No More Learning

, a theoretical faculty suited to comprehending the unconditioned; rather, suggests Kant, reason is a practical faculty which prescribes the unconditioned as the regulative ideal or principle of all conduct. It is in this sense, then, that Kant can agree with Jacobi that 'knowledge cannot justify faith' and also with Mendelssohn that 'reason must be the justification of faith. ' Kant's Vernunftglaube is not knowledge, but belief [Fu? rwahrhalten]. Faith is subjectively sufficient because it is
26 This position, which in some ways reminds one of Kant's, claims that insofar as a given principle is necessary to moral conduct or happiness, albeit inadequately demonstrated on purely rational grounds, we nevertheless have a duty [Pflicht] to believe it (i. e. , to conduct ourselves as though it were true).
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derived from the universality and necessity of the categorical imperative, but objectively insufficient because it is not based upon knowledge proper. Hegel's professor of logic and metaphysics at Tu? bingen, Johann Friedrich Flatt, for example, insisted that Kant's "moral faith amounts to blind faith. " In his Briefe u? ber den moralishen Erkenntnisgrund der Religion u? berhaupt, und besonders in Bezeihung auf die Kantische Philosophie, Flatt argued:
Should you opt for this kind of faith, you might indeed be able to hold to it, provided you are comfortable with it, and stand by Kant's reassurance that it is legitimate for the righteous to say: I will that God exist. But then you must not ask me to approve of a system that, short of falling into contradiction, can leave nothing for the most important of truths but blind faith, or to believe that such a system is of greater use than all what has been done in speculative philosophy over half and two thousand years (1789: 72).
Kant attempts to draw a very fine line between the alleged fanaticism or irrationalism of Jacobi, whom he asks to consider "where [his] attacks on Reason [were] leading," and the dogmatism of the Berliners. So construed, the contested authority of reason is a burden which the critical philosophy alone can bear. This tentative truce between faith and reason was, however, and for reasons that Hegel is eager to rehearse in Glauben und Wissen, ultimately unsustainable.
The first sustained polemic against Kant's doctrine of rational faith came from the oft forgotten Thomas Wizenmann, whom Kant accused of embarking on a dangerous course, i. e. , one that led to Schwa? rmerei and the dethronement of reason. In Wizenmann's reply, An den Herr Professor Kant von dem Verfassor der Resultate (1786), Kant is himself accused of Schwa? rmerei (i. e. , excessive enthusiasm or sentiment) in his illicit inference from a practical and subjective need to a belief in an object which satisfies that need; in short, Kant "mistakes a wish for reality. " To this charge, Kant retorts - in his second Kritik - that there is a difference between believing in a thing because one would like to, a desire rooted in the sensibility, and believing because one ought to believe, which is rooted in reason and justified by a necessary and universal law. But Wizenmann is quick to point out that the most that one can infer is that we ought [sollen] to think as though, say, God exists; but, says Wizenmann, such a procedure can merely justify a regulative but never a constitutive principle. In this sense, it would be a glaring non sequitur to infer existence from moral obligation. Similarly, Wizenmann contends that
Der Zeitgeist 35
Kant is caught in a vicious circle that bases morality on faith and faith on morality. It is also suggested that the Kantian notion of a need of reason is thoroughly contradictory: if one justifies a belief on need, all rational argument comes to a stymied halt - the task of reason, argues Wizenmann, is to determine truth and falsity, not the good. And while these objections were addressed, some to a greater degree than others, in the "Dialektik" of the second Kritik, Wizenmann's criticisms were ominous.
The best known of the early polemics against the Kantian notion of a rational faith, however, came from none other than Jacobi. The Kantian philosophy - especially as refined by Fichte - was seen from here on out as the paradigm of all philosophy and, thus, at least for Jacobi, the very epitome of nihilism (i. e. , in this context, a solipsism that dissolves all reality into our own representations). It was Jacobi who first claimed that Kant had uncovered the principle of all knowledge, namely, that of the "subject-object identity. " This principle holds that reason only knows what it creates, the products of its own activity. It is no surprise that Jacobi, like most of his contemporaries, saw this "self-knowing" as ending in nihilism. Thus philosophy is caught inside the circle of consciousness, a circle consisting of nothing but representations that, in the end, represent nothing at all. Kant insisted, of course, especially in his "Refutation of Idealism" [B274] and the Fourth Parlogism, that these representations represent a great deal more than nothing - namely, the things-in-themselves. But Jacobi claims that the thing-in-itself is merely Kant's last-ditch effort to save his philosophy from falling off into the abyss of nihilism. The Critical Philosophy can avoid this inconsistency, of course, which according to Jacobi was precisely what Fichte proposed to do, but only at the cost of revealing its inner spirit of "nihilism. " Jacobi argues that insofar as the things-in-themselves are wholly unknown to us, we cannot - a fortiori - know that they are the cause of our representations; following Jacobi, these representations are caused neither by empirical nor transcendental objects. And though these causes are mutually exclusive, they are also necessary.
