The Worldview of Personalism: Origins and Early Development (Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs) [1 ed.] 0199297193, 0199297191, 9780199297191

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OX F O R D T H E O LO G I C A L M O N O G R A P H S Editorial Committee

M . McC. ADA MS M. J. EDWAR DS P. M. J OYCE D. N . J. Mac CULLO CH O. M . T. O’D O N OVAN C . C. ROWL A N D

OXFORD THEOLOGICAL MONOGRAPHS HIPPOLYTUS BETWEEN EAST AND WEST The Commentaries and the Provenance of the Corpus J. A. Cerrato (2002) FAITH, REASON, AND REVELATION IN THE THOUGHT OF THEODORE BEZA JeVrey Mallinson (2003) RICHARD HOOKER AND REFORMED THEOLOGY A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace Nigel Voak (2003) THE COUNTESS OF HUNTINGDON’S CONNEXION Alan Harding (2003) THE APPROPRIATION OF DIVINE LIFE IN CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA Daniel A. Keating (2004) THE MACARIAN LEGACY The Place of Macarius-Symeon in the Eastern Christian Tradition Marcus Plested (2004) PSALMODY AND PRAYER IN THE WRITINGS OF EVAGRIUS PONTICUS Luke Dysinger, OSB (2004) ORIGEN ON THE SONG OF SONGS AS THE SPIRIT OF SCRIPTURE The Bridegroom’s Perfect Marriage-Song J. Christopher King (2004) AN INTERPRETATION OF HANS URS VON BALTHASAR Eschatology as Communion Nicholas J. Healy (2005) DURANDUS OF ST POURC¸AIN A Dominican Theologian in the Shadow of Aquinas Isabel Iribarren (2005) THE TROUBLES OF TEMPLELESS JUDAH Jill Middlemas (2005) TIME AND ETERNITY IN MID-THIRTEENTH-CENTURY THOUGHT Rory Fox (2006) THE SPECIFICATION OF HUMAN ACTIONS IN ST THOMAS AQUINAS Joseph Pilsner (2006)

The Worldview of Personalism Origins and Early Development

JA N OLOF BE N G T S S O N

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Jan Olof Bengtsson 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquires concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0-19-929719-3 978-0-19-929719-1 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Preface This book is a revised and expanded version of my Oxford D.Phil. thesis from 2003. I am indebted to my supervisors, the Revd Prof. em. Keith Ward and Dr William J. Mander, for their commitment and complementarity; to the Revd Prof. em. Alan P. F. Sell and the Revd. Dr Philip Kennedy for their valuable criticism and suggestions; to the Revd Prof. George Pattison for his careful reading of and comments upon the thesis as well as the manuscript of this revised text; to Prof. Diarmaid MacCulloch for his kind interest in my work; to the staV of the Bodleian Library, the Taylorian Institute Library, the Theology Faculty Library, and the Philosophy Faculty Library, and of the British Library, the Royal Library in Stockholm, Lund University Library, Uppsala University Library, and Stockholm University Library for their professionalism and friendliness; to the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History, and Antiquities for a grant; to Prof. Svante Nordin of Lund University for encouraging me to do doctoral work on Swedish personalism, for supervising the Wrst stage of that work, and for commenting upon my revision of the thesis; to Prof. em. Stig Stro¨mholm, the former Vice-Chancellor of Uppsala University, for his support and for reading and commenting upon early drafts of parts of the thesis and parts of the manuscript of this revised text; to the Fellows and students of St Cross College and Dr John Walsh of Jesus College for conviviality; to Prof. Claes G. Ryn of the Catholic University of America for a unique philosophical conversation over many years; to Prof. Randall E. Auxier of Southern Illinois University, the editor of the Library of Living Philosophers, and Prof. Thomas O. Buford of Furman University for discussions of American personalism; to my colleagues in the Department of the History of Ideas at Lund University, and in particular Dr Jonas Hansson, for relevant discussions; to Dr Carl Johan Ljungberg for his congenial ideas; to Pusey House and the Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society for inspiration; to Prof. Francis X. Clooney of Harvard University, the former academic director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, for discussions of comparative perspectives on personalism; and to Prof. em. Thure Stenstro¨m, Uppsala, Prof. Bo Lindberg of Gothenburg University, Prof. Alf W. Johansson and Prof. Hans Ruin, both of So¨derto¨rn University College, Dr Mats Persson of Uppsala University, Dr Go¨sta Wrede, Stockholm, Prof. em. Anders JeVner, Prof. David Boucher and others at the Collingwood and British Idealism Centre at CardiV University, Prof. em. Timothy Sprigge, Dr Peter P. Nicholson of the University of York, Prof. John Haldane of the University of St Andrews, Prof. Roger Scruton, Lord Plant of HighWeld, Dr R. T. Allen, Prof. em. J. W. Burrow, and the Revd Prof. em. Sir Henry Chadwick for important conversations and encouragement. As always, I am grateful to my parents, Birgitta and Bengt Olof Bengtsson, for their interest in my work and their unfailing support and love.

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Contents Introduction 1. The current view of personalism and its origins The view of the historians The view of the personalists

1 31 31 49

2. Personal ‘reason’ and impersonal ‘understanding’ Jacobi Schelling Speculative theism British personal idealism

67 68 83 93 116

3. The personal absolute Jacobi Schelling Speculative theism British personal idealism

129 134 142 151 177

4. Personal unity-in-diversity Jacobi Schelling Speculative theism British personal idealism

203 205 212 217 240

5. Early personalism and its meaning

271

Bibliography Index

284 297

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Introduction Personalism exists in many diVerent forms, and an exhaustive classiWcation will not be attempted in this book. The two best-known forms are the American personalism initiated by Borden Parker Bowne, and the French school of Emmanuel Mounier. But there are also strong currents of phenomenological personalism, existentialist personalism, and Catholic personalism. Although there are many signiWcant diVerences between these various forms, as personalisms they also have much in common, their positions often overlap, and historically they can be seen to have stood in more or less close contact and to have inXuenced each other. The journal The Personalist, edited by the leader of the Californian branch of the American school, Ralph Tyler Flewelling, regularly and frequently published articles on and by all kinds of personalists, and Mounier was one of its advisory editors. Less representative versions of personalism were developed by Charles Bernard Renouvier and William Stern. Before becoming bishop of Cracow, Karol Wojtyła developed a personalism inspired not only by Thomistic thinkers like Jacques Maritain, but also by Max Scheler’s personalistic phenomenology. The French school of Mounier has been a strong presence in Polish personalism, but the latter also draws inspiration from the American school. Martin Buber’s dialogical philosophy can be considered a distinct form of personalism. A British version of personalism was developed by John Macmurray. National variations have developed in many countries. The argument in this book concerns the historical origins of modern personalistic philosophy. Against the current view of these origins, I will show how personalistic philosophy emerged throughout the late eighteenth, the nineteenth, and the early twentieth centuries. This philosophy was richly embedded in other, more familiar philosophical, theological, and other currents, which together constitute a complex intellectual landscape, determined by broad cultural and historical forces and not reducible to philosophy in any narrow technical sense. One of my purposes is to disentangle the central themes of what can be discerned as a distinctly personalistic worldview in this context. One reason why the origins and early development of personalism have been hidden from view is that many thinkers in whom personalistic themes appear have, rightly or wrongly, been seen rather as belonging, with regard to their main contributions, to some other current or to a current better described in other terms. As we will see, the American school remains the paradigm of personalism. It is on personalism in the somewhat more precise sense, as deWned by this school, that I will focus in my argument about its historical origins. American personalism began as a rather distinctly idealistic philosophy: the term ‘personal idealism’ was Wrst used by the American George Holmes Howison, and subsequently by a number of British thinkers. The concept of idealistic personalism, however, can be said to be much older.

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Introduction

I will show that its origins are the same as the origins of personalism in general. These origins are to be found in the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenthcentury opposition to the radical Enlightenment rationalism which was seen by its critics to lead to pantheism, atheism, and fatalism, and against the forms of post-Kantian idealism that were seen by the same critics to be alternative forms of impersonalistic pantheism. This opposition, which began with the so-called Pantheismusstreit in Germany in the 1780s and continued and developed throughout the following decades, was led by the philosopher and novelist Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), one of the most widely inXuential writers of the age. According to Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘as a historic inXuence he is hardly second to Kant’.1 Jacobi was primarily a man of letters and a man of the world, not an academic philosopher. Throughout his life he remained close to the centre of social and cultural life in Germany. He knew personally most of the leading Wgures on the German cultural and intellectual scene, and they were all familiar with and commented on his work. Many of his philosophical views were Wrst expressed in letters to them. Today, philosophers are increasingly recognizing the true nature of his genius: his ability intuitively to cut to the core of the dominant philosophies of the age, to see the hidden connections and commonalities between these philosophies, to reveal the nature of their shared essence despite all divergences, and to do all this with a cultural, moral, and religious clarity of vision highly unusual for someone who played a considerable role in other aspects of the movements on the contemporary scene. Yet with regard to his own positive alternative, most scholars still share Ernst Cassirer’s view that, although Jacobi was a brilliant Anreger (stimulator) who with great Scharfsinn (acuteness) raised new questions and discovered diYculties that determined the shape of philosophy for a long time, the answers that he gave were granted only a ‘brief historical semblance of existence’.2 This book will challenge Cassirer’s judgement. For all of the other, older and newer inXuences on modern personalism, I believe there are good reasons to trace the latter back to Jacobi, and to recognize as its beginning not only his deep perceptions of the problematic meaning of contemporary philosophy, but also the positive alternative he suggested. Jacobi made the new term ‘nihilism’ known by using it to describe the consequences of Fichte’s philosophy, which he regarded—as indeed did Fichte himself—as merely ‘inverted Spinozism’. While still shaped in other respects by the Enlightenment and by Romanticism, Jacobi defended what he found to be threatened by a certain radical form of abstract rationalism: the status and the moral freedom of the individual, the moral values of the ordered community of persons, and the personality and transcendence of God. The criticism of the new philosophical pantheism, and of its consequences, was certainly not new.3 Jacobi’s version was in important respects of a new and diVerent kind, however. Jacobi 1 Lovejoy, The Reason, the Understanding, and Time, 5. 2 Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, iii: Die nachkantischen Systeme, 16–17. 3 See Israel, Radical Enlightenment.

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relied on experience and intuition, groped towards a historical form of reason to accompany sensual experience, and simultaneously defended a ‘higher’ intuitive experience, a direct awareness of transcendent reality. Both endeavours were directed against what he considered the abstractions of pantheism, and among the results were new insights into the primacy of the person.4 While contributing strongly in some respects to the new Romantic movement, he was not fully part of it himself, keeping his distance, as we will see, from many of its typical philosophical and religious expressions, and maintaining instead strong ties to ‘the culture of the cosmopolitan society of the rococo’.5 Although he did not deny them, there was in Jacobi a tendency to play down the legitimate use of discursive reason and conceptuality, and their role in conjunction with experience. In some respects he was a kind of realist inspired by Scottish common-sense and moral-sense philosophy.6 It was partly out of Scottish philosophy that the distinctive personal experiential and intuitive basis of philosophy which characterizes personalism developed. Jacobi adapted the argument of ‘belief ’ in external reality with which David Hume supplemented his scepticism, and combined it with other aspects of Scottish common- and moral-sense philosophy.7 This inner connection seems to be conWrmed by the 4 Jacobi’s philosophical works, Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza (1785); David Hume u¨ber den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus. Ein Gespra¨ch (1787); Jacobi an Fichte (1799); ‘Ueber das Unternehmen des Kriticismus, die Vernunft zu Verstande zu Bringen’, in Reinhold (ed.), Beytra¨ge zur leichtern Uebersicht des Zustandes der Philosophie beym Anfange des 19. Jahrhunderts, iii (1801); Von den go¨ttlichen Dingen und ihrer OVenbarung (1811); and two philosophical novels, Woldemar (1779) and Eduard Allwills Briefsammlung (1792), are all collected in Ko¨ppen’s and Roth’s edition of Jacobi’s Werke (i–vi, 1812–25), the edition I will mainly use, although the considerable changes in the Werke versions in some cases make it necessary to consult also the earlier editions. A critical, annotated edition of Jacobi’s Werke has recently been published by Hammacher and Jaeschke. It is pointless to delve here into the comprehensive German scholarship on Jacobi; some works will be referred to in the course of my discussion when needed. Jacobi has normally been seen through the more or less unhistorical lenses of other and later philosophies: transcendental idealism, Neo-Kantian value-philosophy, irrationalist philosophy of life, existentialism, and phenomenological dialogicism. But there are partial truths in many of these approaches. I will point to Jacobi’s neglected connection with idealistic and theistic personalism, but, I hope, not unhistorically reinterpret him in the light of it. Most works deal, of course, with Jacobian positions related to what I call his personalism. Of special relevance are those which relate him to twentieth-century dialogical philosophy, which is closely related to twentiethcentury personalism. The excellent section on Jacobi in Timm’s Gott und die Freiheit focuses on the themes of his work that are most relevant for the present study. The best work on Jacobi in English is the ‘Introduction’ by diGiovanni, published together with his own translations in Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill; in some cases I have cited the earlier editions of Jacobi’s works from diGiovanni’s translation. Beiser’s chapters on Jacobi in The Fate of Reason (chs. 2, 3, and 4) and Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism (ch. 6) should also be mentioned. 5 Heraeus, Fritz Jacobi und der Sturm und Drang, 102. 6 On the inXuence of these philosophies not only on Jacobi but in Germany in general, see Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany. Jacobi called himself a ‘realist’; see Bollnow, Die Lebensphilosophie F. H. Jacobis, 132. 7 See diGiovanni, ‘Hume, Jacobi, and Common Sense’; Baum, Vernunft und Erkenntnis, 42–9, 164– 73; Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 141–5, 158–66; and Berlin, ‘Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism’, in Against the Current.

