No More Learning

In his redolent "Systemfragment," Hegel maintains - though it should be noted that the authorship of this fragment is alternatively attributed to Schelling or, occasionally, to Ho? lderlin - that the structure of life, considered in its organicity, is simultaneously union and non-union, life as unified within the individual and life as differentiated into the manifold of living beings - both of which are defined and conditioned in terms of the other. From this point forward, the individual - as contextualized within an organic whole or unity that is greater than the sum of its parts - is characterized as much by separation as with unity. These polar concepts, e. g. , identity and non-identity, suggested Schelling, internally include or inhere in one another and, therefore, fall outside the conventional realm of logic and, a fortiori, reflective philosophy. This was surely one of the most fetching elements of the Schellingean system: it aimed at a unity within thought, at thinking or at least intuiting nature and thought as coinciding, i. e. , at nature becoming thought and thought becoming nature. And while this subject-object identity was anticipated by the Fichtean system, at least in the spirit of the Wissenschaftlehre (1794), the unity of nature and self or alternatively of the world and God is, according to the letter of his Vocation of Man (1800), indefinitely if not infinitely postponed into the future as the goal of our infinite striving. In the end, and indeed in principle, we can merely postulate - indeed, we must postulate - the coincidence of these two domains within the noumenal realm.
Der Zeitgeist 51 1. 9 Schelling's Naturphilosophie and the Ausfu? hrung
of Fichte's Idealism
It would be difficult to overestimate, although it has surely been done,40 the extent of influence that Schelling exercised over Hegel when he, Hegel, entered the fray of the post-Kantian idealism discussion in Jena. 41 In deference to the alleged influence, and Hegel's anxiety of influence, something needs to be said about the Schellingian system that lay "before the eyes of the public"42 at that time and which Hegel was considered to be an advocate. Schelling, like most of those who participated in speculative idealism's storied "march from Fichte to Hegel," considered himself to be a child of Kant who, as a reasonable service, wished to render those doctrines clearer, more systematic, and more extensive. And like most of his philosophical siblings, that service consisted in showing - as Fichte had tried but failed - how the self- determining activity of the self was constitutive of objective knowledge of nature qua other-than-the-self; the singular goal of the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), according to Schelling, consisted in the discovery of a system in human knowledge, i. e. , to explain the principle by which human knowledge was possible. More generally, Schelling, not unlike Fichte before him, sets out to explain how subjective spontaneity is the ground or origin of nature as well as the content of empirical consciousness. As mentioned above, in ? 1. 5, Fichte had already set the terms of the problematic in his sustained suggestion and attempted demonstration that self-consciousness can - or, at least, should - serve as a speculative paradigm for the identity of subject and object. But that suggestion remained, thought Schelling and Hegel, perhaps in principle, incomplete. It is precisely this speculative task that fuelled the many
40 Perhaps by Schelling himself, who once quipped that every idea Hegel ever had was stolen from him.
41 For a helpful account of this relationship, see Du? sing's "Spekulation and Reflexion. Zur Zusammenarbeit Schellings und Hegels in Jena," Hegel-Studien, V, 95-128 (Appendix 1, below) and Po? ggeler's "Hegels Jenaer Systemkonzeption" in his Hegels Idee einer Pha? nomenologie des Geistes, Freiburg/Munich, Karl Alber, 1973.
42 This is precisely what Hegel claimed in the Differenzschrift with reference to Schelling's Presentation of My System, 1801, which signals a movement toward a philosophy of identity and a departure away from the earlier, very Fichtean sounding preoccupations of the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800); interestingly, Schelling seems to return to his earlier concern in his Philosophical Investigations of the Nature of Human Freedom (1809).
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systems that were to become the rather infamous trademark of Schelling's long speculative career. Hegel's Differenzschrift was originally conceived, however, as a sustained apologia in defense of Schelling's Naturphilosophie. At this point in his thought, Schelling presents nature as the complementary pole in an interaction of spirit and nature; this philosophy of identity expresses an ideal-realism, or 'absolute idealism,' i. e. , a complete synthesis of subject and object. According to Schelling, in his second edition to his Ideas on a Philosophy of Nature as an Introduction to the Study of This Science (1803), nature appears as visible spirit and spirit appears as invisible nature. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel puts it this way: "Nature thus drives toward spirit, just as spirit drives toward nature. "
In opposition to the deflated conception of nature in Fichte, i. e. , as a mere construct of practical reason or a posited resistance to our ethical vocation, Schelling attempts a total and faithful account of the objective particularity of the physical world. Schelling's presentation of "that which is utterly other independent of our freedom" is not, however, contra Fichte if not also Kant, to be understood as merely a stage or an occasion for moral purification but rather as something intrinsic to a "process through which the self sees itself develop through a necessary but not consciously observed act of self-positing" (Werke, X, 97). The dialectical activity of the self and the limitation necessary to such a process, Schelling argues, are essential to the conscious activity of the Ego. This Schellingian version of the identity of identity and difference was, to be sure, among the most alluring aspects of the system to which Hegel felt, at least on his arrival at Jena, an ambivalent allegiance. The self is, speculatively construed, both subject and object, freedom and necessity, activity and limitation. The Fichtean ego was sure to pale, indeed appear wholly empty, in comparison to this - infinitely rich - self and increasingly organic conception of nature.