Kant retains the thing-in-itself as a means of explaining one of the seemingly undeniable facts of consciousness, namely, passive sensibility (i. e. , the impact of sensible experience); for Jacobi, similar to Wizemann, this contradiction discloses a fatal flaw hidden deep within the Kantian system. So construed, Jacobi could quip that "one needs the assumption of the thing-in-itself in order to enter the Kantian system, but with this assumption it is not possible to remain inside it" (Werke, II, 304). Jacobi
36 Chapter One
similarly criticized Kant's doctrine of rational faith: not only is it hopelessly subjectivist (i. e. , unable to produce knowledge of independent reality), thus susceptible to skepticism if not solipsism, or both, it is also grounded - perhaps necessarily but insufficiently - upon an empty maxim of morality. Jacobi goes so far as to say that "nothing fills [him] with more disgust than Kant's attempt to introduce reason into morality. " It should also come as no surprise that the sole antidote to the ills of Kant's rational faith, according to Jacobi's Briefe an Fichte (1799), was his own "natural faith," i. e. , a form of faith that provides an intuition of an ultimate and indeed independent reality which is both the source of and motivation for moral behavior. Not altogether unlike Fries, there is a close connection between faith [Glauben] and feeling [Gefu? hl] but also between each of these and cognition [Wissen]; but unlike Jacobi, Fries construes feeling if not also faith as a function of reason's spontaneity. Shortly after arriving in Jena in 1805, suggests di Giovanni, "Jacobi began to rely on [Fries's] system as an expression of his own views" (1997: 224). Though Hegel is keen to distinguish himself from Jacobi in Glauben und Wissen, his reconciliation of faith and knowledge displays significant similarities with the one proposed by Fries in Wissen, Glauben und Ahnung, where intimation [Ahnung] arises from the "conviction that finite being is the appearance of eternal being, that eternal being itself appears to us in nature" (1805: 60).
1. 6 The Reflective Philosophies of Subjectivity: From Reflection to Speculation.
Reason is a power of principles, and its ultimate demand aims at the unconditioned. Understanding, on the other hand, always serves reason under a certain condition, one that must be given to us.
--Kant, Critique of Judgment, ? 76.
The ideal of Hegel's youth was preoccupied to the extreme with apprehending the absolute, or what Kant calls the unconditioned [das Unbedingtes]; but in his youth, perhaps into early manhood, until his years in Frankfurt, Hegel was convinced that the infinite lay beyond the reach of discursive thought (i. e. , the categories of the understanding). Philosophical metaphysics is bound to flounder, as indeed it has, says Kant, whenever it ventures out beyond the world of the senses.
The light dove [reason], cleaving to the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too
Der Zeitgeist 37
narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of the pure understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance - meeting no resistance that might, as it were, serve as a support [beneath his wings], to which he could apply his powers, and so let his understanding in motion (CPR, A5 = B9).
The empty space of the pure understanding, the domain of the unconditioned, is an intriguing expanse into which, thought Kant, "unfortunately our powers do not extend" (1790: 282; CJ, 76; Ak 400). It is indispensible and necessary for human understanding, writes Kant, "to distinguish between the possibility and the actuality of things, and this fact has its basis in the subject and in the nature of his cognitive abilities" (1790: 284). And although Kant believed that intellectual intuition was thinkable, i. e. , that it entailed no contradictions, and thus possible, it is a ideal form of cognition reserved for God alone. For God, Kant suggests, there is no distinction between the actual and the possible; for persons, by contrast, the actual depends - whereas the possible does not - on what is "given to us" through sensible intuition according to the categories of the understanding. Kant's solution to the problem of synthetic a priori statements, discussed in the following chapter, restricts human cognition to the domain of experience, the conditioned, of receptivity and subjective reflection.
Hegel's 1802 essay, Glauben und Wissen, signals a significant shift in his philosophical development: what had once been merely an object of faith, beyond the reach of discursive or reflective thought, was now an accessible object of speculative cognition. Although Hegel continued to stress that the absolute, whether construed as pure being or the universe as a whole, transcended the range of discursive thought [Verstand] and the categories of the understanding, he became increasingly convinced that they could be apprehended through the dialectic of reason [Vernunft]. Among other things, Hegel calls into question the then fairly common assumption - confirmed, as it were, by modern science - that philosophy begins with an investigation into the limits of human cognition. Though the reflective philosophers of subjectivity include Kant as well as Fichte and Jacobi, Hegel singles out Locke as the source of all our sorrows: it was Locke, suggests Hegel, who transformed "philosophy into empirical psychology" (1802b: 63); indeed, Hegel begins his analysis of Kant with an extended citation from Locke's Introduction to his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and suggests that "[t]hey are words which one could just as well read in the introduction to Kant's philosophy"
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(1802b: 69). The specific quotation from Locke's Essay (II. 1), and how Hegel uses it, is telling: Reflection is "that notice which the mind takes of its own operations, the manner of them, by reason whereof, there come to be ideas of the operations of understanding. " In the portion of the Essay quoted by Hegel, Locke treats reflection as a means by which to restrict thought from wandering into "those depths where they can find no sure footing," to set the bounds "between what is and what is not comprehensible by us" and thus avoid questions which lend themselves to "perfect skepticism. "
In the Differenzschrift, Hegel claims that "[d]ichotomy is the source of the need of philosophy" (1801: 89). Once the subjective turn has been taken, whether by Descartes or by Locke, Hume cannot be far behind. For Hume, says Hegel, "all so-called philosophy comes down to a mere delusion of supposed rational insight" (1802b: 69). Although the Critical Philosophy was officially opposed to the conclusions suggested by Hume, Kant remains completely within the genus of what Hegel would come to call the reflective philosophies of subjectivity. 27 Strictly speaking, Kant is equally well convinced that rational cognition - as opposed to the cognition of appearances or an immanent metaphysics - is impossible, i. e. , human cognition is strictly restricted to finitude. If pure reason ventures out beyond the domain of sensible intuition, the sphere in which the concepts of the understanding have their legitimacy and objectivity, it is doomed - at best - to the antinomies discussed in the "Transcendental Dialectic. " When Kant suggests that the only intuition proper to human cognition is sensibility, he restricts cognition to phenomena; comprehending the unconditioned, the thing-in-itself, is impossible in principle. The self- limitation characteristic of the critical qua reflective project, in its attempt to "enter upon the secure path of science" and avoid the "mere groping of metaphysics," results in a brand of philosophy which not only stops short of the cognition of God but stops short also of its severely limited goal (namely, the mere cognition of experience28). The unifying theme that cuts
27 The genus here is the "antithesis" between concept and existing thing (see 1802b: 67, 76); so while Kant means to solve the epistemological problems raised by Hume, the problematic remains essentially unchanged - indeed, Kant reproaches Hume for "thinking the task of philosophy with far too little definiteness and universality" (1802b: 69).