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Introduction

fact that a distinctive inXuence on the leading British personal idealist, Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, was his Scottish teacher A. C. Fraser. Jacobi was often perceived to verge towards Wdeism, or what was at the time called the ‘philosophy of faith’, although his conception of faith was not in all respects the traditional or orthodox Christian one. A number of subsequent thinkers whom he inspired sought to remedy this. Most important among them was the later F. W. J. Schelling who, naturally enough considering his earlier philosophical development, was unwilling to relinquish his high estimate of reason in his assimilation of Jacobi’s criticism of idealism. In his Philosophische Untersuchungen u¨ber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809), the work which, according to Heidegger, ‘shatters Hegel’s Logic before it was even published’,8 he claimed to have developed the Wrst clear, philosophical concept of the personality of God—a very signiWcative claim, as we will see. The book was written in Munich, where Jacobi was president of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Jacobi attacked the kind of ideas defended by Schelling in Von den go¨ttlichen Dingen (1811), a book on which he had been working for ten years and which was directed primarily against Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and his Philosophie und Religion (1804), but leading up to the ideas which characterized Schelling’s new departure in the Freiheitsschrift.9 There ensued a heated debate throughout 1811–12 which was in substance a permutation of the older pantheism controversy, but as he proceeded further along the road taken in the Freiheitsschrift Schelling later came to recognize the importance of Jacobi’s contributions. In 1841, at a very late stage of his career, Schelling was famously called to a chair at Berlin with the express purpose of having him eradicate ‘die Drachensaat des Hegelschen Pantheismus’, the dragon seed of Hegelian pantheism. He was chosen by the Prussian authorities because by that time he had long since abandoned the absolute idealism he once shared with Hegel, and had developed a new kind of theistic philosophy.10 This positive alternative to Hegelianism, developed over a period of several decades, while not compatible in its particular details with 8 Heidegger, Schellings Abhandlung u¨ber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, ed. Fieck (1971), 97, cited in Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 149. 9 The fact that Jacobi does not mention Schelling, and makes no precise references, has led to some confusion about the target of his criticism. Ford argued, in ‘The Controversy Between Schelling and Jacobi’, that Von den go¨ttlichen Dingen did not treat of Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift, and that it was not intended as an attack on Schelling at all. Subsequent German scholarship has carried on treating it as an attack on Schelling, however; it has also pointed out that Jacobi’s copy of the Wrst edition of the Freiheitsschrift has extensive marginalia, although it is clear that he had not yet fully studied it when writing Von den go¨ttlichen Dingen. See Hammacher, ‘Jacobis Schrift Von den go¨ttlichen Dingen’, 133 and n. 34. 10 I use Schro¨ter’s edition of Schelling’s Werke (1927–54), but follow its practice of giving volume and page references to the Wrst edition of the Sa¨mmtliche Werke edited by K. F. A. Schelling (1856–61); and occasionally, for texts or versions of texts not included in the Werke, Fuhrmans’s edition of Grundlegung der positiven Philosophie. Mu¨nchener Vorlesung (1972), Peertz’s edition of System der Weltalter, Mu¨nchener Vorlesung 1827–28 (1990), Wirth’s translation of The Ages of the World (2000), and the Historisch-kritische Ausgabe which began to appear in 1976. Schelling’s main criticism of Hegel is found in his Geschichte der neueren Philosophie (c.1833–4) and Philosophie der OVenbarung (1841–2).

Introduction

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developing personalism, strongly inXuenced it because of its more general orientation towards a new personalistic theism. Schelling’s criticism of Hegel, however, was only one expression of a more widespread critical reaction, on which Jacobi and his disciples and followers were decisively inXuential. Its theological side has been covered—in general terms—by German scholars. Especially, the works of J. E. Kuhn and F. A. Staudenmaier of the Catholic Tu¨bingen School should be mentioned for stating in paradigmatic fashion the distinctive personalist critique, and thus indirectly also much of the alternative, personalist worldview.11 Other types of critics too, like A. Trendelenburg for instance, were inXuential on emerging personalism. This was, taken together, a massive attempt at confutation which reverberated throughout the nineteenth century—and most palpably perhaps in personalistic thought. What I am interested in here are the critics who themselves developed personalistic ideas as an alternative. Schelling’s polemic is thus here set in the context of emergent personalism rather than that of the general reaction against Hegel. Schelling only partly managed to transcend the distinct teachings of what Jacobi had criticized as pantheism, and combined new personalistic insights with the now familiar themes of irrationalism, existentialism, the unconscious, and language. SigniWcantly, it is these aspects of his later work, in which anticipations can be found of the broadly postmodern current from Nietzsche and Heidegger, and not his personalism, that recent scholarship focuses on.12 All German idealism was influenced by the Western esoteric tradition, and the later Schelling continued to draw on it, albeit with new emphases. On the basis of the speculation of Bo¨hme, a new kind of theistic philosophy was also developed on a parallel line by F. von Baader and by J. J. von Go¨rres, who were both leading Catholic thinkers in Munich.13 With regard to Jacobi and Schelling I will merely draw out the main features of the distinctly personalistic elements which can be found in their works, to the 11 Graf and Wagner (eds.), Die Flucht in den BegriV. Graf ’s and Wagner’s introduction, Tu¨rk’s essay, ‘Rezeption und Kritik der Philosophie Hegels in der ‘‘Katholischen Tu¨binger Schule’’ ’, which deals with Kuhn und Staudenmaier (the decisive inXuence of Jacobi on the Tu¨binger Schule has been studied by Weindell in ‘F. H. Jacobi’s Einwirkung auf die Glaubenswissenschaft der katholischen Tu¨binger Schule’), and Graf ’s on ‘Der Untergang des Individuums’, together give an overview of the personalist theological criticism. 12 Since these aspects are comparatively well known, I will not emphasize them. As in the case of Jacobi, it is not meaningful here extensively to inventory Schelling scholarship. Something must be said, however, about the rediscovery of and the issues in the growing scholarship on the later Schelling. A pioneering work in the renewal of scholarship on the later Schelling was Schulz’s Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der Spa¨tphilosophie Schellings, which, in emphasizing the existentialist elements, in some respects challenged Leese’s notion of a Spa¨tidealismus (Philosophie und Theologie im Spa¨tidealismus), which had been taken up by Fuhrmans (Schellings letzte Philosophie). Bowie’s Schelling and Modern European Philosophy concentrates on the relations between Schelling and Heidegger and other twentieth-century thinkers, but also contains an account of Schelling’s criticism of Hegel. Snow’s excellent Schelling and the End of Idealism is more relevant for my present purposes, since it focuses to a considerable extent on the relations between Schelling and Jacobi. Mention should also be made of Brown, The Later Philosophy of Schelling. 13 See O’Meara, Romantic Idealism and Roman Catholicism, esp. chs. 4 and 6.

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Introduction

extent necessary in order to make clear the presence and the nature of a personalistic worldview at this early stage, and thereby to demonstrate its connection with later developments. The link between Jacobi and Schelling has always been well known, and is highlighted in all works on the later Schelling. Although to some extent sharing the continuously present ‘extra-idealistic’ criticism from Jacobi, much of the reaction against the pantheistic and ‘absolutistic’ lines of development within German idealism remained, in the eVorts to work out an alternative to them, within the boundaries of idealism in a more general sense. It marked the emergence of a new and distinct kind of idealism. Schelling’s central personalistic and theistic themes were taken up and partly extricated from the theoretical contexts of Romantic irrationalism by the school of so-called ‘speculative theism’ (spekulativer Theismus) in Germany, led by thinkers like Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Christian Hermann Weisse, and Hermann Ulrici, a philosophical movement which has as yet received little scholarly attention.14 The speculative theists were also directly inspired by Jacobi. The similarities and the diVerences between Jacobi, the later Schelling, and the school of speculative theism have been studied in German works on the history of 14 Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1797–1879), son of Johann Gottlieb, attacked pantheism in general in Sa¨tze zur Vorschule der Theologie, published in 1826. Gottlob Benjamin Ja¨sche’s Der Pantheismus nach seinen verschiedenen Hauptformen, seinem Ursprung und Fortgang, seinem spekulativen und praktischen Werth und Gehalt. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und Kritik dieser Lehre in alter und neuer Philosophie appeared in three volumes in 1826. Fichte’s Wrst sustained attack on Hegel’s version of pantheism appeared in his Beitra¨gen zur Charakteristik der neueren Philosophie in 1829 (the work also contains an extensive treatment of Jacobi), the same year that Christian Hermann Weisse (1801–66) ¨ ber den gegenwa¨rtigen Standpunkt der philosophischen Wissenschaft. In besonderer published his U ¨ ber Gegensatz, Wendepunkt und Ziel heutiger Beziehung auf das System Hegels. In 1832 Fichte’s U Philosophie appeared, in 1834 his Die Idee der Perso¨nlichkeit und der individuellen Fortdauer, in 1836 his Ontologie, and in 1846 his Spekulative Theologie. Weisse published his Die Idee der Gottheit in 1833, his Grundzu¨ge der Metaphysik in 1835, and his Das philosophische Problem der Gegenwart. Sendschreiben an I. H. Fichte in 1842. The inXuence of German speculative theism culminated towards midcentury. The main organ of the movement, Zeitschrift fu¨r Philosophie und spekulative Theologie, was founded in 1837, and in 1847 it was given its new name, Zeitschrift fu¨r Philosophie und philosophische Kritik. Fichte’s Anthropologie appeared in 1856, and his Psychologie in 1864; Vermischte Schriften appeared in 1869. Hermann Ulrici (1806–84), the editor of the Zeitschrift, turned against Hegel in ¨ ber Prinzip und Methode der hegelschen Philosophie (1841), and against the purely atheistic materiU alism into which pantheism had already developed in Gott und die Natur (1861); Weisse’s magnum opus, Philosophische Dogmatik oder Philosophie des Christentums, appeared between 1855 and 1862 in three volumes. Fichte’s last work, whose title, Die theistische Weltanschauung und ihre Berechtigung: ein kritisches Manifest an ihre Gegner und Bericht u¨ber die Hauptaufgaben gegenwa¨rtiger Spekulation, bears witness to the consistently maintained position, appeared in 1873. Other speculative theists were Jakob Sengler, Karl Philip Fischer, Isaak August Dorner, Richard Rothe, Moritz Carriere, and Heinrich Moritz Chalybaeus. These and very many other speculative theists are listed and brieXy discussed in the later editions of Ueberweg’s Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie. The most ambitious scholarly work in the Weld is still Drews’s Die deutsche Spekulation seit Kant, which, however, is an extreme and idiosyncratic critical study from the perspective of E. v. Hartmann’s philosophy. Among the few relevant older monographs there can be mentioned A. Hartmann’s Der Spa¨tidealismus und die Hegelsche Dialektik, and three works on Fichte: Scherer’s Die Gotteslehre von Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Horstmeier’s Die Idee der Perso¨nlichkeit bei Immanuel Hermann Fichte, and Ebert’s Sein und Sollen des Menschen bei Immanuel Hermann Fichte. Von spa¨tidealistischer Spekulation zur Existenz.