And although Schelling begins his quest for the Absolute in terms of this absolute self, and as an enthusiastic disciple of the Wissenschaftslehre, he never forgets his promise to "recompense nature for the mishandling that it suffered at the hands of Kant and Fichte. " The absolute must be construed in a manner that overcomes opposition between spirit and nature, subject and object; the goal, namely, an Identita? tsphilosophie, was really never in question since the Tu? bingen years. Reconciling the conflict or opposition between the ego and the non-ego is presented, in Schelling, as a point of indifference. It was precisely this conception of absolute
Der Zeitgeist 53
indifference, built on the analogy of magnetism, which Hegel later characterized if not caricatured as "die Nacht, worin, wie man zu sagen pflegt, alle Ku? he schwarz sind" [the night in which, so to speak, all cows are black]. Fichte's relatively impoverished conception of the self entailed an equally empty notion of the absolute; and to the extent that Schelling remained within the Fichtean paradigm, he was similarly limited to a conception of the absolute that was impotent to explain either the self or nature. At about the same time that Hegel arrived in Jena, Schelling was moving away from the subject-oriented Fichtean strategy and, increasing, in the direction of a Naturphilosophie inspired by Spinoza and Herder if not also Oetinger and Boehme. But Schelling also offered something new: in short, nature was construed as the finite self's pre-self; similar to Fichte, nature is an unconscious force, but unlike Fichte, for whom the 'non-Ego' was dependent on the self, Schelling argues that the finite or conscious self emerges from - and thus depends on - nature (Werke, I, 10: 93-94; also see Fackenheim, 1996: 64 ff. ).
Both Fichte and Spinoza fulfill, according to Schelling's "Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,"43 the speculative aims of genuine philosophy to the highest degree, i. e. , they are monistic, complete, and not susceptible to contradiction. Both start from the Absolute and return to it. This compliment to Spinoza and Fichte is equally a condemnation of reflective forms of philosophy or, as they turn it in Critical Journal, "unphilosophy" (i. e. , non-reflective forms of philosophizing which unconditionally require "that the Absolute be kept outside oneself"44). The reflective advances gained by non-speculative forms of philosophy, namely, reintroducing the absolute "through the back door" (i. e. , by "turning dogmatism around"), eventually collapse into an "in itself" which must be superseded if not entirely disavowed; the reflective philosophies of subjectivity, which Schelling treated as an impoverished form of idealism, "remains burdened with all the antitheses of dogmatism. " (This criticism expresses, in a speculative nutshell, the negative thesis of Hegel's Glauben und Wissen. ) Although Schelling held Fichte and Spinoza in high esteem, i. e. , especially in terms of their systemicity,45 perhaps even as the highest achievement of
43 This is also claimed by Fichte in his Wissenschaftslehre, Werke, I, 101.
44 Schelling, "On The Relationship of The Philosophy of Nature to Philosophy in General," in Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, trans. ,George di Giovanni and H. S. Harris, 368.
45 Hegel thought that the Spinozistic (or geometrical) method, i. e. , starting with a set of definition and preceding by implication, to be wholly unsuitable to the
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reflective philosophy, he thought that they similarly failed to make nature wholly intelligible: Fichte devoted entirely too little attention to the objectivity, otherness, and the impact of nature. The Fichtean sublimation of objectivity to subjectivity merely explains it away without making it comprehensible. 46 The problem with the Fichtean system resides in its manifest failure to work out an intelligible system of nature, which consists in demonstrating the inherent unity of nature with the absolute ego. Spinozism is condemned, on the other hand, for its abstract and mechanistic conception of nature. As he puts it in his Of Human Freedom:
If the doctrine that all things are in God is the basis of the entire system [of Spinoza], it must at least first be vitalized and severed from abstractness before it can become the principle of a system of reason. How general and vague is the expression that the eternal beings are modes or consequences of God; what a chasm there is, which needs to be filled in; what questions remain to be answered!
While both of these systems unify human knowledge under a single principle, Schelling attempts to combine the phenomenal as well as noumenal aspects of nature and spirit into, so to speak, a comprehensive field theory of human knowledge. Analogically, it is not only possible but also reasonable to consider space in terms of various geometries: under certain circumstances, one ought to work within the scope of Euclidean geometry, but under other circumstances one ought to employ non- Euclidean geometries (e. g. , Riemannian or Lobechevskian). Each of these geometries is complete and, in some sense, comprehensive; the most comprehensive geometry, however, would be one that would include and make comprehensible these various paradigms as varied expressions of a complete and thoroughly comprehensive system. So was it, analogically, with Schelling: the transcendental system advanced in the Wissenschaftslehre was to be paralleled by a philosophy of nature and joined together by means of a transcendental logic, a metaphysical theory of identity in identity and difference. 47 (Even later on in his career, in 1827, Schelling claimed that his System was an Ausfu? hrung - i. e. , the completion or actual realization - of Fichte's idealism. ) If one aims at providing a comprehensive
organicity and principle of life which both he and Schelling held to be central to any adequate conception of the Absolute.
46 Indeed, the "impact" [Anstoss] of an objective world must, for any form of subjectivity, remain always and ever theoretically incomprehensible.
47 Following Vater, "the System recognizes and allows only an intuitive approach to this transcendental logic of identity/difference, namely through the philosophy of art" (1978: xxii).
? Der Zeitgeist 55
system of the absolute which unifies the necessary but complementary opposition between transcendental idealism and a philosophy of nature, one which refuses to privilege either over the other, it becomes necessary to explain the coincidence between them that demonstrates or otherwise explains their identical principle or shared source [Quelle] within ideal or real orders of spirit or nature. It is precisely the identity of these differences, which the understanding grasps in terms of opposition, e. g. , between conscious and unconscious processes, which Hegel if not also Schelling means by the "absolute. " The absolute Ego is that which emerges as a result, i. e. , through the process of its development and coming-to-be: it is neither subject nor object, but essentially the indifference or unity of both which is achieved through the self- differentiation inherent in its development. The critical journalists claim that this is nothing new to philosophy: on the contrary, it is the perennial ideal of reason.