28 Recall Kant's claim in the Critique of Judgment, ? 76, that we cannot reasonably hope to become familiar with, much less explain, the principles of nature (the domain of human cognition) without thinking of it as a product of an intelligent cause (the domain of the supernatural into which our powers do not extend); it
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across these reflective philosophers of subjectivity, suggests Hegel and Schelling, is their stubborn and allegedly pious conviction that the absolute lay beyond the boundaries of human cognition [jenseits die Grenze der menschlichen Erkenntnis]; similarly, one is left to assume that the phenomenal world only receives its objective coherence "through the good offices of human self-consciousness and intellect" (1802b: 74). In short, the shared principle of subjectivity is the "absoluteness of finitude and, resulting from it, the absolute antithesis of finitude and infinity" (1802b: 62). According to the reflective philosophers of subjectivity, as Hegel calls them, we can at best think the ideas of reason (e. g. , God, freedom and the immortality of the soul); but beyond that, knowledge of the absolute is absolutely impossible. 29 As a consequence of these self- imposed30 epistemological restrictions, the reflective philosophers of subjectivity take refuge in faith. This is not necessarily bad. After all, Kant announced from the outset that his system was inspired by the measured conviction that "we must deny knowledge in order to make room for faith. "31
Though pure reason is denied cognitive access to the infinite and is forced to content itself instead with merely thinking the idea of reason, practical reason smuggles the absolute in "through the backdoor" (1802a: 369) - i. e. , through an analysis of the subjectively necessary conditions for morality in the Critique of Practical Reason and teleology in the Critique of Judgment. The "idea of reason," as Hegel calls it, is scattered throughout the Kantian corpus: The idea appears in Kant's principle of the deduction, as the supersensible substrate of nature (i. e. , the indeterminate
would follow, then, that our cognition of the former is parasitic on the latter - i. e. , our cognition of nature, too, is a matter (though somewhat remote and unacknowledged) of faith. Also see Hegel, 1802b: 65.
29 The reflective philosophies of subjectivity are committed to the ontological assumption that "in order to be genuinely real the 'in-itself' must be independent of the Ego outside it" (1802a: 368-369).
30 I say "self-imposed" in deference to Hegel, but I think one could supplement this assumption with the following sort of argument: Traditionally, critics of Hegel have asked for a justification for the assumption that rational cognition of the absolute is possible; but the alternative - viz. , that rational cognition is not possible for humans - might well be equally unjustified. Indeed, Hegel thinks that "the prejudice against which philosophizing on the subject of religion in our time has to fight . . . [is] the prejudice that the divine cannot be conceived" (1802a: 266).
31 For an examination of Hegel's dialectical reversal of this Kantian dictum, in the Hegelian strategy of limiting faith in order to make room for reason, see Jensen (2001).
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solution to the four antinomies), as an intricate part of his account of the moral law (i. e. , as the final cause and moral author of the universe), and in his treatment of aesthetic and teleological judgment. Nonetheless, phenomena and finitude are considered to be altogether absolute - i. e. , they exhaust the class of objects suitable for cognition. Though the suspension of finitude "hovered very clearly before Kant" (1802b: 80), avers Hegel, it was officially renounced because subjectivity is central to his refutation of skepticism; in his "we get out of experience what we put into it" strategy, Kant renders the conflict between faith and reason rationally insuperable. The speculative solution to the pernicious dualisms characteristic of reflective philosophies of subjectivity, suggests Hegel, is hinted at in the Critique of Judgment. Though the critical philosophy consciously limits itself to an exposition of the conditions necessary to finite experience, understood as the product of two heterogeneous faculties (sensibility and the categories of the understanding), Kant occasionally refers to "a single higher principle and common source. " This common source, however, "does not admit of any explanation" (CJ, V, 412). The post-Kantians, beginning with Fichte, as we shall see, were preoccupied with explaining this unifying but allegedly inexplicable source.
According to the Critical Journal of Philosophy, in both Hegel's Differenzschrift as well as the Introduction co-authored by Schelling and Hegel, philosophy emerges at a time when the unity or totality of life has been disrupted. At times of unrest, writes Hegel, "the spirit of philosophy itself, which feels the strength of its growing wings all the more when it is submerged and crushed together in this broad sea, . . . strains upward toward a new life our of the putrefication of the deceased culture" (1802a: 384). How might philosophy, seen as the symptom of a deceased culture, what Hegel calls the "Reflexionskultur," reflect itself beyond the limitations of reflectivity? Both Schelling and Hegel were committed to restoring a unity that was lost, remains lost, in Kant's dualisms: God and humanity, objective nature and subjective experience, sensible intuitions and categories of understanding, reason and heart, thought and being, universal and particular, and faith and knowledge. Hegel and Schelling are critical of what they viewed as the "fundamental error that has lurked unchallenged at the base of all recent [philosophical] efforts": namely, "the unconditional requirement that the Absolute must be kept outside oneself" (1802a: 368), the assumption that "in order to be genuinely real the 'in-itself' must be independent of the Ego outside it" (ibid, 369). In their attempt to "enter upon the secure path of science" and thus avoid the "mere groping of metaphysics," the Reflexionsphilosophen from Locke to
Der Zeitgeist 41
Fichte restricted themselves to an epistemological agenda that not only "stops immediately short of its goal" (i. e. , apprehending the unconditioned) but stops short also of its enormously limited goal (i. e. , knowledge of experience). For the critical journalists, the reflective philosophies of subjectivity were fated, as it were, to oppose and segregate as well as divide and distort what is ultimately - and in truth - perfectly unified and harmonious. But by the time he arrived in Jena, Hegel no longer conceives of all thinking in terms of the understanding (Beiser 2005: 119), i. e. , in terms of reflective or discursive thought; by the time he was reunited with Schelling, Hegel was convinced, increasingly, that the absolute, which is infinite, was amenable to speculative or dialectical cognition. 32 Not only is reflective thought unable to grasp the infinite, the understanding - since its concepts are finite, conditioned and divisive - "destroys such an object in the very act of conceiving it" (Beiser 2005: 163). But unlike Schelling, Hegel seems to have been convinced from the Jenaer Zeit forward that the understanding as well as the reflective philosophies of subjectivity had a positive role to play in speculative metaphysics: indeed, speculative reason is inherent in and arises from within reflective understanding.