Introduction

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philosophy.15 It is quite clear that the speculative theists, like subsequent personalists, often misunderstood aspects of Hegel’s philosophy, but it is not their criticism of these aspects per se that is decisive here, but the whole discourse of which this criticism was a part, and which contained the early development of personalism. Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817–81), who published his main works when the earlier speculative theists had been around and even dominated German academic philosophy for a long time, introduced new theoretical elements in pace with the development of the times, but retained some of the basic idealistic themes as well as the cardinal theistic and personalistic positions.16 Lotze, who held Fichte’s, Hegel’s, and Schelling’s chair at Berlin and was succeeded in it by Dilthey, was widely recognized as Germany’s most important philosopher. He renewed idealistic personalism, not least through his development of a philosophy of values and meaning which was of considerable consequence for the thinking of the Baden Neo-Kantians, and which would also inXuence later forms of personalism.17 Although its epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics were rather diVerent, personalism was now, because of its recourse to Wnite subjectivity as at least the point of departure of philosophy, in opposition to absolutism, increasingly identiWed with the Neo-Kantian movement with its similar reaction. The two currents certainly shared some philosophical territory,

The introduction by Graf and Wagner, and the contribution of Graf to Graf and Wagner (eds.), Die Flucht in den BegriV relate the speculative theist criticism of Hegel, which is not sharply distinguished from the theological criticism to which the volume as a whole is devoted; the volume also reprints a ¨ ber die eigentliche Grenze des Pantheismus und des major part of a central article by Weisse, ‘U philosophischen Theismus’, from 1833. Jaeschke deals with speculative theism in Die Vernunft in der Religion, ch. 4. Ko¨hnke deals with the speculative theists in a separate chapter in Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus, 88–105. Ehret’s Immanuel Hermann Fichte. Ein Denker gegen seine Zeit is the only recent work which covers—very selectively—the work of a leading speculative theist. Breckman, in Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, deals at unusual length with ‘Christian personalism’, but only as a foil to Young Hegelianism; I will discuss his important work in Ch. 1. 15 See Drews, Die deutsche Spekulation seit Kant, Fuhrmans, Schellings letzte Philosophie, and Schulz, Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus. The latter, challenging Leese’s notion of a unitary Spa¨tidealismus, corrected Fuhrmans’s results with regard to the relation between Schelling and the speculative theists in important respects, but this does not seem to me to aVect Fuhrmans’s general observations, which are still apposite in the present connection. The links that I want to emphasize are the ones that indicate a continuity in the general, central themes of personalistic theism. It is not a question of denying the considerable diVerences between Schelling and the speculative theists; for Schelling, the latter were much too close to Hegel; cf. Tilliette, Schelling, ii. 39 n. 5, 80–1, 346. 16 Reardon, in From Coleridge to Gore, characterizes Lotze as a ‘personal idealist’, 305, 317. The term Personalismus was used to characterize to Lotze’s philosophy in the 1890s; Ueberweg, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, iv. 278. Through his new concerns, such as that with the theoretical presuppositions of the sciences, Lotze belonged in a diVerent sense and more decisively in the postHegelian period; see Wentscher, Hermann Lotze, 109–12. 17 Bamberger, Untersuchungen zur Entstehung des Wertproblems in der Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts ; Piche´, ‘Hermann Lotze et la gene`se de la philosophie des valeurs’. Other German speculative theists also adopted at least the language of value at this time.

8

Introduction

but the similarities are on a very general level, and the identiWcation has not facilitated the understanding of the distinct personalist positions. Lotze’s work was to exercise a decisive inXuence on British and American personalism,18 as its leaders studied under him in Germany. But Lotze was Weisse’s student, and, although prominent and in many ways original, as a personalist and theist he was only one of many in a broad and deep personalistic movement in Germany. There were considerable diVerences between Lotze and the earlier speculative theists which have been duly documented by German scholars.19 But Weisse clearly acknowledged the merits of Lotze’s work, and what has been overlooked is the continuity in the personalistic and theistic themes, these themes themselves as expressed in Lotze’s work, and how it is these themes that, in Lotze’s formulation, have inXuenced later personalistic philosophers in Britain and America.20 Lotze strongly inXuenced his friend Albrecht Ritschl, whose work dominated the theology of the late nineteenth century. His Kantian ethical focus, criticism of rationalist and Romantic immanentist metaphysics, defence of the primacy of personality in Wnite beings and in God, and emphasis on the historical person of Christ were also, alongside Lotze, a considerable inXuence on more theologically oriented personalists, and, more generally, personalistically oriented theologians in Britain and America.21 But the Ritschlian school was not fully representative of personalism, in that it embraced a kind of German liberal theology from which personalism typically kept some distance. This broad movement in nineteenth-century German philosophy is characterized as a whole by the attempt to break free from the pantheistic tendencies in the main line of German idealism, and to transcend the pantheistic elements even in the later Schelling. Against such pantheisms, it sought to erect a theistic philosophy with the help of new speculative instruments, a philosophy shaped by a new and more pronouncedly personalistic interpretation of Christian theism. But the movement is also marked by the frequent failure of this attempt: many of the speculative theists seem to have been too close to the new sources of

18 Especially his Mikrokosmus. Ideen zur Naturgeschichte und Geschichte der Menschheit, i–iii (1856– 64), his Metaphysik (1879), and his Grundzu¨ge der Religionsphilosophie (‘Diktate’ from lectures) (1882). 19 Pester, Hermann Lotze. Lotze was involved in direct polemics against I. H. Fichte. His divergences from Ulrici can be studied in two long reviews, reprinted in Kleine Schriften (1885–91), ii and iii/1. 20 In his brief Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie seit Kant (1882), Lotze barely mentions Right Hegelianism proper, and tends to identify it with the speculative theism of Weisse and I. H. Fichte, which partly joined the later Schelling; his sympathy is clearly on their side rather than on that of the Left Hegelians, whom he directly criticizes: op. cit. 72–3. Lotze’s position as a kind of speculative theist has been made clear by Drews and others. On Lotze’s relation to Weisse, see Wentscher, 26–7, et passim. An early study of Lotze in relation to Weisse is Pannier, Lotze’s GottesbegriV genetisch dargestellt; Lotze’s relation to Weisse is also discussed by Bamberger, and, brieXy, by Pester. 21 In the second part of The Making of American Liberal Theology, Dorrien describes the proximity of post-Bownian personalism and Ritschlianism, ii. 305.

Introduction

9

pantheism, too dependent on their speculative projects, to succeed unambiguously in the eVort of transcending the pantheistic results.22 It should be mentioned that already at the beginning of the movement of speculative theism there came to dominate, even within Hegelianism, those followers of the ‘Centre’ and the ‘Right’ who gave Hegel’s teachings a theistic interpretation.23 According to E. Hirsch, speculative theism and the Hegelian right represented the two main branches of German Kathederphilosophie between 1830 and 1870.24 As for the Young Hegelians, Warren Breckman has shown how they cannot be properly understood apart from the constitutive polemical negation of the ‘Christian personalism’ that Jacobi, the later Schelling, the Hegelian right, the speculative theists, and various theologians presented.25 Left Hegelians too developed the dialogical aspect of personalism. SigniWcantly, however, for Feuerbach, the I–Thou relationship was exclusively human, and even meant man’s Wnal achievement of his identity as God—and thus the Wnal abolition of the traditional God.26 Feuerbach’s naturalism did not prevent him from sharing some ground, in his criticism of Hegel, with the speculative theists’ earlier criticism. But from the perspective of what I regard as the main line of personalism, Feuerbach’s ‘personalism’, like that of other Left Hegelians, remained constantly vitiated by a never-relinquished pantheism, of which Feuerbach’s naturalism can be regarded as merely a further extension. Under the inXuence of Schelling and other German thinkers, but to some extent also parallel to them, a philosophy selectively combining the substance of Jacobi’s criticism and his positive alternative with elements of idealism was developed in Sweden by four professors of philosophy at the University of Uppsala. Their philosophy too was called ‘speculative theism’, but in addition to that, it also came to be called personlighetsidealism (idealism of personality), and later, personlighetsWlosoW (philosophy of personality)—the term Perso¨nlichkeitsphilosoph was also used by I. H. Fichte.27 By this time Kantianism had been introduced in Sweden by Daniel Boethius (1751–1810) and others, and postKantian idealism by Benjamin Ho¨ijer (1767–1812), one of Sweden’s best-known philosophers. The idealists of personality, however, also preserved—as did Boethius—some of the inspiration from the Scottish common- and moral-sense

22 This is demonstrated not only by the criticism of stricter theistic philosophers, but also by Drews’s pantheist criticism; Drews divides his discussion of speculative theism into two main sections, ‘True Theism’ and ‘Pseudo-Theism’. 23 To these camps belonged thinkers like G. A. Gabler, K. Daub, P. K. Marheineke, K. F. Go¨schel, J. K. F. Rosenkrantz, and J. E. Erdmann. 24 Quoted in Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Ritter (‘Theismus, spekulativer’). 25 See n. 14. 26 Buber, ‘Zur Geschichte des dialogischen Prinzips’, 293–4. 27 Fichte, Vermischte Schriften, i. 58. SigniWcantly, he uses it in connection with a discussion of the parallel between himself and Jacobi, and the inXuence of the example of the latter. The term Perso¨nlichkeitsidealismus was also used in Germany, although in a slightly diVerent sense, with reference rather to the general programme of Bildung.

10

Introduction

philosophy that had been a major force in Swedish eighteenth-century philosophy, and modiWed German idealism accordingly.28 Partly because the German speculative theists cannot normally be considered to have fully succeeded in their eVorts to supersede the pantheistic and theosophical elements in the later Schelling and other German thinkers, special attention will be given here to the Swedish branch of this tradition of idealistic personalism, a branch which in some respects seems to represent more clearly the next step in the development of personalism.29 Here we Wnd an unbroken continuity of idealistic personalism from the beginning of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, dominating academic philosophy throughout most of this period. Nils Fredrik Biberg (1776–1827), Samuel Grubbe (1786–1853), Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom (1790–1855), Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783–1847), and Christopher Jacob Bostro¨m (1797–1866) developed the worldview of late idealism, speculative theism, and personalism by continually relating their own eVorts to what was of relevance in what happened on the German philosophical scene. This development took place in the 1810s, 1820s, and 1830s, with Bostro¨m, who represented a second generation of Swedish personal idealists, exercising his inXuence from the mid-1840s, and the main tendency is fairly clear. Biberg30 was from the very beginning busy with the refutation not only of Schelling’s ‘philosophy of identity’, but also of his ‘philosophy of freedom’, by means of an independent assimilation of Jacobi’s and Hegel’s criticisms. This was presented in his lectures of the academic year 1811–12, at the same time that Jacobi published Von den go¨ttlichen Dingen.31 Jacobi’s formulations on the problematic tendencies 28 See Segerstedt, Moral Sense-skolan och dess inXytande pa˚ svensk WlosoW (The School of Moral Sense and its InXuence on Swedish Philosophy). 29 The complex subject of the relation between the developments of the personalistic themes in Sweden and Germany, and the question of priority in this development, are not of importance for my argument. What I am concerned to demonstrate is only the presence in Europe at this early stage of the development of the speciWc themes of personalism. Although priority was later claimed for the Swedish thinkers, and this will have to be mentioned since the substantial diVerences adduced in support of that claim—whether the latter is strictly tenable or not—are of relevance for the general argument about the direction of the development of personalism, it is probable that this argument could also have been made with reference to some German thinkers. By paying scant attention to the German speculative theists, however, German scholars concur in playing down their importance. It is a little strange that they are frequently dismissed as epigones, for it is not at all clear of whom they are supposed to be epigones. They may not all have been important philosophers, but they undoubtedly represented a distinct line of their own. 30 Among his most important works are ‘Om philosophiens allma¨nna problemer’ (‘On the General Problems of Philosophy’), and a number of unpublished manuscripts (articles and lecture notes), such as ‘Inledning till etiken’ (‘An Introduction to Ethics’), ‘Om fo¨rha˚llandet mellan religion och sedlighet’ (‘On the Relation between Religion and Morality’), ‘Om de etiska formalbegreppen’ (‘On the Formal Concepts of Ethics’), and ‘Fo¨rela¨sningar i WlosoWens historia’ (‘Lectures on the History of Philosophy’). Biberg’s Samlade skrifter (Collected Writings), edited by Dellde´n in three volumes (1828–30), contains mostly his work in the philosophy of law. Other important works include a commentary on the Stoics, and the essay ‘Om falsk och sann liberalism’ (‘On True and False Liberalism’) (in Svea, 1823–4). 31 Henningsson, Na˚gra frihetsproblem hos Nils Fredrik Biberg (Some Problems of Freedom in Nils Fredrik Biberg), 5–7; Frykenstedt, Atterboms kunskapsuppfattning (Atterbom’s Theory of Knowledge),

