic unity which elevates common understanding to rational knowledge; indeed, for Hegel, "non-knowing becomes knowledge by becoming organized" (1801, 165). According to the Logic, an adequate religion would demonstrate in some manner that though "[w]e usually suppose that the absolute must lie far beyond, it is precisely what is wholly present" (1817, 59). In a telling passage from Faith and Knowledge, Hegel claims that
[i]n the true faith the whole sphere of finitude, of being-something-on- one's-own-account, the sphere of sensibility sinks into nothing before the thinking and intuiting of the eternal. The thinking and the intuiting become one and all the midges of subjectivity are burned to death in this consuming fire, and the very consciousness of this surrender and nullification is nullified (1802b, 141, my italics).
Finitude's "sinking into nothing," which is felt but not fully cognized by primitive religious consciousness, e. g. in song, argues Hegel, is wholly explicable within the sphere of speculative thought. Hegel characterizes, perhaps even caricatures Protestantism as "a conscious flight from objectivity" or as "subjectivity holding fast to itself. " And if Hegel is right about this, the question shifts to how - and to what extent - faith is able to elevate itself above its subjectivity, shed all particularity, and thus participate in the universal objective harmony? How might reflectivity move beyond a mere longing for and toward the actual possession of eternity? And how is reflective thought, borrowing a phrase from Heidegger, who seems to have understood the Hegelian project as well as anyone has, "to reflect itself out of this reflectivity" (i. e. , sich aus dieser Reflexion hinauszureflektieren)? Adorno turns it nicely when he suggests, in his Three Studies, "only through reflection can reflective thought get beyond itself" (1993: 73). Answering this question, or this set of questions, i. e. , teaching reflection how to jump over its own shadow, constitutes Hegel's methodological preoccupation at the time of his Jenaer Zeit collaboration with Schelling.
6 Introduction
The speculative philosophy of religion proposed by Hegel if not also by Schelling is dedicated to overcoming the one-sided abstractions inherent in the reflective philosophy of subjectivity on the one hand and cognizing conceptually the unity of the finite and the infinite on the other; that the former is related to - if not identical with - the latter is distinctive to Hegelian thought. According to his 1821 lectures, the philosophy of religion aims at reconciling religion to reason; in short, philosophy articulates conceptually what is already experienced in religion. And in the revised Concept of Religion, Hegel claimed that religious consciousness begins in feeling (1824, 1: 140); thus, from the outset, faith is steeped in interiority. But the interiority of devotion when limited to feeling and representation - i. e. , of the reflective philosophy of subjectivity - is not, argues Hegel,
the highest form of interiority. It is self-determined thinking which has to be recognized as this purest form of knowing. It is in this that science brings the same content to consciousness and thus becomes that spiritual worship which, by systematic thinking, appropriates and comprehends what is otherwise only the content of subjective sentiment or representation (1827b, 1: 143).
Thus, what was originally interior is further internalized by elevating itself into self-determining thinking; this must be done, of course, without losing one's sense of adoration for the Divine. In his "Tu? bingen Fragment," thinking of Kant and Fichte, but closer to Ho? lderlin, Hegel claimed that "the Ideas of reason enliven the whole web of human feeling - their operation penetrates everything, like subtle matter and gives a peculiar tinge to every inclination and impulse" (1793, 511-512). Thus, religious consciousness in its truest form transcends the traditional bifurcation between thinking and feeling. And this, Hegel wants to suggest, would constitute a lasting reconciliation between faith and reason. But how do we get from here to there, from hovering over the corpse of faith and reason to a form of intellectual devotion that is more interior than the interiority of feeling? This question was decisive for Hegel en route from Frankfurt to Jena.