1. 7 Reinhold and Fichte: Beyond the Critical Philosophy
Although the Critical Philosophy was attacked from the left as well as from the right, on theoretical as well as practical grounds, it continued to gain - slowly but surely - admirers and advocates. Among the ablest of these advocates was Reinhold. Although he wrote a bold rebuttal of Kant's scathing review of Herder's Ideen, Reinhold was rather dramatically converted to Kantianism in 1785. Reinhold's Briefe u? ber die Kantische Philosophie (1790) explains how the Critical Philosophy, and it alone, can navigate us - as it had him - through the Scylla of rational disbelief and the Charybdis of irrational belief, between the straits of what Reinhold dubbed the 'neologists' and the 'fideists. ' Indeed, Reinhold claims that Kant had settled the dispute between Mendelssohn and Jacobi, by which he means the pantheism debate, four years before it broke out. From the success of the Briefe, Reinhold received both Kant's official blessing (in the January 1788 issue of Merkur) and a professorship at the University of Jena, which was to become the epicenter of Kantianism in Germany. After
32 Following Beiser: "While the understanding is an analytic faculty that divides and analyzes, failing to grasp objects as wholes, reason is a synthetic faculty that unites parts into a whole, showing how no part exists on its own apart from the whole" (2005: 119); also see Klaus Du? sing, 1969.
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two short years as a loyal expositor, however, Reinhold began to bemoan the letter - though not the spirit (which he claimed to know better than its author) - of that same Critical Philosophy. His dissatisfactions would soon give birth to Reinhold's own "philosophy without a nickname," i. e. , the Elementarphilosophie, which he initially articulated in a series of essays and later revised into a set of manuscripts: Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermo? gens (1789), Beytra? ge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Missversta? ndnisse der Philosophen, Erster Band (1790), and Ueber das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens (1791).
But what was wrong with the critical philosophy that only a few years earlier had served as his salvation? Reinhold's primary dissatisfaction stemmed from the failure of the Critical Philosophy to provide the philosophical consensus and unanimity that it had predicted; this failure was due not only to its forbidding style but also to the opacity of its fundamental principles or foundation. The programmatic task of the Elementarphilosophie, then, was to define and clarify these presupposed principles, thereby grounding - without essentially altering - the edifying conclusions of the critical philosophy. In short, Kant had failed to place his philosophy upon sufficiently systematic and critical foundations. If for no other reason, Reinhold should be remembered in the history of post- Kantian idealism for his early his insistence on systemicity; the Critical Philosophy, argued Reinhold, needed to be supplemented with or grounded in a singular but infinitely rich first principle. It was not, however, the fate of Reinhold to provide us with such a principle; instead, Reinhold was condemned - according to Hegel - to Sisyphean toil of endless preambles and introductions to such a system.
The Elementarphilosophie was seriously challenged if not ultimately undermined by an anonymous work that appeared in 1792 under the lengthy title Aenesidemus, oder U? ber die Fundamente der von dem Herrn Professor Reinhold in Jena gelieferten Elementarphilosophie. The Aenesidemus, written by G. E. Schultz, shattered all the pretensions into which the Critical Philosophy - in either its Kantian or Reinholdian formulation - was starting to settle. The Author of the Aenesidemus argues that "the faculty of representation laid down in the Philosophy of the Elements is in fact nothing more than a definition of the characteristics of the very representation which was supposed to be the effect of the defined faculty, adorned however with the entirely empty title of power or faculty" (1792: 111). An appeal to some particular faculty in order to explain a given phenomenon "amounts to no more than a repetition of the
Der Zeitgeist 43
phenomenon or actual fact whose properties we wanted to explain, with the addition of the word power or faculty" (ibid). Although the influence of the Aenesidemus was as broad as it was diverse, our present concern is with its influence on Fichte and Hegel. Fichte claims that while the Aenesidemus completely confounded him, it nevertheless convinced him that both Kant and Reinhold had failed to provide an adequate foundation for philosophy. The proper foundation, thought Fichte, was to be provided within his own Wissenschaftlehre (1794).
Every event that occurs in nature is the result of a set of causal conditions without which the given phenomenon could not take place and with which it could not fail to occur; according to Kant's 'Analytic,' and Fichte follows suit, this is an "established principle" that "allows of no exception" (A. 536; B. 564). When this principle is extended to humans, considered here as but one more "link in the chain of the rigid necessity of Nature," the source of our actions is simply the product of the antecedent chain of causes. It would seem to follow that we are not really responsible for what we - construed as the last palpable link in an infinite chain - do; but this conclusion is altogether incompatible with if not repulsive to our moral consciousness. The philosophy that one chooses, e. g. , between dogmatism and determinism or idealism and freedom, suggests Fichte, ultimately depends on the sort of person one is (see Breazeale, 1988b). In his Bestimmung des Menschen, Fichte demonstrates that our empirical consciousness, i. e.