Introduction

11

in the kind of ideas that shaped Schelling’s philosophy of nature, and to some extent the Freiheitsschrift, were thus supplemented by an analysis using other philosophical instruments. After these lectures, the other Swedish philosophers, Grubbe, Atterbom, and Geijer, were soon engaged in the same kind of criticism of Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift of 1809, on the grounds that it did not represent suYcient progress beyond the earlier philosophy of identity with regard to the concept of God. Unlike Biberg, Grubbe gradually worked his way out of an early adherence to Schellingianism.32 His teaching during this period strongly inXuenced the development of Atterbom, who moved beyond his earlier, more outre´ forms of aesthetico-Romantic Schellingianism in the direction of at least a more strictly philosophical one. Atterbom was also under the inXuence of the Platonism shared by Biberg and Grubbe. His most important philosophical works are Studier till Philosophiens Historia och System (Studies in the History and System of Philosophy) (1835) and a number of extensive articles.33 Geijer, a professor of history, had already published several works in the spirit of the neo-humanistic

17–23, 37–9, 49–50. Apart from Nyblaeus’s work on the history of Swedish philosophy (see below) and Nordin’s chapter on Biberg in Romantikens WlosoW (The Philosophy of Romanticism), there are as yet no other works that deal extensively with Biberg. Nyblaeus uniquely built his account to a considerable extent on the voluminous collection of Biberg’s unpublished, and barely legible, manuscripts in Lund University Library, which it has not yet been possible for me—or anyone else—to go through in its entirety. Henningsson does not challenge any of the interpretations I here accept. Nyblaeus’s account corresponds with the view held by Bostro¨m, and heeding Nordin’s warning about the extent to which Nyblaeus tends to see earlier thinkers in a one-sided Bostro¨mian light, it seems possible to judge to the extent necessary for my present purposes of its trustworthiness. 32 His Skrifter (Writings) were published in seven volumes (1876–84) by Nyblaeus, with some linguistic, orthographic, and compositional revisions in accordance with the editing practices of the times (some of them being problematical). The parts of this edition are given the following names by Nyblaeus: ‘Praktiska WlosoWens historia’ (‘The History of Practical Philosophy’), i–ii; ‘FilosoWsk sedela¨ra’ (‘Philosophical Ethics’), iii–iv; ‘Fenomenologi eller om den sinnliga erfarenheten’ (‘Phenomenology, or On Sensory Experience’), v; ‘Ontologi eller om det absolute urva¨sendet’ (‘Ontology, or On the Absolute Original Being’), vi; and ‘Det sko¨na och den sko¨na konstens WlosoW’ (‘The Beautiful and the Philosophy of the Fine Arts’), vii. This edition was supplemented in 1912 with a volume of ‘Fo¨rela¨sningar till WlosoWens propedevtik’ (‘Lectures on the Propedeutic of Philosophy’), published under the title Om WlosoWens intresse och problemer (On the Interest and Problems of Philosophy) by Franse´n. The standard work on Grubbe is Cullberg, Samuel Grubbe. Cullberg’s work is valuable partly because of the detailed information on the problematic elements of Nyblaeus’s editing; Cullberg also claims to detect certain contradictions between the Platonic, Christian, and modern idealist elements in Grubbe’s philosophy. (In other works, Cullberg demonstrated the relevance of Geijerian themes in the contemporary context of phenomenological and existentialist dialogicism.) 33 Atterbom is best known as a Romantic poet, yet the extensive scholarship devoted to him has largely neglected his philosophical work, especially as it relates to the tradition of Swedish idealistic personalism. The standard biography is Tykesson’s Atterbom. Atterbom’s impressions of Jacobi, Schelling, and other leaders of German culture can be studied in Aufzeichnungen des schwedischen Dichters P. D. A. Atterbom u¨ber beru¨hmte deutsche Ma¨nner und Frauen nebst Reiseerinnerungen aus Deutschland und Italien (1867), and Menschen und Sta¨dte. Begegnungen und Beobachtungen eines ¨ sterreich, 1817–1819, edited by Schro¨der. As Schwedischen Dichters in Deutschland, Italien und O could be expected, Atterbom was much more impressed by Schelling than by Jacobi.

12

Introduction

and idealistic programme of Bildung, works which, however, at the same time upheld a Christian, theistic position.34 But until he published a largely original, partial criticism of Schelling in Thorild (1820) (partly a study of a late eighteenthcentury Swedish philosopher), Geijer’s philosophical development seems to have been parallel to that of Grubbe and Atterbom.35 Geijer then became engrossed by his historical work, and the task of leading the development of Swedish personalistic idealism fell to the other thinkers. In 1835 Geijer wrote a highly appreciative review of Atterbom’s History and System of Philosophy, but only in the 1840s, after his so-called ‘defection’ to liberalism, did Geijer return to philosophy. It is now that his long career of philosophical, historical, and general broad humanistic reXection culminates and his production reaches its qualitative apogee, making his reputation as the emblem of Swedish personalism.36 Certainly Geijer here in some respects developed further the work of his colleagues and predecessors in the 1820s and 1830s. But for the rest, he simply summed up the Upsaliensic insights that had gradually matured and deepened during these decades, and gave them a new and sometimes better expression.37 The theistic tendency of Schelling’s ‘philosophy of freedom’ remained a considerable inXuence, however, as did the later, scanty, oracular utterances of Schelling himself, and his mysterious manuscripts that were observed by his Swedish and other visitors in Munich.38 Hegel’s criticism of the early Schelling, received partly through Biberg, was also not a negligible inXuence on the later Swedish idealists’ way of apprehending the absolute, on their emphasis on the concrete, and even, by means of the kind of interpretations that were

34 Geijer had also published a work in political philosophy, Feodalism och republikanism (Feudalism and Republicanism) (1818–19), which evidenced the unique extent to which he was inspired by the English political tradition. I use the Wrst edition of Geijer’s Samlade skrifter (Collected Writings) (1849–55). 35 The controversies caused by Thorild forced Geijer to add a new section to this work as well as replies to critics, which are important sources of his personalism. 36 The most important works from this period are Menniskans historia (The History of Man), Geijer’s most inXuential work in philosophy, a lecture series from 1841 to 1842, posthumously published in 1856, on the philosophy of history in relation to philosophy in general (the title betrays Scottish inXuence); the Tilla¨gg (Addendum) (1842) to his early work on Om falsk och sann upplysning med afseende pa˚ religionen (On True and False Enlightenment with Regard to Religion) from 1811; and Ocksa˚ ett ord o¨vfer tidens religio¨sa fra˚ga (Also a Word on the Religious Question of Our Time) (1847). 37 At this late stage, Geijer could also beneWt from the work of the German speculative theists and other critics of Hegel in Germany. A study of Geijer in English is Spongberg, The Philosophy of Erik Gustaf Geijer. The most important works on Geijer as a philosopher, and especially on his position in relation to German thinkers, are Landquist, Erik Gustaf Geijer, and Norberg, Geijers va¨g fra˚n romantik till realism (Geijer’s Development from Romanticism to Realism) (some of Norberg’s results have subsequently been questioned). During the Second World War, Norberg used Geijer’s personalism as a weapon in the Wght against the totalitarian systems of Nazism and communism, pointing to what she perceived by then to be the tragic historical consequences of following Hegel’s rather than Geijer’s lead. A selection from Geijer’s Minnen (Memoirs) and letters was translated and published under the title Impressions of England in 1932. 38 Schelling did not publish much after the Freiheitsschrift; there were many rumours of his work on Die Weltalter, but it was never completed and was only published posthumously in fragmentary form.

Introduction

13

later to be described as ‘Right Hegelian’, at least to some extent on their understanding of the absolute as a person. However, like Schelling and the speculative theists, they all came to see Hegel’s philosophy too as distinctly non-personalistic and as unable properly to explain the concrete, and to state the criticism of it in terms which, in retrospect, can be seen to be paradigmatic of personalism. With somewhat bombastic claims of independence, Bostro¨m then burst upon the scene with an even sharper criticism, not only of Schelling and Hegel, but of the speculative theists in Germany as well. Bostro¨m exercised his inXuence through his lectures and informal seminars as holder of the most prestigious of the philosophical chairs at Uppsala, and did not publish much in his lifetime. He departed from the more Jacobian understanding of faith and reason of his teachers Biberg and Grubbe by a higher degree of Hegelian rationalism, but many of the central themes of personalistic idealism remained intact.39 As not fully typical of early personalism, and as representing a later phase of Swedish speculative theism that is less important for my historical argument, his position will only brieXy be indicated in connection with the discussion of the other Swedish speculative theists. With regard to the distinctly personalistic features of his metaphysics and ethics he in many respects remained close to his teachers. But his system does, I think, shed some light on the problem of the taxonomy of diVerent forms of personal and absolute idealism and the relations between them, a problem which is not without historical importance. The Bostro¨mian school dominated Swedish academic philosophy throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, headed by Bostro¨m’s leading disciples. One of the most prominent of them was Axel Nyblaeus (1821–99), professor at Lund, who is best known for Den WlosoWska forskningen i Sverige fra˚n slutet af det adertonde a˚rhundradet (Swedish Philosophy from the End of the Eighteenth Century) (1873–97), a four-volume work which recapitulated and restated the whole of the development of Swedish idealism of personality up to Bostro¨m and the successive stages of its emancipation from German pantheistic idealism.40

39 A presentation of Bostro¨m and his philosophy in English is available in R. N. Beck’s ‘Introductory Essay’, published together with a translation of selections from Bostro¨m’s Philosophy of Religion (1962); Beck, familiar of course with the American school, repeatedly refers to Bostro¨m’s philosophy as ‘personalism’: op. cit. pp. xx, xxxvi. There are two unpublished American doctoral dissertations on Bostro¨m, L. H. Beck’s ‘A Comparison of the Doctrines of Reality in the Philosophies of Lotze and Bostro¨m’ and Nosco’s ‘God in the Philosophy of Christopher Jacob Bostro¨m’. Entries on Bostro¨m appear in various philosophical encyclopedias; Swedish works on Bostro¨m are too many to enumerate here. 40 Although, as less important for my historical argument, I will not cover the period except for brief references where relevant, a few words on the later development of Swedish idealistic personalism should be added for comparative purposes, since it was at this later stage that such personalism emerged in Britain and America. Pontus Wikner (1837–88), arguably Bostro¨m’s most brilliant student and considered by Bostro¨m himself as his successor, ultimately defected from Bostro¨mianism, and as professor at Christiania (subsequently Oslo) and in a number of his later writings set forth an elaborate criticism of it. Wikner was not the only apostate from Bostro¨mianism. He was soon followed by Vitalis Norstro¨m (1856–1916) (Masskultur (Mass Culture) (1910), Religion och tanke (Religion and