The ideal of speculative reason consists in a holistic grasp of the whole, i. e. , an absolute synthesis of spirit and nature; the apprehension of this ideal, for Schelling, at least in the System, is the product of an aesthetic if not intellectual intuition. It is sometimes suggested that it was Schelling who first convinced Fichte that the self-positing activity of the ego was paramount to an intellectual intuition as defined by Kant in ? 77 of the Critique of Judgment. Intellectual intuition, for Kant, is a constitutive mode of thought proper to God alone (as opposed to the passivity intrinsic to human knowledge). Kant insisted, however, that "we cannot conceive even the conceptual possibility of a would-be intellectual intuition, or of an infinitely efficient causality, let alone assert any knowledge of either" (1793, AK XX: 267; di Giovanni, 2005: 23). But in his systematic analysis of Kant's celebrated "schematism," which is the constitutive apparatus behind objectivity (i. e. , rule-governed behavior), Fichte disclosed the speculative significance of transcendental apperception, i. e. , the "I am I. "48 And by fixating on the role of transcendental apperception and its synthesizing activity in Kant, Fichte brought increased attention to the self-positing act of self-consciousness as the source or condition of consciousness; the "I think" of pure apperception (i. e. , the I that emerges in the act of thinking of itself as thinking) is both subject and object. For
48 According to Kant, "there can be no modes of knowledge, no connection or unity of one mode of knowledge with another, without that unity of consciousness that precedes all data of intuition (and by relation to which representations of objects is alone possible). This pure, original, unchanging consciousness I shall name transcendental apperception" (CPR A107).
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Fichte, this is the "common source" to which Kant referred when he claimed that the Critique of Pure Reason was "a totally new science, one of which nobody has previously grasped even just the thought; of which even the mere idea was unknown and to which nothing so far available is of any use" (1783; AK 4:262). It was the great and breath-taking insight of Fichte to construe intellectual intuition as the first principle of all human knowledge. Increasingly, Fichte conceived of intellectual intuition as the "immediate awareness" of one's own existence as an Ego if not also the activity of free creation. Similar to Fichte, Schelling considered intellectual intuition to be "the universal mediating factor in our knowledge" as well as "a reconciling element between analytic and synthetic modes of thought" (1800: 18, 19-22); but Schelling also treated intellectual intuition as the hidden core of the self and the unconscious principle of consciousness. And it was Schelling who eventually suggested - in his Exposition of My System - that the "Ego of Fichte was intuitive identical with the 'God or Nature' of Spinoza. " But Fichte denied this. Perhaps for political reasons, Fichte could no longer collaborate with Schelling. 49 The fundamental flaw in Fichte's system, writes Schelling, is that "Fichte understands by Ego merely the human Ego, by no means the universal or absolute Ego" (1827: 106). To the extent that philosophy restricts itself to the finite Ego, nature will remain equally finite (i. e. , merely the other- than-self-for-self), and the opposition between self and nature cannot be transcended. The speculative task of the System, therefore, consisted in nothing less than transcending or otherwise sublimating the limitations of the finitude.
49 For Fichte, not unlike Kant, our knowledge of nature is limited solely to phenomena, which is the domain of natural science. Beyond the phenomenal realm, however, there is room for faith. The ideas of reason (e. g. , God, freedom, immortality of the soul) are accessible by means of practical reason alone. For Kant, morality leads to religion; and religion consists in the hope of reconciliation by citizens of two worlds, the natural and the moral, the phenomenal and the noumenal. But in Fichte, it was possible to rise above mere hope such that the natural was conquered by the moral: "the joy that is in the moral activity," writes Fichte in his U? ber den Grund unseres Glaubens an eine go? ttliche Weltregierung, "is nothing less than a share in God" (1799, Werke, V, 175). So while it is true that Fichte moves beyond finitude by participating in the 'moral order of the world,' thus verifying the presence of the noumenal-realm in the phenomenal-realm, nature is subsequently reduced to something less than phenomena: nature is transfigured into "the material of duty, rendered sensuous," and that which exists solely to be conquered by moral spirit. Schelling considered this moral bridge, as it were, between the self and nature-as-non-self to be altogether inadequate.
? Der Zeitgeist 57 1. 10 The Programme of the Critical Journal
The central thesis of Faith and Knowledge is not unlike the remainder of the Hegelian corpus; and as is often the case in the early formulations of a leitmotif, it is less elaborate than the latter stages of its articulation - it is, however, a distinctively clear if not elegant expression of the Hegelian enterprise. Although it is true that Hegel's critique is seasoned by a certain amount of "interminable polemic"50 (Harris 1977b: 25), the critical journalists - i. e. , Hegel and Schelling - were committed to clearing away the "abundantly flourishing weeds" which at that time jeopardized the "few good seeds that [had] been sown. "51 The title of Hegel's essay - Faith and Knowledge, or the Reflective Philosophy of Subjectivity in the complete range of its forms as Kantian, Jacobian, and Fichtean Philosophy - is rhetorically loaded and agenda laden; according to the Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy, which appeared in an earlier volume of the short-lived Critical Journal of Philosophy (1801-1803, co-edited by Schelling and Hegel), knowledge is "the conscious identity of the finite and the infinite, the union of both worlds, the sensuous and the intellectual, the necessary and the free, in consciousness" (1801: 96). In the same text, Hegel defines faith as a "relation or connection of the limited to the Absolute [in which] there is no consciousness at all of their identity [hingegen u? ber die Identita? t eine vo? llige Bewutlosigkeit vorhanden ist]" (1801: 100). Conscious of the opposition alone, the faith philosophers [Glaubensphilosophen] - similar to the reflective philosophers of subjectivity, because the principle is shared - restrict, rashly, in their rush to be edifying, the Absolute to the realm of "the incalculable, the inconceivable, [and] the empty" (Hegel 1802b: 60). Although the principle of subjectivity achieves "perfect formation and definitive self-expression" in the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte, it is "by no means a restricted expression of the spirit
50 Indeed, one may well concede to Harris that Hegel's "sarcastic wit and polemic gift" in this section of the essay are "in the end repellent because they are so unrelieved by that appreciation of positive achievement which he had himself declared to be the first essential of genuinely philosophical criticism" (Harris 1977b: 25).