If the resolution of a difficulty constitutes the discovery of the truth, as Aristotle suggests, a judicious assessment of Hegel's reconciliation would depend on a thorough grasp of the difficulty for which the Hegelian answer was intended to serve as a solution. Without attending to the wide range of questions to which Hegel's philosophy of religion is intended to be an answer, the answer itself - cast in the dizzying language of the time
Hegel: Hovering Over the Corpse of Faith and Reason 7
- must appear to us monstrously difficult if not utterly unintelligible. "The task, therefore, of one who lives in another age and wants to appreciate that work correctly, consists precisely in rediscovering the varied information and complexes of ideas which the author assumed to be the natural property of his or her audience" (Parry 1971: 2). This task, the task of criticism, as described by Milman Parry, in his L'e? pithe`te traditionnelle dans Home`re, is daunting at best. But with Hegel, it is worse than daunting. In his Foreword to Hegel's Logic, the Wallace translation, Findlay suggests that:
Hegel is better seen macroscopically than microscopically, even though the latter may be a necessary preliminary to the former: the broad drifts of the dialectic, fixed as to starting-points and goal, do not depend on the minuter eddies that can with some strain be seen in it. One has to let the headaches produced by continuous Bacchantic riot subside into the calm of a more distant, critical vision if one is to profit from the majestic assault of Hegel's genius (Wallace 1975: vii).
I think that Findlay is right about this. And I think that Findlay and Adorno, though they diverge in other ways, are suggesting similar strategies for how to read Hegel. The difficulty, however, for which the following study is meant as a corrective, consists in the proclivity of many casual students of Hegel, especially his critics, to latch onto the latter, i. e. , the macroscopic metaphysical maxims, and dispense with the former. This tendency has led to what I consider to be an egregious misreading of the Hegelian project. I do not propose to build sepulchers to Hegel, nor do I plan to exaggerate his importance, but I am convinced that we have yet to appreciate his work - his philosophical corpus - correctly.
According to Bloom, and substituting philosophy for poetry, philosophical history is "indistinguishable from [philosophical] influence, since strong [philosophers] make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves"(1973/1997: 5). If this thesis can rightly be applied to philosophical history, a scandalous suggestion in itself, it would be more accurate - or at least more fruitful - to view Hegel's early critique of his contemporaries as having less to do with them and more to do with himself. (This in no wise trivializes Hegel's accomplishment. ) Hegel was, borrowing Bloom's adjective, a "strong" philosopher; thus rather than idealizing his influences, by whom he was formed and malformed, Hegel appropriated them for himself. In Faith and Knowledge, Hegel offers a philosophical interpretation of what he then considered the "present state of philosophy. " Rather than merely
8 Introduction
expositing upon or simply rehearsing the thought of his precursors, Hegel reads or interprets them "plastically" with an eye turned toward a speculative "Aufhebung. " To view Hegel's reading of his contemporaries as a misreading, therefore, misses the critical point of the Critical Journal of Philosophy as well as what is most instructive in Hegel's belabored critique of the reflective philosophies of subjectivity.
So while I am certainly interested in the accuracy of Hegel's interpretation of Kant as well as Jacobi and Fichte in his Faith and Knowledge essay, that is by no means my only concern: reading misreading teaches us more about the one misreading than it does about those misread. Strong philosophers, such as Hegel, like Bloom's "strong poets," are never disinterested readers of philosophy, nor are they philosophical critics "qua common readers raised to the highest power. " In the work of their precursors, a strong reader discovers not only their "own rejected thoughts, [which] come back to [them] with a certain alienated majesty," as Emerson put it, but they search also for the place where the precursor shall be overthrown. Hegel, I have discovered, is an apotheosis of philosophical strength. But even if all strong readings were a misreading of a kind, since philosophical reading is all-but-impossible, that is not to say that there are not better and worse readings. On the contrary, recognizing our tendency to misread - whether because we have lost "the varied information and complexes of ideas which the author assumed to be the natural property of his or her audience" or because we recognize that "there is no such thing as a disinterested reader" or even as a means of staking a claim to an intellectual