, our perception of external things, this dense system of indifferent causes, is "in the first place only yourselves and your own condition"; indeed, it is "only your own condition. "33 The relation of this stream of sensible qualities to "external objects" can only be inferred from a general principle of cause and effect. This general principle can only be justified, or critically defended, as an "inward law of thought. " As such, the object, which we take to exist independently, is itself only the product
33 The discovery of the first principle of consciousness, Ich=Ich, as the foundation of all knowledge, requires that the second principle of consciousness (which cannot be deduced from the first) must be determined by it, i. e. , that the Ich must determine the nicht-Ich (which is, in effect, to say that the Ich determines itself-- by, of course, a self-limitation). How that is accomplished must remain, for Fichte and according to the Wissenschaftlehre, a mystery to theoretical knowledge. It can, however, be explained within the practical realm, by moral self-determination (albeit an eternal striving) by which the absolute self, and its activity of self- creation, should appear within humanity. And while it should exist, it need not actually exist (whereas Hegel's ideal - by the very fact that it can be formulated - must exist).
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of our own thought. The first fundamental proposition (namely, the principle of identity, or A = A) expresses the identity of the subject and object in pure consciousness, the second principle (namely, the principle of opposition, or A -A) provides the transcendental conditions requisite to determinate determination, i. e. , that determinate identification (and differentiation) within empirical consciousness presupposes a determinate identification (and differentiation) within pure consciousness, and the third proposition or grounding principle of speculation (A = A & -A) expresses the identity as well as the mutual limitation of pure-self consciousness and empirical consciousness, i. e. , that the not-self posited by the self is not a not-self at all.
The remaining if not intractable problem, though, for Fichte but also for Kant, is that we know nothing other than the world of appearances and nothing at all about the reality that lies beyond them; this predicament is tantamount to Jacobi's charge of nihilism in his Open Letter to Fichte (1799). In response to Jacobi, perhaps, Fichte claims that we are delivered from this derivative difficulty by privileging the dictates of our moral consciousness, i. e. , by having faith that there is a world in which our duties can - because they ought to - be performed. Our moral activity can only be conducted in a sensible world, one filled with obstacles, i. e. , the material around which we might practice our virtue. But this Fichtean notion of Identity, with its absolute subjectivity, is doomed - according to Hegel - to a one-sidedness that lacks the symmetry and reflexivity necessary to a fully adequate notion of identity. The ultimate and perhaps most pernicious antithesis within the reflective philosophy of subjectivity is that which arises between freedom and necessity. According to Fichte, who was following Kant, we are compelled by practical reason to view the world as 'a field of moral action' and thus postulate the freedom of my will. And not unlike Kant, Fichte thought that it was possible to regard one and the same event as being in one respect merely an effect of nature and in another aspect due to freedom (see KRV: A. 543, B. 571). And yet, both Kant and Fichte agree that the demand to regard oneself as a moral agent, or the subject of freedom (i. e. , as noumenon), and at the same time from the point of view of physical nature (i. e. , as phenomenon) in one's own empirical consciousness is "paradoxical" (Kant 1788: 6). At its most extreme, Kant suggests that while we cannot comprehend the fact of moral freedom, wedo comprehend its incomprehensibility, and this is all that can be fairly demanded of a philosophy that strives to carry its principles to the very limit of human reason (1785: 463). In the Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte similarly admits that "as for myself qua subject-object, I am
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incomprehensible [unbegreiflich]; within experience, I divide myself into a subject and an object, which, to be sure, should be thought of as originally one" (1794: B. 419-20; D. 211).
And while Hegel praised Fichte for a genuinely speculative insight into the absolute (i. e. , what Harris calls "an intellectual vision of all things within the universal logos"), he severely reprimanded him for failing to provide the promised demonstration of the subject-object identity. According to Hegel, the speculative insight inherent in the Wissenschaftslehre (1794) had deteriorated into dogmatism - albeit with a "hue of inwardness" - by the time Fichte published the Bestimmung des Menschens (1800); and while there are those who sharply distinguish the earlier work from the later work, such that it would be a misreading of Fichte to assess the one on the basis of the other, Hegel was convinced that the Bestimmung essay "not only unveils the essence of Fichte's philosophy most completely for a popular audience, it is also the only one among his expositions that sets forth his philosophy in its totality as a system" (NKA, IV: 505). The practical conclusions of Fichte's system of knowledge, which are suggested in his Vocation of Man but more explicitly in his 1806 Guide to the Blessed Life, contributed - suggests Hegel - to the swelling tide of thinkers who conceived of religion as essentially rooted in aesthetic and moral feeling. (This romantic tendency is embraced and espoused most unabashedly in the religious thought of Schleiermacher, but it is also to be found in Hamann as well as Jacobi and Schlegel. ) But this reconciliation is considered by Hegel to be superficial: it is, he suggests, a truce that is quickly conceded because there is nothing very significant to be gained or loss.
The theoretical shortcomings inherent in Fichte's theory of knowledge, which concede and abstract if not empty reconciliation, were seemingly surmounted - at least in principle or to Hegel's satisfaction at the time that he wrote the Differenzschrift - by the emerging Schellingean "system"; Hegel is presumably referring to the system presented within Schelling's "Presentation of My System" (1801) rather than the earlier "System of Transcendental Idealism" (1800). The critical project, which was initiated in German thought by Kant and subsequently purified by Fichte, was intended to legitimate, simultaneously and by mutual restraint, the claims of both knowledge and faith. The dominant or recurrent Hegelian critique of this reconciliation is that the forms of knowledge and faith for which they shrewdly negotiated were, in both cases, relatively impoverished substitutes. When faith and knowledge were reduced to their lowest
46 Chapter One
common denominator, in order to facilitate a quick and seemingly painless truce, it hardly seemed to Hegel "worth the bother. " An enduring or sustainable reconciliation would require that we retain a conception of reason that makes truth possible, i. e. , a construal of reason "worthy of the name," as well as a form of faith that is raised above subjectivity and finitude.