51 This is how Fichte, in a letter to Schiller (2 Dec. 1800), described the programme that he and Schelling had in mind for the Kritischen Journal; Fichte eventually withdrew from the project and was replaced by Hegel. For a fuller account of the events surrounding the Journal, see Harris's Hegel's Development, II: Night Thoughts (1983: xxxiii ff. ) or Buchner's "Hegel und das Kritische Journal der Philosophie" (1965: 95-156).
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of a brief epoch or small group. " From a philosophical point of view, this "system of culture" becomes cognizant of itself in "the principle of the North [read: Kant52], and from a religious point of view, of Protestantism. " Because the finite is declared to be absolute, as the sole reality for cognition, "the Absolute is no more against reason than it is for it, it is beyond [u? ber] Reason" (Hegel 1802b: 56). Hegel's Glauben und Wissen essay served as the first part of the second volume of the Critical Journal that Hegel edited, after a long series and turning of events, with Schelling. In general, the Critical Journal was aimed at providing a critical forum for examining the present state of philosophy and, in the process, silencing what Fichte called "philosophical chatterers. "53
The Critical Journal originated with Schelling: In June of 1800 Schelling proposed - to J. F. Cotta, one of the major publishing houses in Berlin - that he edit, together with his celebrated colleague in Jena, Fichte, a purely scientific-philosophical journal; although Cotta would have preferred a more general literary review, they deferred to Schelling by early August. In the first volume, Schelling proposed to write a survey of the present state of philosophy as a whole, leaving the second volume to Fichte. But Fichte held back: not only was Fichte in the throes of the Atheismusstreit, which at that time jeopardized his position in Jena, he must have also felt increasingly estranged from Schelling. 54 At the same time, Hegel - who was already en route to Jena and who was expected to
52 Certainly, the philosophical reference is to Kant, whom Hegel reads as a continuation of Locke's reflective philosophy of subjectivity (Hegel 1802b: 69), but the allusion could point also in the direction of Hamann; like Kant, Hamann lived in Ko? nigsberg. Hegel was, as we know from Goethe's correspondence with Eckermann, very familiar with Hamann's works ("displaying," writes Eckermann, "a deep insight into this extraordinary mind [Hamann], such as could only have arisen from a most earnest and scrupulous study of the subject"). In a letter written to Eckermann in 1829, and impressed with Hegel's criticism of Hamann in the Berlin Ja? hrbu? cher, Goethe - who monitored Hegel's academic career in an official capacity from Weimar - writes: "Hegel's judgments as a critic have always been excellent" (O'Flaherty: 17).
53 In a letter to Schiller, 19 Nov 1800 (Schulz, ii, 194-9), which is quoted in part in Harris's Hegel's Development, vol. 2, xxxviii.
54 The irreconcilable differences between Fichte and Schelling must have been clear to Fichte by the time that Schelling published the Exposition of My System (1800), in which Schelling claimed to have overcome the residual dualisms in Fichte's ethical idealism. The impossibility of a collaborative venture between Schelling and Fichte is obvious from their correspondence in late 1800 (see Fichte, Briefwechsel, II, 322-329).
? Der Zeitgeist 59
collaborate, albeit peripherally, on the Critical Journal - was steeped in what would eventually be his initial contribution to the Journal, namely, the Differenzschrift; indeed, Hegel's timely critique of Fichte and defense of Schelling may well have served as a catalyst for the split [Auseinandersetzung] that was soon to take place between Schelling and Fichte. By the closing months of 1801, it was Hegel - and not Fichte - who was engaged to be Schelling's co-editor. The journal itself, which consisted of only two published volumes, each of them comprised of three issues, was regrettably short-lived (12/1801 - 05/1803). The programmatic introduction is concerned primarily with stipulating if not also establishing the singular Idea of philosophy itself,55 which was to serve as the indispensable standard for all productive - i. e. , genuine or authentic - philosophical criticism. Anyone who denies this capacity for objectivity, i. e. , claims to universal validity, "must claim not merely the possibility of distinct forms of one and the same Idea, but the possibility of essentially distinct yet equally true philosophies - a view of the matter which properly deserves no consideration, for all its immense comfortableness" (1802a: 273). This rather heavy-handed dismissal of philosophical subjectivism as well as skepticism and dogmatism is animated by what the critical journalists considered to be "the fact that Reason is but one. " This Platonic posture toward the capacities of human reason, Schelling and Hegel are quick to point out, is diametrically opposed to those reflective philosophers who concede that philosophy begins - and thus, quip the critical journals, end - with subjectivity (i. e.