territory - is at the very core of our task of an increasingly more accurate reading of Hegel' philosophical corpus. Although Hegel's philosophy of religion has received a good deal of attention within the past decade, especially in America but also in Germany, the development of Hegel's concept of God from the early Jena essays to the later Berlin lectures - writes Jaeschke in Reason in Religion (1990) - "has not yet been investigated as it should, and it has not infrequently been entirely disregarded. " And while much of the recent scholarship focuses exclusively on the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, which were delivered in Berlin, it was - again Jaeschke, but acknowledged more recently also by Pinkard (2002) and Hodgson (2007) as well as Desmond (2003) and Beiser (2005) - "during the Jena years that Hegel made his weightiest decisions. "
Hegel: Hovering Over the Corpse of Faith and Reason 9
But the debate that Hegel rehearses as if to appropriate in his 1802 manuscript, Faith and Knowledge, is also timeless: it is as old, or as new, as philosophy - and theology - itself. Though the history of the debate reaches back to ancient Greek philosophy, from Heraclitus to the Neo- Platonists, the basic questions that constitute the character of the conflict have a strangely contemporary ring to them. The medieval period is replete with treatises on the notion of double-truths, the truths of reason and the truths of faith, which some viewed as complementary (e. g. , Aquinas) and others viewed as adversarial (e. g. , Averroes, Duns Scotus, and Ockham). The Enlightenment in general and the Deutsche Aufkla? rung in particular was itself fuelled by the dispute between the dictates of reason and the demands of the heart. By the time that Hegel wrote Faith and Knowledge, the philosophy of Kant provided - in spirit if not in letter - the dominant though contested reconciliation of faith and knowledge. The alternatives to Kant's moral theology were pantheism, e. g. , Spinoza or Lessing or Herder, which was the sub rosa doctrine of most heterodox Protestants at the time, and the theology of feeling (e. g. , Jacobi and Schleiermacher). Hegel considered these proposed solutions to be woefully inadequate because they, one and all, but each in their own way, consist in degrading reason as well as deflating faith. Beyond his critique of the prominent faith philosophies of his age, especially Kant and Jacobi and Fichte, which Hegel casts as constituting a dialectical triad, Hegel offers - in Faith and Knowledge - his own version, in nuce, of speculative theology and doctrine of God.
CHAPTER ONE
DER ZEITGEIST
The conflict between faith and reason gave rise to an astonishing number of varied and often ingenious if not ultimately unsatisfactory reconciliations prior to Hegel's remark - in Glauben und Wissen - that the time had finally come to "give philosophy the shape it has always been trying to reach, a shape in which the old conflicts of religion on the one hand and the sciences on the other are suspended once and for all. " In his Faith and Knowledge (1802), an early contribution to the short-lived Kritischer Journal, which he co-edited with Schelling in Jena, more or less in Fichte's stead, Hegel claimed that the 'imperfect philosophies' of his day rendered the conflict as extreme as possible and subsequently assumed the "edifying" role of cutting Gordian knots rather than untangling them. (Five years later, in the Preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel claimed that philosophy must "beware of the wish to be edifying. ") The greatest achievement of that era, the Kantian system, polarized the respective standpoints of faith and knowledge to the extreme. The Kantian philosophy of the first Critique, construed by the faith philosophers as a paragon of the Enlightenment principles, seemed to collapse into Humean skepticism if not solipsism when disencumbered of the Ding an sich or, if the Ding an sich was retained, into dogmatism; but the Critical philosophy was commonly supposed - based on Reinhold's popularist reading of Kant - to do away with both of these. For transcendental or subjective idealists, argues Hegel, according to which we "know a priori of objects only what we produce in them" (Kant 1781: B xviii), the rationality of the world has its source in the knowing subject alone - indeed, quips Hegel, it would seem that the world would implode altogether were it not for the good services of the categories of the understanding. Of the noumenal, the in- itself or the Absolute, following the limitations of transcendental idealism, we know nothing. Our understanding of the real scheme of things, therefore, and strictly speaking, is a matter of faith rather than knowledge. It is against this view that Schelling and Hegel conceived of their objective if not absolute idealism. Hegel also claimed that transcendental criticism is quickly transformed into dogmatism if not Philistinism once it takes the
