No More Learning

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
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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
50 Chapter One
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. ).
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).
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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).
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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.