, between those who aim at "the cognition of God" and those who are content instead with "the cognition of men"). 56 How this genuine form of philosophy is be worked out, in detail, and how it is to be distinguished from "unphilosophy," has yet to emerge from the purifying fires of speculative criticism. According to Harris, "the experience of putting his critical theory into practice was of vital importance to Hegel's eventual ability to give a far more adequate theoretical statement of his critical theory, and his critical method, than he gives us [in the Critical Journal]" (1985: 254). The Critical Journal displays what Hegel later described as "seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative. " Hegel's coeditor, Schelling, had
55 Philosophy here is defined as the cognition of the Absolute, i. e. , God "in some other aspect as Nature. " In Hegel's Disputation, which consisted of defending twelve theses, the sixth defined speculative philosophy in the following way: "An Idea is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, and all philosophy is in Ideas. "
56 The best example of this un-philosophy of subjectivity is, perhaps, Reinhold, for whom philosophy was little more than the curious collection of personal biases and caprice.
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decidedly less patience for this "labor of the negative"; indeed, he may have had Hegel in mind when he wrote:
The philosopher who employs his entire life, or a part of it, following [reflective philosophy] into its endless oppositions in order to abolish its last opposition, earns through this service that which, when it remains negative, is reserved for the best among those similarly respected - a relatively dignified position, assuming that he should not have enough in himself to resuscitate philosophy from the raggedness of [reflection] and into its absolute form (1803: 23-24).
For Hegel, suggests Adorno, it is "only through reflection [that] reflective thought [can] get beyond itself" (1993: 73). This critical feat, this effort "to reflect oneself beyond the confines of reflectivity," as Heidegger turns it, constitutes Hegel's methodological preoccupation at the time of his Jenaer Zeit collaboration with Schelling. In Glauben und Wissen, Hegel is interested not only in overcoming the one-sided abstractions inherent in the reflective philosophy of subjectivity, he is equally keen to grasp conceptually the unity of the finite and the infinite; that the former is related to the latter, that the absolute is apprehended only as a result, is distinctive to Hegelian thought. The labor of the negative is the dialectical means by which Hegel proposes to "nullify the antithesis of finitude; but it is at the same time also the spring of eternal movement, the spring of that finitude which is infinity, as out of the secret abyss that is its birthplace" (1802b: 190).
CHAPTER TWO MAKING ROOM FOR REASON
Hegel's 1802 analysis of "the reflective philosophy of subjectivity" is remarkable as a piece of philosophical criticism: Though sharply critical of the reflective assumptions indigenous to what he calls a Reflexionskultur, Hegel also proposes a strategy for "reflecting oneself out of reflectivity" [sich aus Reflexion hinauszureflektieren]. 1 A genuinely philosophical reconciliation between faith and reason, insists Hegel, should be distinguished sharply from "the truce of the times" - namely, a "peace which hovers triumphantly over the corpse of faith and reason, uniting them as the child of both, [a truce which] has as little of reason in it as it does of authentic faith" (1802b: 55). The Kantian corpus, it is suggested, embodies one such truce. Whereas Kant found it necessary to deny [aufheben] the then prominent conception of knowledge in order to make room for faith, Hegel's genius lay in a refined reversal of this Kantian dictum; though Hegel nowhere says this, at least explicitly, it is - or so I shall argue - essential to his position from the Jenaer Zeit forward.
In Part I of the following chapter I quickly rehearse Hegel's reading (or misreading) of the Kantian reconciliation between faith and knowledge. In Part II, I sketch the main features of Hegel's early critique of the "reflective philosophers of subjectivity. " Although Hegel is fiercely critical of the religious tastes of the times, he is not merely critical - he offers also, if we know where to look, an alternative model of religious consciousness. In Part III, therefore, I focus on what I consider the distinctively Hegelian reconciliation of faith and reason. More and more it
1 I borrow this phrase, mentioned in the Introduction, "aus Reflexion hinauszureflektieren," from Heidegger's Was heisst Denken? ; the context out of which it has taken is also worth mentioning: "Grosse Denker, Kant zuerst and dann Hegel, haben das Unfruchtbare dieser Reflexion erkannt. Sie mussten daher versuchen, sich aus dieser Reflexion hinauszureflektieren" [Strong thinkers, first Kant and then Hegel, recognized the barrenness of this reflectivity. Thus, they found it necessary to reflect themselves out of reflectivity. ] (Reclam: Stuttgart, 1992), 15.
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seems to me that the Hegelian critique of the principle of subjectivity, and the revised model of religious consciousness which follows in its wake, is as timely as it is perceptive. I conclude with the suggestion that, first, Hegel's alleged misreading of Kant is central to the critical purposes of the Critical Journal and, second, that Hegel is far less hostile to religious thinking than most religious thinkers tend to think. 2 These goals are less modest than one might suspect.
2. 1. Making Room for Faith in Kant3
According to the standard reading of Kant, and perhaps James Collins (1978) is an exemplar of this reading, the inspirational economy of the Critical Philosophy is disclosed in that much celebrated passage taken from the second Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant declares: "Wir mussten also das Wissen aufheben, um zum Glauben Platz zu bekommen" (Bxxx). And certainly, this is how Hegel learned to read Kant at the Tu? bingen Stift. But when Hegel reflected on this very passage, traditionally translated "we must therefore deny knowledge in order to make room for faith," he was inclined to think that knowledge no longer appeared worthy of the name and faith no longer seemed worth the bother. If we take Kant at his word, or shall we say letter, pure reason is formally restricted to phenomena and religion (within the bounds of reason) is based, as a matter of Pietistic apologetics, on morality. Kant's effort to limit rational pretensions - or, to use a Nietzschean phrase, "to harness the knowledge drive" - is nothing new to philosophy; it was, of course, a significant part of Socrates' divine mission. Indeed, Hegel thinks that the reflective philosophy of subjectivity culminates in Fichte, who, in the Vocation of Man, answers the oracle as Socrates did. And while Kant may
2 I am thinking of two rather standard criticism of Hegel's speculative theology: First, those who say of Hegel what Wolff (in his Theologia naturalis in 1737) said of Spinoza - namely, that he was "not far from the denial of God, and just as harmful as this. Indeed, to a certain degree, it is more harmful than atheism"; and second, those who, like Charles Sanders Peirce, in an unpublished fragment (MS 893), say that "Hegelianism is one of the least sentimental of doctrines and whatever sentiments it may approve, approves as a part of a system, with a singularly raw and chilly approval. "
3 An earlier version of this chapter was published as "Making Room for Reason: Hegel, Kant, and the Corpse of Faith and Knowledge" in Philosophy and Theology, 2001, pp. 119 - 136.