14

Introduction

In a few places I will use the designation ‘idealists of personality’ to distinguish these Swedish philosophers from their German counterparts, but it should be borne in mind that the German and the Swedish currents belonged closely together within the same broader movement of the early European development of personalism. In Sweden, as in Germany, ‘speculative theism’ was not yet a term of historical description and classiWcation, but one which signalled what thinkers in both countries were calling for. I will therefore use the title ‘Speculative Theism’ for the sections which cover both the Germans and the Swedes, in order to distinguish them as schools from the subsequent British personal idealism and American personalism. As will become plain, however, this in no way implies that the German and the Swedish schools were any less personalist than the latter. What they called for under the general and unexpressive name of speculative theism was in reality the whole new personalist synthesis, as the only way ahead not just in Western philosophy and theology, but in Western culture more generally. The existentialist element in modern personalism can be traced back to Schelling, and in some respects even to Jacobi. Schelling’s late Berlin lectures were Thought) (1912, German translation 1932)), professor at the University of Gothenburg, the leading Swedish philosopher at the turn of the century and an inXuential cultural critic. Yet both Norstro¨m and Wikner remained loyal to the personalist tradition. Indeed, it was precisely because they found Bostro¨m’s rationalistic idealism insuYcient for the defence of theism and of the distinctness and independence of the individual person, and incapable of doing justice to the dynamic realities and experiences of life (and not least religious life), that they broke with it. Instead, while developing their own positions in closer connection with historicism and traditional Christianity, and, in the case of Norstro¨m, new impulses partly akin to those at work in his German friend, Rudolf Eucken, partly from the Lotzean and Neo-Kantian philosophy of values, they also drew on the alternative Swedish legacy within personal idealism, that of Geijer. SigniWcantly, Wikner left at his departure an unWnished work entitled Tidsexistensens apologi (Apology of Temporal Existence) (published in 1888). Norstro¨m, although highly respectful of the Gru¨ndlichkeit of German scholarship, was inclined to see the diVerence between German (pantheistic) and Swedish (personal idealist) philosophy as an expression of a diVerence in national character. Viktor Rydberg, a leading Swedish novelist and poet in the second half of the nineteenth century who also published philosophical and historical works, was strongly inXuenced by Bostro¨mianism. In diVerent versions and new combinations, Swedish idealistic personalism remained a decisive inXuence on the whole of the intellectual and cultural climate of Sweden in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the Wrst decades of the twentieth. Hegelianism, which had representatives in early nineteenth-century Sweden, survived, and in the person of Johan Jakob Borelius (1823–1909) (I hvad afseende a¨r Hegel Pantheist? (In What Respect is Hegel a Pantheist?) (1851)), held one of the philosophical professorships at Lund. But signiWcantly, Swedish Hegelianism, like, for instance, the Finnish version of Johan Vilhelm Snellman (1806–81), was Wrmly established at the Right end, emphasizing, to the extent to which it could credibly be done, the theistic potentialities of the system. An important representative of Swedish personalistic philosophy in the early twentieth century was J. A. Eklund, a theologian who synthesized elements from all branches of the Swedish personalistic tradition and developed further the incorporation of the new philosophy of values, but also selectively combined with this themes from Dilthey’s historicism and hermeneutics; much like Nyblaeus and Norstro¨m, Eklund saw the whole modern philosophical development in Sweden as driven by the need to break free from what he considered the vague and murky pantheism of Germany. In the work of the philosopher Alf Ahlberg, the Lotzean and Neo-Kantian philosophy of values was Wrmly wedded to personal idealism. John Landquist interpreted Geijerian personalism in terms of a new historicism partly inspired by Bergson.

Introduction

15

famously attended by Kierkegaard. Although he dismissed completely Schelling’s positive teachings, Kierkegaard did develop further some similar existentialist elements in his own writing against Hegel.41 It is important to have a clear picture of Kierkegaard’s position in relation to the early development of personalism. His was not only among the most inXuential criticisms of Hegel; his philosophy was also one of the most important manifestations of a more general assertion of human individuality in the nineteenth century. Although Kierkegaard’s position was theistic and Christian, stressed the value of the individual, displayed some similarities with Schelling’s existentialism, and in its mode of expression was characterized by the anti-systematicity and the kind of paradoxicalism that could sometimes be found in Jacobi, it was diVerent from what I will argue was to become the main avenue of the further development of personalism, in Germany as well as in Scandinavia. There were several more or less personalistic thinkers in Scandinavian countries other than Sweden. In Denmark alone, J. Baggesen carried on a correspondence with Jacobi already in the 1790s and defended many of his positions, and F. C. Sibbern and the internationally inXuential H. L. Martensen espoused typical speculative theist and idealistic personalist positions, albeit, in comparison with their colleagues at Uppsala, leaning more towards Hegelianism (of the Right inXection) on some issues. It must be stressed that early personalism was a truly international phenomenon, and although I have taken examples from the country I know best, others could, I believe, be taken from most Western countries.42 Yet with regard speciWcally to Kierkegaard, it seems clear that the more important truth is that he developed the common reactions, insights, and impulses of personalism in a rather diVerent direction. Kierkegaard’s famous attacks on Martensen are telling. Although Kierkegaardian radical individualism,43 subjective feeling, temporalism, and Wdeistic paradoxicalism were to remain present, in various combinations, as alternatives, as exceptional and somewhat ‘extreme’ developments throughout the continued international development of personalism—with renewed inXuence on some of its twentiethcentury forms—they were not, as will become clear in the course of this study, representative of the central line of early personalist thought.44 There are many other German inXuences on emergent personalism, some of which deserve mention. They were on the whole minor ones, however, and varied considerably from one personalist thinker to the other. Most importantly, the inXuence of Schleiermacher has to be mentioned, although it must be observed that he was himself strongly inXuenced by Jacobi. Schleiermacher also had

41 Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy, 3–4. On the existentialist line extending from Schelling to Kierkegaard and Buber, see Fackenheim, ‘Buber’s Concept of Revelation’, in Schilpp and Friedman (eds.), The Philosophy of Martin Buber, 276–7. 42 In Russia too, V. Soloviev was inXuenced by the later Schelling, and his followers seem to have been decidedly personalistic. 43 Buber points to this as the reason for the absence of dialogicist Wesensbeziehung in Kierkegaard: ‘Zur Geschichte des dialogischen Prinzips’, 294–5. 44 Kierkegaard signiWcantly found Jacobi’s salto mortale (see Ch. 1) insuYciently radical.

16

Introduction

marked Romantic and pantheistico-monistic leanings, and his defence of a personal relation between man and God seems not to have impressed the personalists. Although personalism belongs broadly in the strand of modern liberal theology—in a general sense—to which Schleiermacher contributed so decisively, it is, precisely through its strictly personalistic theism, at the same time an exceptional current within that broader movement. Even as its concept of the personality of God was, as I will argue, in important respects new, the stress on personality turned it, at least in some important respects, away from the immanentist impersonalism and humanist moralism of the main liberal current and towards orthodoxy and tradition. What was of importance for personalism in Schleiermacher’s work was above all his emphasis on religious experience and, in ethics, his defence of the contribution of unique individuality and his neohumanist rejection of the irreconcilable duality of duty and inclination in Kant’s ethics. Among other inXuences could be mentioned the philosopher J. F. Fries, who shared some of the speculative theist arguments against Hegel,45 and K. C. F. Krause, who introduced the concept of ‘panentheism’, which described well one aspect of the speculative theist position.46 Increasing attention is today paid to the many thinkers of the age previously considered ‘minor’, even if it is still mostly their contributions to the debates surrounding the works of Kant and the well-known post-Kantian idealists that have been studied.47 The personalists also received many inXuences from such lesser-known thinkers who were not themselves personalists. In my view, it is less important today, in connection with the historiography and understanding of personalism, to chronicle all of these various inXuences than to try to discern the distinct nature of the worldview synthesis emerging through the work of the thinkers who can properly be considered personalists. It has been argued that it is the specific welding together of the respective ingredient positions that is the distinguishing mark of personalism, not the single positions in themselves. But it should be added that if, for the purpose of ascertaining the derivation of the latter, we itemize the worldview of personalism in the way in which, as we will see, it is done by Albert C. Knudson— who holds this view with reference to American personalism—we must at the same time bear in mind that the worldview of personalism as a whole came about as a creative synthesis from original perceptions, considerations, and motivations, from an inner, coherent speculative need, rather than from a mere external combinatoric. And it had done this already at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Mainly, but not exclusively, through Lotze, it was the tradition of speculative theism in Germany that gave the decisive impulse to the thinkers who were to become the leading so-called ‘personal idealists’ in Britain and ‘personalists’ in the United States. But these could also draw on native traditions and thinkers, partly representing developments of continental impulses received at a much 45 Fries was strongly inXuenced by Jacobi. 46 In Krause it had more esoteric and less personalist connotations, however. 47 Beiser’s The Fate of Reason was an important work of this kind.

Introduction

17

earlier stage. There had in fact long been a British, and to some extent an American, intellectual movement in the direction of speculative theism and personal idealism. Already the later S. T. Coleridge was not only thoroughly familiar with Schelling (including the Freiheitsschrift), but read and cited Jacobi, and although he was critical in some respects of the latter, the whole late idealistic problematic of pantheism versus personalistic theism, in all of its philosophical and religious ramiWcations, was, I believe, of the essence in Coleridge’s later development.48 Bestowing the highest praise on ‘Frederic Henry Jacobi’, Sir William Hamilton, in his Discussions (1852) and his Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (published 1859– 61), quotes and translates long passages from him. The same holds for H. L. Mansel, who cites Jacobi at length in the notes to his Bampton Lectures of 1858, The Limits of Religious Thought. This work restated some central personalist themes. Mansel seems to have been uniquely familiar with late idealist, Right Hegelian, and speculative theist thought in Germany, and clearly transmitted Jacobian insights to Britain. Interestingly, despite his diVerences from Mansel, some of the characteristic elements of personalism can also be found in F. D. Maurice’s works.49 One of the Wrst criticisms of Hegel in Britain, that of J. D. Morell in his Modern Philosophy and An Historical and Critical View of the Speculative Philosophy in Europe in the Nineteenth Century (1846), was a typically theistic-personalistic one.50 The Cambridge philosopher John Grote wrote in his Exploratio Philosophica (1865) about ‘The idealism, personalism, or whatever it may be called’, which ‘lies at the root’ of the philosophy presented in the book, and which was ‘not simply a doctrine or opinion’ but his ‘earliest philosophical feeling’.51 Likewise, James Martineau, the leading Unitarian philosopher, was shaped by the Jacobian and the late idealist thematic, publishing a typical Study of Spinoza (1882), leaning on Jacobi in Types of Ethical Theory (1885), and opposing to pantheism and materialism a distinctly personalistic theism in A Study of Religion (1888).52 Martineau’s student, Charles Barnes Upton (1831–1910), professor of philosophy at Manchester College, was one of the Wrst to assimilate Lotzean personalism in Britain. His Hibbert Lectures of 1893, Lectures on the Bases of Religious Belief (1894), set out in broad outline the whole of the worldview of personalism in its British variation. Most of the ingredients of the later and fuller formulations could here be found in embryonic form. This statement was often neglected because of its relative simplicity and what seems to have been perceived as Upton’s lack of prominence. I will, however, point to its historical signiWcance

48 For Coleridge’s reading of Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift, see Biographia Literaria, i. 247, n. to p. 103; for his reading of Jacobi, and his annotated copy of Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza, see Coleridge, The Philosophical Lectures, 464 n. 29. 49 Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore, 179, 196–7, 230–4, 239. 50 Both works are cited in Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition, 151, 158. 51 Grote, Exploratio Philosophica, i. 146. 52 Jacobi is quoted in A Study of Spinoza, 185, and in Types of Ethical Theory, ii. 21–2 and 145.