12 Chapter One
form of a system in Fichte. The rival model of rationality, namely, scientific naturalism (i. e. , the thesis that everything in nature happens according to ineluctable laws), which was often associated with Spinoza, was summarily dismissed as leading to atheism and fatalism. And while there are exceptions to this view, e. g. , Lessing and Herder, this critique of naturalism carried the weight of tradition; indeed, it was practically a matter of protocol to prove one's orthodoxy in the eighteenth century by publicly renouncing Spinozism. The faith philosophers viewed Lessing as a paragon of the Aufkla? rung1; and Lessing, according to Jacobi, as we shall see, was secretly a Spinozist. After a formidable reign, enlightened reason was suffering a severe and painful setback. Though the enlightenment philosophers, including those who developed the critical theory of knowledge, viewed themselves as defending knowledge against the tyranny of religious faith or authority, Hegel argues that it took the brilliance of Kant to disclose the affinities between the finite knowledge and Protestant faith; in both cases, suggests Hegel, for both the reflective philosophers of subjectivity and the faith philosophers of Protestantism, these philosophers exhibit "merely a negative relation to the Absolute. " The alternative to the skepticism or solipsism if not atheism and fatalism inherent in the eudaimonian principles of the enlightenment was the salto mortale of fideism or irrationalism.
And while Hegel's solution is no great secret, namely, that the infinite is not transcendent but rather immanent in the finite, or that "the Absolute is the identity of identity and non-identity," or more simply that while we "usually suppose that the Absolute must lie far beyond, it is precisely what is wholly present," we have tended to neglect the contextual significance of his proposed reconciliation of faith and reason. We have, as a result, in large part lost the philosophical orientation requisite to what Schleiermacher called "reading behind the lines" of the speculative metaphysical systems of post-Kantianism. Laurence Dickey argues convincingly that the Frankfurt school strategy of "going 'back to the text' is misguided, for so much of the intellectual context of what Hegel wrote is unfamiliar to us. " Only after having familiarized oneself with, e. g. , the Pantheism Controversy
1 This term is often used to signify the uniquely German dimension of the Enlightenment;, although committed to the education of the general public (i. e. , to its liberation from superstition, ignorance, and servitude as well as to the cultivation of taste, manners, and reason) and Deism, similar to the Enlightenment outside of Germany, the Aufkla? rung expressed these views, for good or ill, with reference to the distinctively German philosophical tradition, e. g. , often in Liebnizian-Wolffian terms.
? Der Zeitgeist 13
(which began in the Summer of 1783), and how it exercised an influence comparable with the publication of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft (published in May 1781), and the latter not only as the alternative to Hume's skepticism and Leibniz's rationalism, but also with Hamann and Jacobi's irrationalism, and perhaps even Swabian Pietism, can we hope to appreciate the considerable subtlety of the Hegelian reconciliation. We can surely apply to Hegel what Herder once said of Spinoza, namely, that "if you read a philosopher of the last century in the language of contemporary philosophy, then he must needs appear a monster to you. " For this reason, it is important to read Hegel against the backdrop of - at the very least - the most prominent philosophical personalities and problems of this rather remarkable era. Without attempting to provide an exhaustive or even altogether adequate index of influences on Hegel's earliest - i. e. , Jenaer Zeit - philosophical system, which has been a preoccupation of Hegel interpretation since Dilthey, a project culminating in the Jena project, the following pages are intended merely as an introduction to an array of diversely formative influences on Hegel's reconciliation of faith and knowledge. The twenty years that separated the publication of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft and Hegel's Glauben und Wissen essay may well be said to be among the most animated and embittered epochs in the history of western philosophy.
Following the textbook reduction of early nineteenth century German idealism to a dispute over post-Kantian epistemological subtleties, which is an unfair treatment of the cultural movement during the Goethezeit, philosophers at the end of the eighteenth century were faced with a seemingly unavoidable dilemma: rational skepticism (represented more or less by the Kantian and Spinozistic models of rationality) or irrational fideism (represented, though perhaps unfairly, by Jacobi).