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represent the most ambitious among the faith philosophers, he was not alone. 4
According to Hegel, Kant's solution to the conflict between the finite and the infinite is simple - he simply declares the conflict absolute. 5 But when the absolute is construed as 'an absolute beyond,' the only point of contact is faith qua feeling. In the reflective philosophies of subjectivity, says Hegel, faith quickly deteriorates into to a "lyrical and nostalgic yearning" for the infinite which it cannot possess, but of which it is constantly aware. A faith of this sort, thinks Hegel, is always and ever shackled to subjectivity and radical finitude. Hegel seriously doubted that a form of consciousness so thoroughly steeped in epistemological opposition was capable of overcoming that posture in the realm of faith and feeling. Though innocent in its origins, i. e. , as an expression of humility and an attempt to honor God by placing Him beyond and above us, this well-intended gesture is transformed - in direct proportion to its degree of self-consciousness - into what Hegel later characterized as "a frenzy of self-conceit" (1806: B395).
At the moment of religious consciousness, says Hegel, individuality "sinks into nothing before the thinking and the intuiting of the eternal" (1802b: 141); in this sphere, the "finite and infinite are one, and hence finitude as such, i. e. as something that was supposed to have truth and reality in and for itself, has vanished" (1802b: 66). Hegel thinks that the faith philosophers of his day too willingly and too quickly resigned themselves to the guillotine6 and neglected the role of thought in religious consciousness. Hegel's critique of the reflective philosophy of subjectivity is meant, at least in part, as a counter-polemic in defense of reason. 7 Above all else, Hegel is critical of the radical one-sidedness he discovers
4 Indeed, the Kantian project inspired - or sustained - an entire generation of faith philosophers; in particular, I am thinking of Jacobi, Herder, Reinhold, and Fichte -- all of whom, it should be noted, were eventually and publically denounced by Kant. According to Hegel, this "brand" of thought was in no way restricted to a brief era.
5 For Jacobi, however, "reason is a born Spinozist" - worse than a whore, to use Luther's notorious simile, reason leads ineluctably to atheism and nihilism. See Jacobi, Werke, IV, xliv; also see Chapter 3, below.
6 Recall Lessing's response to Jacobi's plea for a leap of faith; though the former was not altogether averse to taking such a leap if necessary, he refused to "cut of his head" unnecessarily.
7 Hegel treats the Critical Philosophy as a sustained "polemic against reason" (1802b: 81).
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in the epistemological posture of Protestantism. In short, when we neglect religious thought, which is fed primarily by creeds, liturgy, theological speculation, et cetera, our religious sensibility or pious feeling deteriorates into sub-human levels; in a well-known quip, endearingly called the "dog passage," Hegel says that
[i]f religion in a man is based only on feeling, then such a feeling rightly has no further determination than in the feeling of his dependence, and the dog feels most strongly in himself and lives mainly within his feeling. The dog also has feelings of redemption, whenever his hunger is satisfied by a bone. 8
Hegel considered the theology of feeling, of contingency and of the arbitrary will of subjective feeling, the malady of his time; as he put it in the Phenomenology, "[p]hilosophy [in this tradition] arouses the desire to bite, but offers nothing to eat" (1807/M: 6). In the hands of the reflective philosophies of subjectivity,
religion builds its temples and altars in the hearts of the individual. In sighs and prayers he seeks for the god whom he denies to himself in intuition, because of the risk that the intellect will cognize what is intuited as a mere thing, reducing the sacred grove to mere timber (1802b: 57).
This moment of religious consciousness, which Hegel considers characteristic of Protestantism, is the direct result of the principle of subjectivity; immersed in finitude, reason renounces all intuition and cognition of the eternal. Indeed, the philosophers of faith believed that "by drawing the veil over self-consciousness and surrendering understanding," they became the beloved of God.
With a twist of irony worthy of Socrates, Hegel argues that "[i]t is precisely through its flight from the finite and through its rigidity that subjectivity turns the beautiful into things - the grove into timber" (1802b: 58). The intensity of our feeling, because it is without a core, is - suggests Hegel, in the Preface to the Phenomenology - "a rapturous haziness" that "is in no way distinguishable from superficiality. " When the infinite is defined as "that which finitude is not," then infinity too is "all tangled up in limitation" (1802b: 65). In brief, the reflective equation goes like this: if
8 In Hegel, Hinrichs and Schleiermacher: On Feeling and Reason in Religion. The Texts of the 1821-22 Debate, trans. Eric von der Luft (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellon Press), 1987, 260.