18

Introduction

as a fusion of the continental and the British traditions by selecting Upton as one of the representative British personal idealists. Alexander Campbell Fraser (1819–1914) had developed a position in some respects close to the later personal idealism by a combination of the Scottish tradition with Berkeley. Alfred William Momerie’s Personality: The Beginning and End of Metaphysics appeared in 1879. In 1900 Wilfrid Richmond published An Essay on Personality as a Philosophical Principle. The theme of personality was by now generally inXuential, at least in Anglican theology, and increasingly so in philosophy. Despite the modiWcations in the British version of absolute idealism— determined by distinct British intellectual traditions—Andrew Seth, later Seth Pringle-Pattison (1856–1931; hereafter: Pringle-Pattison53), professor of logic and metaphysics at Edinburgh, detected many of the same weaknesses in his teacher T. H. Green as the German and Swedish personal idealists had pointed to in Hegel and the early Schelling. He launched personal idealism in Britain with Hegelianism and Personality (1887), a series of Balfour Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, which decisively shaped the idealistic debate in Britain for decades. There can be no doubt that this is an important and in large measure original work. Pringle-Pattison’s presentation of the arguments is brilliant and vigorous, and the application to the special British form that idealism had taken in Green was indeed new.54 Pringle-Pattison supplied not least a philosophical precision in the formulation of the criticisms and the positions of personalism in Britain which was often lacking in its earlier British versions. He also introduced a number of new philosophical ideas into personalism which, while the basic arguments remained unchanged, became more evident as he followed up his early polemic, taking into consideration the replies from the later British absolute idealists, in his main work, The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy (GiVord Lectures, 1912–13, 1917),55 and in The Idea of Immortality (a second series of GiVord Lectures, 1922). Yet Pringle-Pattison’s basic arguments were not at all new. While he openly draws on Lotze and Trendelenburg, there are not many signs of his awareness of the development of personalistic idealism that had taken place before Lotze: mention of ‘the turning-point’ of Schelling’s philosophical career by the time of Philosophie und Religion (1804) is made in a footnote in Hegelianism and Personality, and in The Idea of God we Wnd two quotes from Ulrici.56 But it seems obvious that during his period of study with Lotze in Germany Pringle-Pattison 53 The name Pringle-Pattison was added when this was made the condition of his inheritance of a large estate from a distant relative. 54 Green’s absolute idealism was itself already strongly modiWed by inXuences from Lotze. The early phase of British idealism, and its continuation, represented by Green, Stirling, John Caird, and Wallace, was closer to Right Hegelianism, speculative theism, and personalism than the classical German systems and the later British absolute idealism. 55 I use the second edition (1920), which contains important appendices. 56 Pringle-Pattison writes of Ulrici that he was ‘prominent half a century ago as a defender of Theism against all that he deemed pantheistic error’: The Idea of God, 305.

Introduction

19

must have imbibed at least the substance of this earlier tradition as well; identical arguments had been used since the last decades of the eighteenth century. Apart from the historically important Hegelianism and Personality, I will focus on Pringle-Pattison’s later works because the mature and deWnite expression of his thought is given there, and since only in them is the whole range—with some exception for ethics—of the personalist worldview displayed. But it is important to understand that the principles and contours of his personalistic worldview were Wrmly in place at a much earlier stage. His Two Lectures on Theism (1897), for instance, bear witness to his full assimilation of the older personalistic-theistic tradition and its criticism of pantheism. James Seth, professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh, supplied a kind of ethical corollary to his brother’s Hegelianism and Personality in Freedom as Ethical Postulate (1891) and in his widely inXuential and quintessential personalist work, A Study of Ethical Principles (1894). John Richardson Illingworth (1848–1915), a pupil of Green’s who, despite withdrawing from his fellowships in Jesus and Keble Colleges, Oxford, to the rectory of Longworth, Oxfordshire, became one of the most inXuential personalist philosophers and theologians in Britain, worked out a distinct synthesis of idealism and the Trinitarian, theistic positions of a comparatively orthodox Anglican theology; at the heart of his philosophy was the concept of personality on the level of God as well as of man. His main work, Personality Human and Divine (1894), was supplemented by two books where, in line with a main trend of personal idealism, he stressed the immanence of God against the deists (Divine Immanence, 1898), and his transcendence against the pantheists and monists (Divine Transcendence, 1911). Other important books are Reason and Revelation (1901) and The Gospel Miracles (1915).57 Clement Charles Julian Webb (1865–1954), fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and the Wrst holder of the Oriel (subsequently Nolloth) Chair of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, drew on the whole tradition of natural theology and modiWed Kant’s moral arguments by bringing them into close relation to Plato and Christian theism, the centre of his philosophy ever more clearly emerging as distinctly belonging in the personalist tradition and as opposed to the absolute idealist school. The fullest expression of his position is found in his two volumes of GiVord Lectures, God and Personality and Divine Personality and Human Life (1919–20).58 57 A useful study of Illingworth is Hoskins, The Doctrine of the Trinity. See also my entry in the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century British Philosophers. 58 On Webb, see my entry in the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century British Philosophers. In grouping these thinkers together as ‘personal idealists’, I follow, as I will explain in Ch. 1, the classiWcation of Metz, Copleston, Patrick, and Sell. In the anthology Personal Idealism: Philosophical Essays by Eight Members of the University of Oxford (1902), edited by Henry Sturt (1863–1946), various themes of the new school were discussed by Sturt himself, G. F. Stout, F. C. S. Schiller, W. R. Boyce Gibson, G. E. Underhill, R. R. Marett, F. W. Bussell, and H. Rashdall, and the term personal idealism was used for the Wrst time in Britain. But interestingly enough, some of the contributors represent a clear departure from the older tradition of personal idealism. Hastings Rashdall (1858–1924), fellow and tutor of New

20

Introduction

A Wnal British thinker deserves mention here, William Ritchie Sorley (1855– 1935), who at Cambridge defended personal idealism as Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy in King’s College, and conjoined—uniquely in the British context—the British version of idealistic personalism with the Neo-Kantian philosophy of values (which in turn was inspired by Lotze) in his main work, Moral Values and the Idea of God (1918). G. H. Howison was not only the Wrst to use the term ‘personal idealism’;59 he was also among the Wrst to introduce the personalistic movement in the United States. It soon found its leading American proponent in Borden Parker Bowne (1847–1910), professor at Boston University (Studies in Theism (1879), Metaphysics (1882), Philosophy of Theism (1887), Principles of Ethics (1892), Theory of Thought and Knowledge (1897), Theism (1902), The Immanence of God (1905), and Personalism (1908)),60 whose school soon dominated American personal idealism.61 Turning down oVers of prestigious positions from the presidents of College, Oxford, long considered a main representative of the school, should in my view rather be seen to have been exceptional in his tendency to separate the concepts of God and of the absolute, and in his adoption of determinism. In central respects, his version of personal idealism, not least in The Theory of Good and Evil, i–ii (1907), in fact marks a relapse into some of the characteristic positions of pantheism. (On Rashdall, see my entry in the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century British Philosophers.) Sturt went on to a more ambitious critique of absolute idealism in Idola Theatri: A Criticism of Oxford Thought and Thinkers from the Standpoint of Personal Idealism (1906). Although this volume, like Personal Idealism, contains many observations that were characteristic of the broader movement, his version of it was shaped by a radical neoteric humanism and by pragmatism. SigniWcantly, despite the fact that he himself used this designation of his philosophy and some of the central themes of the older tradition are certainly part of his work as well, Metz, in A Hundred Years of British Philosophy, ranges Henry Sturt not under the heading ‘The Personal Idealists’, but under ‘Pragmatism’, along with Schiller, the best-known of the contributors to Personal Idealism, who, although introducing some personalist themes that were in line with the broader movement, falls clearly outside the ambit of the latter by his pragmatist use of them. Schiller’s and Sturt’s contributions gave rise in some quarters to the identiWcation of personalism with such pragmatic humanism. (On Sturt, see my entry in the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century British Philosophers.) Far beyond the pale of the main current falls also, in a similar, signiWcant way, the atheistic version of personal idealism developed by J. M. E. McTaggart (1866–1925). A. E. Taylor (1869–1945), fellow of Merton College, Oxford, professor of moral philosophy at the universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh (The Faith of a Moralist, i–ii (GiVord Lectures, 1930)), moved gradually towards a Christian theistic position close to that of some of the personal idealists. Henry Jones (1852–1922) (A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Lotze (1895), A Faith that Enquires (GiVord Lectures, 1922)) was perhaps the leading British proponent of a synthesis of absolute and personal idealism. A number of thinkers strongly inXuenced by the themes of personal idealism veered in the direction of empirical psychologism and/or realism; the most prominent among them was James Ward (1843–1925) (The Realm of Ends, or Pluralism and Theism (GiVord Lectures, 1911)). 59 The Limits of Evolution and Other Essays Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Idealism (1901). Howison protested that Sturt, in his opinion a crude empiricist and pragmatist, had stolen the term personal idealism. 60 There exists one biography of Bowne, McConnell, Borden Parker Bowne; among the works on his philosophy is Pyle’s The Philosophy of Borden Parker Bowne and its Application to the Religious Problem. 61 Its leading subsequent representatives are Edgar S. Brightman (1884–1953), R. T. Flewelling (1871–1960), and Peter A. Bertocci (1910–89). The leading American idealist, Josiah Royce (1855–1916) of Harvard, represented one of the forms of synthesis of absolute and personal idealism, but also moved in the course of his career from the former towards the latter, as is clear from his major,

Introduction

21

Yale University and the University of Chicago, Bowne remained loyal to the new Boston University, thereby contributing strongly to making it into a Wrst-class institution of higher learning; under his leadership, it was the Wrst in the United States to award a Ph.D. to a woman. Bowne studied not only with Lotze but also with Ulrici in Germany, and, like Pringle-Pattison, he must have assimilated at least the main results and conclusions of the earlier German development of personalism at that time. Bowne also cites Jacobi as a reference that can be expected to be familiar to his readers without any introduction. Ever since the publication of Bowne’s own short summary of his philosophy under the title Personalism, his school, despite being more unambiguously idealistic than its British counterpart, came to be designated by this term and no longer as ‘personal idealism’. Contrary to the German, Swedish, and British schools, this American or Bownian school will not be discussed in detail in separate sections in this book, since my focus is on the origins and early development of personalism; the American school will appear only as that version which, at least in AngloAmerican accounts of personalism and its history, still appears as the central and deWning one. The questions of the relations between the British and the American school and of the possible priority of one or the other in the development of personalism are not of central importance for my argument, which concerns the shared European background of both, and the fact that there is a British school at all. A few observations may nonetheless be added. At the time of Pringle-Pattison’s GiVord Lectures, Bowne was already departed, and his work was well known. It is not clear, however, how well known it was in Britain. Some evidence suggests that the British personal idealists may have been inXuenced by him. In a letter to the Bowne, Pringle-Pattison enthusiastically welcomed his late, popular summary of his work, Personalism, and J. Cook Wilson (1849–1915), an inXuential Oxford philosopher, said in a letter that ‘he always urged the study of Bowne as ‘‘by far the most important (to my mind) of the modern American philosophers’’ ’62 (Cook Wilson and Bowne met at Go¨ttingen). Yet there are few signs of this inXuence in their works. The only reference to Bowne in Pringle-Pattison is a somewhat obscure footnote in The Idea of Immortality, where William James’s Principles of Psychology is said to be ‘quoted from B. P. Bowne’.63 Bowne considerably revised his early works in later editions, so that only the latter contain his philosophy in its deWnitive form, yet he clearly did develop a rigorous personalistic philosophy somewhat earlier than Pringle-Pattison, and certainly a more systematic one. There are, as far as I have seen, no references to Bowne in Illingworth’s or Webb’s work, although, as we shall see, some passages in Illingworth are highly reminiscent of him. None of the more speciWcally Bownian developments of personalism seem to Wgure in the work of the British personalists, late work, The World and the Individual, i–ii (GiVord Lectures, 1901–2), and from the work of his student William Ernest Hocking (1873–1966), likewise professor at Harvard. 62 Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 62–3 nn. 55 and 56. 63 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of Immortality, 101 n. 2.