1. 8 Hegel's Early Identity Philosophy
Although Hegel was well aware of the controversies stirring beneath the philosophical surface at the end of the eighteenth century, he was still paralyzed by the dogmatism of Tu? bingen and, shortly thereafter, the solitude of Berne. These years, though, were neither idle nor unimportant to the strictly philosophical ideals and methods indicative of the later, Jena, period. Indeed, it is not at all difficult to construe Hegel's development - as H. S. Harris so convincingly contends - as a continuous, conscientious and thoughtful progression; his earliest philosophical preoccupations as well as the "ideal of his youth" are always present.
While at Berne, perhaps even earlier, Hegel's writings are seemingly (anti-)theological34 if not anti-Christian in their emphasis and tone; and yet, it is important to note that the Jugendschriften are preoccupied solely with critiquing the "positivity"35 inherent in Christianity. It would be a mistake, surely, to characterize these earlier writings as "anti-religious. "36 At this point in his development, Hegel was quite satisfied with Kant's doctrine of moral faith. Hegel's ideal of a folk religion, i. e. , the organic unity of life as expressed within a society and as valuable for society, is judged - according to his Religion ist eine37 - in terms of three central concerns: (i) its doctrines must be founded on universal reason, (ii) fancy,
34 See Kaufmann 1972: pp. 63-71; also Lukas, 1973: I, 34 ff.
35 For Hegel, "positivity" refers to institutional efforts to base religion on ecclesiastic or institutional authority rather than "reason alone"; similarly, Beiser suggests that during his years in Tu? bingen and Berne Hegel is less interested in "objective religion," i. e. , with dogma and doctrines, than with subjective religion, i. e. , religion as expressed in action and feeling (2005: 127-128).
36 Nowhere is this ideal better captured than in Hegel's poem to Ho? lderlin, Eleusis, an English translation of which can be found in Mueller's Hegel: The Man, his Vision and Work, pp. 60-62. Civic or folk religion aims at a reconciliation between life and thought, faith and reason, and spirit and intellect.
37 See Nohl, pp. 20-1; and for an extended treatment of this period and these canons, see Harris' Hegel's Development, Ch. III, esp. section 6 ff. .
? Der Zeitgeist 47
heart, and sensibility must not go away empty, and (iii) that it be so constituted that all the needs of life, such that the public activities of the State were also implicated. So construed, Christianity (as understood by Hegel in this period) can, at best, meet the first of these three tenants; with regard to the second and the third, Christianity was sad and melancholy (as opposed to the festive and imaginative temper of Hellas) on the one hand and regrettably private (as opposed to the mentality epitomized within the walls of the Parthenon) on the other. For Hegel, as for most of the Romantics of the period, Christianity paled in comparison to the organic unity of Greek paganism, which expressed itself in terms of imagination, enthusiasm, beauty, and community. In the Berne Fragments, Hegel still considered Socrates to be better suited than Jesus as a teacher of morality or civic religion. It was Hegel, rather than Nietzsche, who first pronounced that "God is dead" (1802b: 191; see Jaeschke, 1992)38; and it is with this in mind that Hegel hovered over the "corpse of faith and reason" in search of an enduring reconciliation or, sticking to the metaphor, a resurrection of a new civic religion.
As reported by his sister, Hegel's experience in Berne was not altogether pleasant. Hegel himself claims to have suffered at this time from what he called hypochondria - i. e. , at least in part, a period of painful recognition of the immensity of the task that lay before him and the unlikelihood of his prospects for achieving those goals. It was within this period that Hegel was to reassess - perhaps inspired by his friend Ho? lderlin - the arsenal of Christianity, especially the love ethic and moral beauty of Jesus, for grounding a folk religion. Perhaps it was not a revolution in his thought at all: perhaps it was merely his turning away from the critical task, i. e. , culling out that which hinders spirit, looking instead toward the constructive task of salvaging the best of whatever remained, representing the spirit of Christianity in its dialectical purity, and weaving those remnants into a healthier mythology. But by the time
38 Although the declaration that "God is dead" is first found in Hegel, the connotation is quite different from its use in Nietzsche and subsequently Heidegger. In the Positivity Essay, Hegel goes so far as to claim that our preoccupation with personal salvation demonstrates our failure to discover immortality within the republic. Whereas Nietzsche and Heidegger seem to be referring to the irrelevance of Christianity as a societal fact, as it were, Hegel is alluding to the withdrawal of God from the world as a moment of negation and infinite grief that must itself become negated by speculative philosophy: it marks the end of traditional Christianity, as exemplified by "positivity," and the emergence of a new religion (see Beiser 2005: 135-139).