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finitude is absolute, then the antithesis between finite and infinite is absolute, and if infinity is set up against finitude, each is as finite as the other (1802b: 63). In the Idee, i. e. in that form of completely contextualized cognition,
the finite and infinite are one, and hence finitude as such, i. e. , as something that was supposed to have truth and reality in and for itself, has vanished. Yet what was negated was only the negative in finitude. . . . This infinite is itself not the truth since it is unable to consume and consummate finitude [die Endlichkeit aufzuzehren] (1802b: 66).
Compare Hegel's similar claim in the Logic:
. . . infinity only exists as the going beyond the finite: it therefore contains its other, and so is in itself its own other. The finite is not overcome by the infinite as by an externally existent might, but as its own infinity whereby it transcends itself. 9
An authentic reconciliation of faith and knowledge requires a revised theory of cognition - and that, in turn, requires nothing less than a revised conception of Infinity (i. e. , one which "consumes and consummates finitude"); until then, philosophy cannot aim at the cognition of Absolute, but only - and at best - at the cognition of human consciousness. Until then, says Hegel, "[one] is no longer a glowing spark of eternal beauty, or a spiritual focus of the universe, but rather an absolute sensibility" (1802b: 65). For a consciousness shot through with finitude, religion has its sublime aspect only in feeling and the "empty shell of subjective conviction" (1822: 245); resigned to finitude, writes Schelling, philosophy "is supposed to prettify itself with the surface colour of the supersensous by pointing, in faith, to something higher" (1802a: 369).
In their Introduction on the Essence of the Philosophical Criticism Generally, and its Relationship to the Present State of Philosophy in Particular, the critical journalists argue that the shared assumption "ineradicably implanted" in the reflective philosophies of subjectivity is the conviction that "in order to be genuinely real, the 'in itself' must be independent of the ego outside it" (1802a: 277). The reflective philosophers of subjectivity met the demand of their age by carefully crafting an absolute being "which is all and does all, but never itself makes an appearance" - indeed, far from an appearance, the absolute is politely
? 9. Hegel, Science of Logic, I, 169 (1969, Miller).
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escorted into the unattainable beyond. This reflective enterprise is doomed, thinks Hegel, not only because the truce is precarious and insubstantial, it is more serious than that, but much more because a faith of this sort, one steeped in a reflective attitude toward finitude, cannot - in principle - lift itself above subjectivity. The Hegelian critique of the Reflexionskultur focuses on the terms of the truce and what, if successful, it hopes and sometimes promises to accomplish. The reflective reconciliation leads to a brand of faith that seemed to Hegel no longer worth the bother, a victorious reason that no longer merited the name, and a preoccupation with empirical existence that was utterly vulgar. Thus Hegel found it necessary to deny or otherwise re(de)fine [aufheben] faith in order to make room for reason; such is the task of philosophical criticism (as applied to religion).
2. 2. Toward a Speculative Reconciliation.
For the sake of a more lasting reconciliation, the Kantian dictum must be reversed. It is serendipitous, we might suppose, that Kant uses a term with which Hegel was to become associated, Aufhebung, in his claim that we "deny [aufheben] reason in order to make room for faith"; when we, for Hegel, reverse the dictum (i. e. , Wir mussten also das Glauben aufheben, um zu Wissen Platz zu bekommen), we retain the word but transfigure it in Hegel's technical sense. Not only does Hegel annul the negative features of reflectivity, he also preserves the positive - thus both senses of the term, Aufhebung, are satisfied. The reflective philosophy of subjectivity has, according to Hegel, a "positive, genuine though subordinate position within true philosophy" (1802b: 190). Hegel repeats this conviction in the Preface to the Phenomenology:
It must be said of the Absolute that it is essentially a result and that it is only truly what it is in the end . . . One misunderstands reason, therefore, when reflection is excluded from the truth and not grasped as a positive stage of the absolute. It is reflection which makes the truth a result. 10
Though Hegel found it necessary to "sublimate"11 or re(de)fine faith in order to make room for faith, he certainly did not mean to imply that the claims of faith were wholly untrue; on the contrary, for Hegel, strange as it
10 Hegel, Pha? nomenologie, Vorrede, 22 (my italics).
11 This translation of "Aufhebung," sublimation, belongs to W. Kaufmann; but for this translation to pull its weight, so to speak, we must understand sublimation in its alchemic rather than its psycho-analytic sense.
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may sound, faith is a necessary precondition to knowledge. That is not to say that Hegel was a closet Medievalist, but it seems undeniable that Hegel acknowledged a developmental sequence in religious consciousness. 12
Absolute religion differs from absolute knowledge only in form, the content is true in both; religion represents with images what philosophy grasps conceptually. 13 If knowledge is the "conscious identity of the finite and infinite," and if identity is never simple for Hegel, then one misunderstands reason when faith is "excluded from the truth and not grasped as a positive stage of the Absolute. " On this point, at least, Hegel understood reason. The task of the philosophy of religion includes an explanation of how the individual human subject rises above all that is finite to absolute universality and, at the same time, remains within the scope of finite self-consciousness. 14 This task requires, of course, the "seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative. " Hegel's explanation hinges on the role of thinking in relation to feeling. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel suggests that
[i]n thinking I raise myself above all that is finite to the absolute and am infinite consciousness, while at the same time I am finite self- consciousness, indeed to the full extent of my empirical condition (LPR, 211-212).
The speculative enterprise in Hegel consists largely of organizing the manifold shapes of restriction and defect into an integrated totality which lifts common understanding to rational knowledge - i. e. , to a consciousness of the actual presence of the infinite; indeed, "non-knowing becomes knowledge by becoming organized" (1801: 165). According to the Encyclopedia, an adequate religion would demonstrate in some manner that though "[w]e usually suppose that the absolute must lie far beyond, it is precisely what is wholly present" (EL, 59, Section 24, Z2). In an extremely telling passage, Hegel claims that
12 The dialectical movement from feeling to representation to thought is characteristic of Hegel's thought from the Phenomenology forward; in his philosophy of religion, the sequence - which is animated by negation - is most explicit in his 1824 Concept of Religion.