22

Introduction

however, and in this sense at least, British personal idealism was not inspired by Bowne. It seems quite clear that the British personalists drew primarily on the common, earlier European sources of personalism, on the more general and international nineteenth-century development of a partly new kind of personalistic theism, of which Lotze was but one representative.64 It should be mentioned here that personalistic philosophies were present also in France before Mounier and in alternative forms parallel to him, and that among these French philosophies we Wnd some that were in many ways closer to, and in some cases perhaps even part of, the main current that I will trace. Some of the personalist themes were present already in Maine de Biran. Victor Cousin moved characteristically from a Hegelian towards a late Schellingian position. The Wrst explicit version of French personalism is that represented by Renouvier (1815–1903) (Le Personnalisme, 1903) and his disciple (to some extent) Octave Hamelin (1856–1907). This, however, was an exceptional, ‘Wnitistic’ form, but, through William James, it exercised some inXuence in America and Britain. A Christian personalism, opposed to the radicalism of Renouvier, but with some themes in common with the idealists, was developed by Lucien Laberthonnie`re (Le Re´alisme chre´tien et l’ide´alisme grec, 1904); Esquisse d’une philosophie personnaliste, 1942) and Maurice Ne´doncelle (La Re´ciprocite´ des consciences. Essai sur la nature de la personne, 1942); Vers une philosophie de l’amour et de la personne, 1946), and connected with the philosophy of values by Rene´ Le Senne. The link between Lotze and the British and American personalists is familiar among historians of Anglo-American philosophy. It needs merely to be supplemented by pointing out that other speculative theists too, like Ulrici, were inXuential here, and that a more indirect, as well as a more general, inspiration from the older and broader continental current of idealistic personalism and theism, as to some extent represented in Britain already by the later Coleridge, was also a factor in the development of some of the core themes of British and American personalism.65 Again, Jacobi and Schelling aside, the existence of this 64 In the extensive notes to Personality Human and Divine, Illingworth cites a plethora of theologians and philosophers—not only British, but also German and French—who had already defended some of the characteristic positions of this development or positions related to or fundamental to it. Alongside Green, Edward Caird, and other idealists as represented by passages that comport with Illingworth’s own more strictly personalistic idealism, and of course Lotze and Pringle-Pattison, Martineau Wgures equally prominently in Illingworth’s notes. Other names include those of Mansel, Momerie, and the German speculative theist Dorner. A typical personalistic work by the American G. P. Fisher is cited, The Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief (1883), which contains two references to Bowne. But Fisher seems to have been independent of him, receiving the same inXuences while studying in Germany; apart from Lotze, he also cites or mentions Jacobi, Trendelenburg, Ulrici, Dorner, and Rothe. In this connection, it should be mentioned that Bowne makes reference not only to German thinkers, but also, for instance, to Martineau. It is a distinguishing mark of his writing, however, that he rarely makes references at all, even when he does discuss the ideas of others. 65 It is signiWcant that Pringle-Pattison wrote an essay on Martineau, in The Philosophical Radicals and Other Essays (1907). In America at least some less speciWcally personalist aspects of the work of German speculative theists other than Lotze and Ulrici may have exercised some inXuence on theology; see Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology, ii. 44.

Introduction

23

broader current will be demonstrated in this book mainly by reference to the early version of idealistic personalism in Sweden. Although I will to some extent tie all these links together and emphasize neglected ones, my task is not primarily that of tracing precise historical inXuences, but to point to the fact that a surprisingly unitary worldview with a distinct historical meaning was transmitted and gradually developed through them, and to show that this is the speciWc and proximate origin of personalism. The unity and continuity of the early development of personalism is indeed such as to make a presentation of it by means of examples from even a limited number of representative thinkers risk appearing repetitious. But even where there are no major diVerences and innovations in substantial terms, there are sometimes interesting alternative formulations of basically the same positions. The brief summaries with which some scholars have acknowledged some parts of what I call early personalism have done scant justice to the depth, the extent in time, the international character, and the signiWcance of the movement. Its worldview, of which American personalism was a late version and development, was one which took seriously the values of the true, the good, and the beautiful, the problem of immortality, and the question of the personality of God. Its distinct, creatively traditionalistic form of idealism often clearly sets it apart from the whole tenor of later phenomenological personalism with its speciWcally twentieth-century philosophical and non-philosophical assumptions. The similarities, indeed the identity, of worldview in central respects between German and Scandinavian speculative theism, British personal idealism, and American personalism does, however, raise interesting questions about similarities and diVerences in the general intellectual and cultural climate in these countries. Not only in Germany and Sweden, but also in Britain and America this kind of thinking was dominant for some time. Many of the insights that found philosophical expression in personalistic idealism were present in the more general intellectual, moral, and religious culture of the nineteenth century, in Britain no less than on the European continent. German idealism itself could be said to have been more than a philosophy—or rather, its conception of philosophy was broader than the one which subsequently came to dominate in the Anglo-American world: it was a whole cultural paradigm, closely related to the neo-humanist programme of Bildung. If speculative theism constituted a main branch of German Kathederphilosophie between 1830 and 1870, it certainly provided some of the philosophical structure of the distinct idealistic academic culture of the German ‘mandarins’ during the same period.66 Many of the wider assumptions of that culture were inevitably taken over as Green rolled back the utilitarianism that had come to inXuence Oxford philosophy, and grafted a liberal 66 Ringer, in his somewhat one-sided sociological analysis of the later phase of this culture, The Decline of the German Mandarins, describes its main characteristics as ‘the consistent repudiation of instrumental or ‘‘utilitarian’’ knowledge, the associated contrast between ‘‘culture’’ and ‘‘civilization’’, the conviction that Wissenschaft can and should engender Weltanschauung, the widely applicable ‘‘principles of empathy and individuality’’, and the normative concept of the ‘‘legal and cultural state.’’ All of these elements in turn were anchored in the crucial ideal of Bildung or ‘‘cultivation’’ ’; and they led to the demand—against which M. Weber reacted—that ‘the scholar had to be a personality’. Op. cit. pp. vii–viii, 352.

24

Introduction

version of idealism onto the ‘Greats’ tradition. Coleridge, Carlyle, J. S. Mill, Arnold, and others developed corresponding concepts of cultivation which became characteristic of Victorian Britain.67 The general cultural and religious background of British idealism described by M. Richter is, of course, also to a considerable extent the background of British personalistic idealism.68 Similarly, American idealism, including American personalism, must be understood in connection with the strong, general ties between the United States and Germany in this historical period, and especially with the renewal of the American university system after the German model.69 The fundamental tenet of the centrality of self-actualization shared by all personalists, for instance, is derived—often quite directly—from the rich and complex German tradition of self-cultivation, even if the typical, distinguishing contribution of the personalists was their modiWcation of it in light of the signiWcations of personality that were already part of (and could be further developed from within) the tradition of Christian theism to which they remained loyal. In German neo-humanism and idealism this doctrine was normally part of the secular, progressivist philosophy of history that was expressed in terms of the ‘education of mankind’. In this German tradition, self-cultivation was not strictly self-actualization in the sense of the realization of a pre-existing essence, but of the free creation, in the Renaissance spirit, by the human subject of his personality and his destiny. Personalism can be said to be characterized by various attempts at a combination of actualization and creation. Early personalism in all its aspects—epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical—is, however, closely related to the development of historicism and the historical consciousness, and personalism’s relation to historicism and philosophy of history is one of its important aspects. Since I aim primarily to study the origins and early development of personalism as it is deWned today with reference to the 67 Ideals of personal cultivation have of course existed throughout history in other versions. 68 Richter, The Politics of Conscience. 69 To get an idea of the extent and the sense in which this idealistic and neo-humanist paradigm of culture was in itself a Perso¨nlichkeitsidealismus, it is worthwhile considering the German deWnitions— from the 1920s and 1930s, using the terminology of ‘values’ to describe a much older programme—of the words Bildung and Kultur, as cited by Ringer from Der grosse Brockhaus: ‘Bildung requires: (a) an individuality which, as the unique starting point, is to be developed into a formed or value-saturated personality; (b) a certain universality, meaning richness of mind and person, which is attained through the empathetic understanding and experiencing . . . of the objective cultural values; (c) totality, meaning inner unity and Wrmness of character.’ Kultur is ‘the ennoblement . . . of man through the development of his ethical, artistic, and intellectual powers; also the result of the activity of such cultivated men, a characteristic, personal style of life; the products of such activity (cultural objects and values). Thus Kultur is the forming and perfecting of the world around us and within us’. The Decline of the German Mandarins, 86, 89. Again, such ideals were part of the general cultural background of early personalism not only in Germany and Sweden, but also, with some variations, in Britain and America. For some facts about the mandarin programme of culture before the decline, see e.g. Bruford’s Culture and Society in Classical Weimar and the same author’s The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation, both of which, however, share with Ringer’s work the weaknesses of the one-sidedly sociological type of analysis which long dominated scholarship in this Weld, and which fails to grasp the inner cultural dynamic at work in modern history.

Introduction

25

American school, and the latter did not distinguish itself by assimilating or developing this central aspect, I will not dwell on it here, and will mention it where appropriate only in passing. It should be noted, however, that early personalism often stands out by incorporating the new insights of historicism while at the same time inclining, at least to some extent, the overwhelming trend towards a purely secular progressivism typical of the new speculative philosophies of history in the direction of a partly reconceived transcendence. Similar, and related, modiWcations—and other modiWcations where diVerences in national traditions probably played a more important role—took place with regard to the pervasive ‘German’ distinction between Vernunft and Verstand and its associated dichotomies (culture–civilization, organism–atomism, community– society). As the kind of philosophy represented by speculative theism was taken up in other countries, some of the distinctive features of the broader German idealistic paradigm, which distinguished it from the academic cultures of these countries, were thus relinquished; its ideals were only selectively appropriated. The special kind of liberalism that characterizes British and American—as, in large measure, also Swedish—personalistic idealism is noteworthy, since at the time when this philosophy was taken over, renewed, adapted, and developed in Anglo-American philosophy and theology, the idealistic cultural paradigm was taking a decidedly non-liberal turn in Germany. This turn was not, however, a return to an older conservative position. It was a reaction against some of the forces of a radicalized modernity, but it employed, often by means of reinterpretations of a kind that sometimes seems to have made shifts in meaning almost imperceptible to the idealists themselves, distinctive innovations of this very modernity itself.70 It continued in increasingly sinister forms the deeper, rationalistic and Romantic momentum of modernity. Strong elements of naturalism entered not least into the new vo¨lkish racialism that gradually became part of a new and aggressive nationalism.71 It is not that such tendencies were absent in the Anglo-American culture of the period. But it seems to be a fact that the leading Anglo-American personalistic idealists—and many of the other idealists—remained largely uninXuenced by it. Much of the older meaning of the idealistic paradigm could thus perhaps be said to have been ‘saved’, to some extent, in the process of transmission and selective reappropriation by British and American thinkers. But even many of the earlier German personalists correctly saw that the dominant pantheistic forms of German idealism engendered naturalism and materialism out of themselves. Indeed, in the widely inXuential work of Ernst Haeckel we Wnd a synthesis of the new naturalism and the impersonal, pantheist Naturphilosophie of Romantic idealism. This form of pantheism, adding many new elements to the rationalistic pantheism which was the Wrst to be analysed by Jacobi, and providing the basis for a whole new immanent Weltanschauung, a secular substitute for 70 Viereck, Metapolitics, 147, et passim. 71 See Stackelberg, Idealism Debased. This is another book that uses somewhat too simple historical explanations.

26

Introduction

religion, contained seeds of even more sinister developments than the early personalists could perceive.72 It was the product of an underlying cultural dynamic of modernity which the personalists’ persistent battering could not halt or reverse. If personalism, as I will here reconstruct it, begins with the partly liberal Jacobi in the 1780s, and continues in the conservative climate of Germany and the less conservative climate of Sweden after the Napoleonic wars and after the Wrst liberal surge of German nationalism, it is still a living force in the wholly diVerent historical and political context of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the Wrst decades of the twentieth, when it reaches systematic philosophical expression as personal idealism in Britain and as personalism in the United States. It is this whole historical development that I will trace, thus reconnecting the later development to what I will show are the beginnings of personalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The culture of idealistic humanism, the Romantic and historicist emphasis on human individuality which transformed Enlightenment individualism, as well as the elevation and idealization of personality, of original geniuses, of heroes and great men, are general characteristics of the nineteenth century, and the more specialized, philosophical and theological personalism should partly be seen in this broader cultural context, and understood in terms of its general historical causes, to the extent that this is possible. Even personalism’s insistence on the personality of God must be seen to some extent as a consequence of a new humanistic stress on the personality of man: as I will emphasize, it is no mere return to, or reassertion of, the orthodox Christian position. Yet, due to its stronger traditional Christian inspiration, personalism was from the beginning sceptical towards the more radical forms of exaltation of individual personality, derived from the amalgamation of Enlightenment universalist individualism and proto-Romantic and idealistic sentiment present already in the French revolution;73 it is in tune rather with the more moderate phase of the development of idealistic neo-humanism in Germany. Although the later Coleridge does not unambiguously belong in the early personalist line, his simultaneous revulsion—expressed not least in The Friend—against some aspects of the post-revolutionary ‘age of personality’ with its unqualiWed individual rights, and metaphysical and religious insistence on the importance of personality both on the level of man and of God, the insistence that it is in reality the Church that is ‘the Guardian and Representative of all personal Individuality’, is telling.74 By the same token, the worldview of personalism is incompatible with the extreme versions of Romantic assertion of individual originality and genius, and with the amoral, ‘daemonic’ cult of world-historical heroes which were sometimes part of the later debasement of Weltanschauung in Germany. Already in Hegel, the ‘great men’ were great because of their acts as instruments of the Weltgeist, not because of 72 See Gasman, The ScientiWc Origins of National Socialism and Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology. 73 See Dawson, The Gods of Revolution, 104–5. 74 The Friend, 179, 182; Aids to ReXection, 220. Coleridge’s special view of the relation between Church and state must of course be taken into account here.