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that he writes his essay on the Spirit of Christianity, Hegel revisions Christianity as an uncanny and indeed beautiful fusion between the better aspects of the Greek soul and Kantian reason; at the same time, Hegel now feels able to circumnavigate the harmful dualisms intrinsic in Kant as well as the positivity inherent in traditional Christianity and Judaism. The altered status of Christianity and the almost mystical tone of Hegel's works in this period seem to suggest that the shift in his thought was decisive. The concept of the Divine, as opposed to the submissive fear engendered by the alienating commands of positive religion, allows the subject and object or freedom and nature to be united; indeed, subject and object cannot be separated from one another without misconstruing either - this is, suggests Hegel, the ideal of every religion. Only in love, writes Hegel, as though enthralled if not recently converted, are such dichotomies overcome: "Since the Divine is pure life, anything and everything said of it must be free from any implication of opposition. "39 Love and Divinity, in form if not content, are during this period of Hegel's thought virtually synonymous: "Genuine love excludes all oppositions. " But even here, Hegel is unwilling to say that all separation or opposition is obliterated - indeed, a separation remains but as no longer fixed in its opposition. Difference is taken as a duplication of the same: both within the lover and beloved, within the subject and object. This mystery of identity and difference - if not also the identity inherent in identity and difference - is not to be grasped by thought, however, at least not yet, but rather by spirit. It is important to notice that the doctrine of identity of identity and non- identity, which is what distinguishes Hegel from Schelling in Jena, is already present in Hegel's earliest reflections on the nature of love in Plato, Shakespeare and the Scriptures.
If the speculative ideal consists in an apprehension of organic wholeness or unity, then the structure for its realization is to be found in the formula or structure of an "identity of identity and non-identity. " Following Kant, the reflective philosophers of subjectivity retained an ultimate opposition between an infinite reality, often construed as nature in-itself or the absolute, and the finite self. It was generally thought that reconciling the ego and the non-ego could only be accomplished by collapsing the former into the latter, which is how most commentators interpreted Spinoza, or the latter into the former, which is how many of his contemporaries interpreted Fichte. There is, however, a third possibility: the one envisioned by the Identita? tsphilosophie. Briefly put, it is to
? 39 Hegel, Spirit of Christianity, 255.
Der Zeitgeist 49
conceive of these seeming antitheses as coinciding and mirroring aspects of one, ultimate reality. It is only in this way, as Hegel put it in his Differenzschrift, that we might "give nature its due" without obliterating or otherwise explaining away as non-essential if not illusory the reality of the self. In his review of Krug, Hegel described the main idea of the Identita? tsphilosophie as the effort "to put God back again at the peak of philosophy, absolutely prior to all else as the one and only ground of everything, the unique principium essendi and cognoscendi" (1802c: 299). And while that alone is too thin to be useful, it is thickened in two ways: First, nature must no longer be conceived as something dead, or merely mechanistic, as it was in Fichte, and wholly other-than or independent of the self. And while this solution is clearly modeled after Spinoza, it has now been filtered through the post-Kantian conceptual apparatus on the one hand and purged of the mechanistic presentation of nature to which Spinoza remained victim (see ? 1. 2, above, apropos of Herder's vitalism or organicism). Similarly, the self and its knowing capacities must no longer be limited to the activities proper to apprehending that which is dead, i. e. , knowledge must no longer be limited to the discursivity of the understanding [Verstand], which merely analyzing or divides things into discrete parts. Hegel's solution, or his discovery in Frankfurt, as it were, consists in his organic construal of nature and his emerging confidence that reason [Vernunft] is a faculty adept at grasping things synthetically (i. e. , in terms of the unifying whole rather than merely the totality of parts).
The so-called "Ho? lderlin fragment," published as Urteil und Seyn, which Harris dates at April of 1795, seems to have anticipated if not directly inspired Hegel's so-called reversal in Frankfurt; it was there, in a fragment that may well have served as a speculative manifesto for Hegel, who was one of his most loyal friends, that Ho? lderlin claimed that:
Being expresses the connection of subject and object, where subject and object are not only partly united but so united that no separation at all can be undertaken without violating the essence of that which is to be separated, there and nowhere else can one speak of Being simpliciter, as is the case with intellectual intuition.
Ho? lderlin also expresses this ideal in the penultimate version of the Preface to his Hyperion (1795):
The blessed unity, Being, in the only sense of the word, is lost to us and we had to lose it if we were to strive for it and win it. . . . We have fallen away
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from nature and what, one might surmise, was once unified now struggles in opposition, and rule and slavery alternate between the two sides.
Although this insight or speculative formula is most prominent in his philosophy of religion and phenomenology of experience, it is detectible also in Hegel's later conception of metaphysics and logic, i. e. , the study of the necessary concepts proper to being (see Forster, 1989: 48). The structure of this ideal remains strikingly consistent throughout its semiotic development, whether construed in terms of the "divine moment" and the "experience of love" (as described in The Spirit of Christianity in 1799) or in terms of organicity, Life, or Being (as intimated within the Systemfragment of 1800) or in terms of the method and metaphysics inherent in his mature writings (as expressed in the dialectic of the Phenomenology of 1806 or the Encyclopedia of 1816).
In his redolent "Systemfragment," Hegel maintains - though it should be noted that the authorship of this fragment is alternatively attributed to Schelling or, occasionally, to Ho? lderlin - that the structure of life, considered in its organicity, is simultaneously union and non-union, life as unified within the individual and life as differentiated into the manifold of living beings - both of which are defined and conditioned in terms of the other. From this point forward, the individual - as contextualized within an organic whole or unity that is greater than the sum of its parts - is characterized as much by separation as with unity. These polar concepts, e. g. , identity and non-identity, suggested Schelling, internally include or inhere in one another and, therefore, fall outside the conventional realm of logic and, a fortiori, reflective philosophy. This was surely one of the most fetching elements of the Schellingean system: it aimed at a unity within thought, at thinking or at least intuiting nature and thought as coinciding, i. e. , at nature becoming thought and thought becoming nature. And while this subject-object identity was anticipated by the Fichtean system, at least in the spirit of the Wissenschaftlehre (1794), the unity of nature and self or alternatively of the world and God is, according to the letter of his Vocation of Man (1800), indefinitely if not infinitely postponed into the future as the goal of our infinite striving. In the end, and indeed in principle, we can merely postulate - indeed, we must postulate - the coincidence of these two domains within the noumenal realm.