13 See LPR1, 260; this aspect of Hegel's philosophy of religion has been discussed at length in both Fachenheim's The Religious Dimensions of Hegel and Williamson's Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Religion. More generally, "[t]he sole interest of Reason is to suspend such rigid antitheses" (1801: 90).
14 See Hegel's LPR, 211-212.
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Chapter Two
[i]n the true faith the whole sphere of finitude, of being-something-on- one's-own-account, the sphere of sensibility sinks into nothing before the thinking and intuiting of the eternal. The thinking and the intuiting become one and all the midges of subjectivity are burned to death in this consuming fire, and the very consciousness of this surrender and nullification is nullified (1802b: 141, my italics).
Finitude's "sinking into nothing" occurs to some degree, e. g. in song, among the simple and naive faiths, but to the fullest extent this can occur only in speculative philosophy or a speculative brand of faith (where the negation characteristic of reflection has been thoroughly sublated). Hegel characterizes, perhaps caricatures, Protestantism as a conscious flight from objectivity, i. e. as "subjectivity holding fast to itself. " And if Hegel is right about this, how - and to what extent - is faith able to raise itself above subjectivity, shed its particularity, and melt into a universal objective harmony? 15 How might reflectivity move beyond a mere longing for and toward the actual possession of eternity? How is reflection able to reflect itself outside the confines of reflectivity [i. e. sich aus Reflexion hinauszureflektieren]? This question constitutes the core of Hegel's project in Jena: Hoc opus, hic labor!
2. 3 Speculative Religion and Hegel's Appropriation of Kant
Speculative religion is largely dedicated to overcoming the one-sided abstractions characteristic of the reflective philosophy of subjectivity on the one hand and cognizing conceptually the unity of the finite and the infinite on the other; that the former is related, if not identical, to the latter is distinctive to Hegelian thought. According to his 1821 Lectures, the philosophy of religion aims at reconciling religion to reason; in short, philosophy articulates conceptually what is already experienced in religion. In the 1824 Concept of Religion, Hegel claimed that religious consciousness begins in feeling;16 thus, from the outset, faith is steeped in
15 Recall Jacobi's claim, in Jacobi an Fichte, that he will "pluck the ears of wheat on the Sabbath for no other reason save that I am hungry, and because the law is made for man and not man for the law . . . For I know, I know with the most holy certainty within me--that the privilegium aggratiandi, for crimes of this sort against the pure letter of the absolutely universal law of reason, is man's authentic right of majesty, the seal of his dignity, of his divine nature" (Jacobi, Werke III, 37-38; quoted in 1802b: 143-44).
16 See LPR1, 140; quoted in Merklinger, 126.
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interiority. But the interiority of devotion limited to feeling and representation is not, says Hegel,
the highest form of interiority. It is self-determined thinking which has to be recognized as this purest form of knowing. It is in this that science brings the same content to consciousness and thus becomes that spiritual worship which, by systematic thinking, appropriates and comprehends what is otherwise only the content of subjective sentiment or representation. 17
Thus, what was originally interior is further internalized by elevating itself into self-determining thinking; this must be done, of course, without losing its sense of adoration. In his "Tu? bingen Fragment" of 1793, thinking of Kant and Fichte, Hegel claimed that "the Ideas of reason enliven the whole web of human feeling - their operation penetrates everything, like subtle matter and gives a peculiar tinge to every inclination and impulse. "18 Thus, religious consciousness in its truest form transcends the traditional bifurcation between thinking and feeling.
Within the sphere of religious consciousness, the finite is consumed and consummated in the infinite by passing beyond a merely historical attitude toward religion. Speculative philosophy attempts to mirror speculatively the dialectical correlation of the finite human subject and the infinite divine object that takes place in and through religious consciousness. In this way, faith is converted into vision. Without philosophy, religious content remains indeterminate and thus "esoteric";19 prior to the speculative reconstruction of an infinite "which contains its other," religion collapses into poetry (and poets, according to Plato's Apology, "say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them"). And while Hegel swerves away from Kant when it comes to the restriction of theoretical reason to the domain of the phenomena, he does believe that the speculative idea shines through the critical project. And in the end, the Hegelian reconciliation is undeniably indebted to Kant's general formula that "human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts and ends with ideas" (KRV: B 730).
17 Hegel, Vorstellung ueber die Aesthetik, I, 143.
18 Hegel, "Tu? bingen Fragment," translated by H. S. Harris, in Hegel's Development, Toward the Sunlight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 511-12.
19 See Pha? nomenologie, Vorrede, XXII, 21.
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Did Hegel misread Kant? Of course he did; but to what extend did Hegel misread Kant and what was the shape of his misreading? That depends on how one reads Kant and, I think, equally, how one reads Hegel. But because Hegel, at least at this stage of his career, was often viewed as a mere apprentice to Schelling's genius, Hegel's alleged misunderstanding of his precursors (in this case, Kant) is itself something to be understood. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard says that his age was "not willing to stop at faith, with its miracle of turning water into wine; it goes further, it turns wine into water. "20 Though witty, Kierkegaard's epigram betrays a misreading of the Hegelian enterprise. Though correct in saying that Hegel was unwilling to stop at faith, Kierkegaard is mistaken in thinking that Hegel hoped to "suck worldly wisdom out of the paradox" and turn wine back into water.