Der Zeitgeist 51 1. 9 Schelling's Naturphilosophie and the Ausfu? hrung
of Fichte's Idealism
It would be difficult to overestimate, although it has surely been done,40 the extent of influence that Schelling exercised over Hegel when he, Hegel, entered the fray of the post-Kantian idealism discussion in Jena. 41 In deference to the alleged influence, and Hegel's anxiety of influence, something needs to be said about the Schellingian system that lay "before the eyes of the public"42 at that time and which Hegel was considered to be an advocate. Schelling, like most of those who participated in speculative idealism's storied "march from Fichte to Hegel," considered himself to be a child of Kant who, as a reasonable service, wished to render those doctrines clearer, more systematic, and more extensive. And like most of his philosophical siblings, that service consisted in showing - as Fichte had tried but failed - how the self- determining activity of the self was constitutive of objective knowledge of nature qua other-than-the-self; the singular goal of the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), according to Schelling, consisted in the discovery of a system in human knowledge, i. e. , to explain the principle by which human knowledge was possible. More generally, Schelling, not unlike Fichte before him, sets out to explain how subjective spontaneity is the ground or origin of nature as well as the content of empirical consciousness. As mentioned above, in ? 1. 5, Fichte had already set the terms of the problematic in his sustained suggestion and attempted demonstration that self-consciousness can - or, at least, should - serve as a speculative paradigm for the identity of subject and object. But that suggestion remained, thought Schelling and Hegel, perhaps in principle, incomplete. It is precisely this speculative task that fuelled the many
40 Perhaps by Schelling himself, who once quipped that every idea Hegel ever had was stolen from him.
41 For a helpful account of this relationship, see Du? sing's "Spekulation and Reflexion. Zur Zusammenarbeit Schellings und Hegels in Jena," Hegel-Studien, V, 95-128 (Appendix 1, below) and Po? ggeler's "Hegels Jenaer Systemkonzeption" in his Hegels Idee einer Pha? nomenologie des Geistes, Freiburg/Munich, Karl Alber, 1973.
42 This is precisely what Hegel claimed in the Differenzschrift with reference to Schelling's Presentation of My System, 1801, which signals a movement toward a philosophy of identity and a departure away from the earlier, very Fichtean sounding preoccupations of the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800); interestingly, Schelling seems to return to his earlier concern in his Philosophical Investigations of the Nature of Human Freedom (1809).
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systems that were to become the rather infamous trademark of Schelling's long speculative career. Hegel's Differenzschrift was originally conceived, however, as a sustained apologia in defense of Schelling's Naturphilosophie. At this point in his thought, Schelling presents nature as the complementary pole in an interaction of spirit and nature; this philosophy of identity expresses an ideal-realism, or 'absolute idealism,' i. e. , a complete synthesis of subject and object. According to Schelling, in his second edition to his Ideas on a Philosophy of Nature as an Introduction to the Study of This Science (1803), nature appears as visible spirit and spirit appears as invisible nature. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel puts it this way: "Nature thus drives toward spirit, just as spirit drives toward nature. "
In opposition to the deflated conception of nature in Fichte, i. e. , as a mere construct of practical reason or a posited resistance to our ethical vocation, Schelling attempts a total and faithful account of the objective particularity of the physical world. Schelling's presentation of "that which is utterly other independent of our freedom" is not, however, contra Fichte if not also Kant, to be understood as merely a stage or an occasion for moral purification but rather as something intrinsic to a "process through which the self sees itself develop through a necessary but not consciously observed act of self-positing" (Werke, X, 97). The dialectical activity of the self and the limitation necessary to such a process, Schelling argues, are essential to the conscious activity of the Ego. This Schellingian version of the identity of identity and difference was, to be sure, among the most alluring aspects of the system to which Hegel felt, at least on his arrival at Jena, an ambivalent allegiance. The self is, speculatively construed, both subject and object, freedom and necessity, activity and limitation. The Fichtean ego was sure to pale, indeed appear wholly empty, in comparison to this - infinitely rich - self and increasingly organic conception of nature.
And although Schelling begins his quest for the Absolute in terms of this absolute self, and as an enthusiastic disciple of the Wissenschaftslehre, he never forgets his promise to "recompense nature for the mishandling that it suffered at the hands of Kant and Fichte. " The absolute must be construed in a manner that overcomes opposition between spirit and nature, subject and object; the goal, namely, an Identita? tsphilosophie, was really never in question since the Tu? bingen years. Reconciling the conflict or opposition between the ego and the non-ego is presented, in Schelling, as a point of indifference. It was precisely this conception of absolute
Der Zeitgeist 53
indifference, built on the analogy of magnetism, which Hegel later characterized if not caricatured as "die Nacht, worin, wie man zu sagen pflegt, alle Ku? he schwarz sind" [the night in which, so to speak, all cows are black]. Fichte's relatively impoverished conception of the self entailed an equally empty notion of the absolute; and to the extent that Schelling remained within the Fichtean paradigm, he was similarly limited to a conception of the absolute that was impotent to explain either the self or nature. At about the same time that Hegel arrived in Jena, Schelling was moving away from the subject-oriented Fichtean strategy and, increasing, in the direction of a Naturphilosophie inspired by Spinoza and Herder if not also Oetinger and Boehme. But Schelling also offered something new: in short, nature was construed as the finite self's pre-self; similar to Fichte, nature is an unconscious force, but unlike Fichte, for whom the 'non-Ego' was dependent on the self, Schelling argues that the finite or conscious self emerges from - and thus depends on - nature (Werke, I, 10: 93-94; also see Fackenheim, 1996: 64 ff. ).