Introduction

27

their individual personalities. In order to see how such phenomena and ideas sprang from quite diVerent metaphysical presuppositions, it is necessary to look closely at the worldview of personalism proper and its historical development. In the works of the thinkers I have mentioned, basic personalist themes are found in a unitary form and with a conceptual and analytical precision which go beyond what can be accounted for by reference only to the general cultural milieu of the nineteenth century. While the latter is important, rather than continuously relating personalism to it I will concentrate, even quite narrowly, on laying bare the speciWcally philosophical and theological similarities between the personalist thinkers. Jacobi’s criticism, in itself and as it was taken up by the later Schelling and the speculative theists and combined with their own various idealist additions, is, I submit, the origin of a broad movement that as a whole can adequately be described as personalism. I will show that many of the themes that Jacobi introduced and that the theistic late idealists took up and expanded upon are still plainly recognizable in the British and American forms of idealistic personalism. Despite the obvious variety, a remarkable continuity and coherence marks the development of personalism in the period here covered. The personalists clearly diVer in some areas of their thought. Yet despite the changes, reconsiderations, adjustments, and additions, many of the basic contours of the early forms of personalism remained surprisingly intact, or were, alternatively, rediscovered in a strikingly similar form, as personalism was renewed in Britain and America. This fact makes it legitimate to speak of personalism as a single movement. It also makes it reasonable to discuss it thematically and not only chronologically. It is not the precise relations or allegiances of the personalist thinkers to various better-known strands within modern philosophy and theology (or politics, literature, science, psychology)—which have in some cases been researched— but this neglected central personalistic proWle and continuity that needs to be retraced and reconstructed. I will do this by focusing on central passages from the work of those among the personalists who can be considered most important or most representative. Jacobi and Schelling are, as I will show, obvious points of departure, but for the later development it will be possible to deal here only with a handful of selected German, Swedish, British, and American thinkers. I will show in some detail how not only American personalism but also British personal idealism, which has been badly neglected by historians, represent a Xourishing and reformulation of an earlier European development that did not begin with Lotze. The later, pragmatic and process-theological developments of personalism will have to be left out as less typical in the broader perspective I introduce. Equal space will not be given to the respective thinkers, since the contributions they make to the diVerent areas of personalism that I will look at vary, and since, more generally, some are more important than others. The word ‘worldview’ (Weltanschauung) has been given speciWc, technical meanings by Dilthey—related to, but also to some extent apart from, the general fate of the notion in the historical trajectory of the German idealistic paradigm of culture—and others. Its English terminological counterpart is normally quite independent of speciWcally German conceptual connotations.

28

Introduction

Although I believe a ‘German’ meaning, as part of the stricter idealistic paradigm, and as distinct from its later debasement, actually corresponds largely to the understanding also of non-German idealistic personalists of the nature of true, integral knowledge and insight, and the use of the term in the title of this book is appropriate also for this reason, I use the term rather in a more general sense that is both non-technical and ‘international’. My purpose is to clarify, in broad outline, the origins and development, and through this the nature and meaning, of personalism as an emerging worldview in this sense. But although the emphasis will be on similarities and continuities in the development of what can be described as a personalistic worldview, the diVerences are also of great importance for the understanding of its nature and meaning. My intention is not only to point to what can be regarded as neglected historical sources of personalism. The aim is above all to present, in connection with the introduction of these sources and the more obvious, albeit sometimes vague, connections between them,75 the main outlines of the personalist worldview thus emerging at this early stage,76 and to some extent to indicate its signiWcance in a deeper historical perspective. I will assume that the worldview of personalism can be typologically set against a many-faceted worldview of what can perhaps be called ‘impersonalism’, which takes the form of diVerent versions of pantheism and their intellectual oVspring. To characterize the nature of personalism is to clarify the opposition between these worldviews.77 The obvious risk involved in my ‘method’ is that it might yield results that are to some extent arbitrary constructions. I am convinced, however, that it is necessary to stress against the onesidedness of ‘new historicism’ and similar approaches—inspired by a cluster of gradually accumulated and mutually adjusted theoretical perspectives which are in my view misleading when taken as the whole truth—that continuities and identities preserved for intrinsic reasons in shifting historical contexts are both a possibility and a reality in intellectual history. This is not least the case with moral, metaphysical, and religious ideas. Situationally prompted changes, discontinuities, and reinterpretations are certainly real and important, but not more so than transmissions, assimilations, and restatements demanded by lasting intellectual and moral perceptions, responses, and concerns. Broader historical and comparative 75 Although I do trace to some extent the relations between these sources themselves, and sometimes point to the relation between them and subsequent developments of personalism, the question of the exact historical inXuences received by later personalist thinkers from earlier ones is not my main concern. For such study, much valuable information could be gained from unpublished sources; for my purposes, there is an embarras de richesse of published ones, many of which have been badly neglected. 76 For this reason I do not, except in cases where it is obviously necessary or important for this purpose, discuss the development or the changes in the thought of the chosen individual philosophers. The relevant information about titles and years is given in this Introduction; in the cases where I use collected editions, I normally refer only to the respective volumes in these editions, and only when there is a special need, or when I use other editions, to the original titles. 77 Timm speaks of the ‘weltanschauungstypologishe Kontrastierung’ of pantheism and personalism, which in substance antedates Jacobi: Gott und die Freiheit, 139.

Introduction

29

perspectives, in some respects supplementing those discussed by the personalists themselves, and of a kind that can only brieXy be indicated here, corroborate this assertion and illustrate its truth with regard to personalism. This is not at all to deny the truths of a moderate and non-relativist historicism. The full intellectual context of personalism, the ‘questions’ which it originally sought to answer, have indeed been obscured in the deWnitions and genealogies of personalism that I will scrutinize, and I will certainly bring them to light. Not least to the extent, however, that what I argue are more ‘timeless’ considerations entered into the ‘origins and early development’ I will lay bare, there is of course nothing absolute about the latter. But speaking in terms of origins and development is justiWed by the relative importance of the sources here highlighted and by the distinctly modern variation of the arguably to some extent more universal insights that is found in them. The diYculties and ambiguities of the notions of origins, developments, typologies, and essences must of course also be taken into account, but they are not such as to render illegitimate their moderate, critical use in historical scholarship. Although the worldview I will be describing is of course partly a linguistic construct, it is, like all other linguistic construct, more than that. It is not more of a discursive construct than the theory according to which all historically existent philosophies and worldviews are such constructs. Nor did it have more of an ideological or hegemonic function than the theory according to which historically existent forms of thought or discourse necessarily have such functions. There is no way of Wnally or exhaustively getting around or reducing away diVerences in the understanding of reality, just as there is no way of taking a critical or a neutral analytical or scientiWc position apart from the fray of the historical contest of worldviews. Scholarly objectivity in a deeper sense is an altogether more diYcult, complex, and subtle matter, involving the perception of the real philosophical dimensions of—and thus to some extent the philosophical engagement with— the historically existent thinking that is itself the object of study. It emerges, to the extent that it is possible, from within such perception and engagement, as interrelating with the larger totality of the historian’s general understanding. The book is thus primarily a study of the development of the philosophy of personalism in a broad sense, an attempt to lay bare its historical, philosophical origins, and to describe the continuous development of its distinct historical proWle. I speak about personalism as a philosophy, since most of its representatives were professors of philosophy, but at least in some of its aspects it should also be described as a theology; some of the leading personalists were theologians rather than philosophers, and many indeed were both. To an eminent degree, personalism is a philosophy of religion, but normally it covers all of the central Welds of philosophy. The book is thus a contribution both to the history of philosophy and to historical theology. Chapter 1 discusses the current accounts and assessments of personalism in general and in the form of ‘personal idealism’ by historians of philosophy. It further looks at the deWning American school of personalism’s view of the sources, development, and nature of personalism. Finally, it introduces brieXy

30

Introduction

some larger historical and comparative perspectives on personalism that have hitherto been absent in its scholarly treatment. Chapter 2 begins the thematic exposition of the emerging worldview of personalism, drawing on representative thinkers from the whole of the period covered. This chapter focuses on the central epistemological aspects of the personalist criticism of modern rationalism, absolute idealism, and pantheism, and on the personalist alternative’s reinterpretation of the concept of the subject in terms of the concept of the person. Chapter 3 introduces the arguments for why, according to the personalists, the absolute cannot be conceived in pantheistic and impersonalistic terms, discusses the meaning of the new concept of God as a person, and explains the personalists’ insistence that the absolute can be understood as the personal God. Chapter 4 presents a broader picture of the whole of the worldview that results from the themes introduced in earlier chapters. Reality is conceived as a system of related personalities, of God and Wnite persons, the dynamic principle and living content of which is determined, more or less, by the reciprocity of the I–Thou relation. The chapter investigates the implications of the personal concept of the absolute, the new philosophical emphasis on freedom, will, and the reinterpreted idea of creation, and the understanding of the relation between God and Wnite persons that follows from this. The view of the society of persons is also shown to have consequences for the understanding of the moral order, as personal and impersonal ethics are distinguished, and, with a terminological shift in the later personalists, for the questions of the relation of ‘values’ to the person. The titles of Chapters 2 to 4 indicate main themes or aspects, the developments of which are chronologically followed. But due to the nature of the subject, where work in all philosophical Welds revolves around the (often somewhat elusive) concept of the person, the chapters overlap in large measure and the themes run through them all, as they are presaged or preliminarily introduced in earlier chapters and reappear in later ones. Chapter 5 summarizes the main results reached in Chapters 2 to 4, drawing general conclusions from them with reference to the current historical accounts discussed in Chapter 1. It also returns to the broader cultural and historical perspectives, seeking brieXy to ascertain and assess in their light the proper meaning of that personalism whose origins, development, and nature have been described in the preceding chapters. Critical philosophical discussion of personalism will be kept to a minimum, and I will go into philosophical detail only to the extent that it is necessary for my purpose of demonstrating the existence of something that deserves to be called personalism as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, indicating the nature of its development, and describing its basic outlines as a worldview. The detail that is necessary will be continuously related to the unity and the continuity of the development of the respective themes covered in Chapters 2 to 4; and the relations between the current scholarly descriptions of personalism investigated in Chapter 1 and the themes as present in the thinkers studied will be repeatedly highlighted. Through the various positions, analyses, and criticisms discussed, an ordered pattern will gradually emerge, which is that of the worldview of personalism.

1 The current view of personalism and its origins T H E V I EW O F T H E H I S TO R I A N S In the most recent, authoritative account of personalism, in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Keith E. Yandell deWnes it as the thesis that only persons (self-conscious agents) and their states and characteristics exist, and that reality consists of a society of interacting persons. Typically, a personalist will hold that Wnite persons depend for their existence and continuance on God, who is the Supreme Person, having intelligence and volition. Personalists are usually idealists in metaphysics and construct their theories of knowledge by inference from the data of self-awareness. They tend to be nonutilitarian in ethics and to place ultimate value in the person as a free, self-conscious, moral agent, rather than in either mental states or in apersonal states of aVairs. Typically, holding that a good God will not allow what has intrinsic value to lose existence, they believe in personal survival of death.1

Yandell points out that ‘even as a term for philosophical systems’, personalism ‘has myriad uses’, but he distinguishes between the main categories of atheistic personalism (exempliWed by J. M. E. McTaggart), ‘absolute idealistic personalism’ (Hegel, J. Royce, M. Calkins), and theistic personalism (Bowne, E. S. Brightman, P. A. Bertocci).2 As we will see, in the perspective of the historical development of personalism, it is doubtful whether Hegel can rightly be regarded as representing ‘absolute idealistic personalism’, but apart from this the classiWcation is uncontroversial. For the personalist, ‘persons are simple (noncomposite), of an intrinsic worth not equalled by nonpersons, and at least one of their number is ontologically ultimate’. Personalism ‘develops a worldview that begins with immediate, selfconscious experience and interprets not only the life of the individual but the world at large in personalistic terms. This involves the claim that the basic categories or fundamental concepts of our thought should be understood in terms applicable to persons and their experiences.’3 Yandell bases his deWnition wholly on American personalism, and the entry goes on exclusively to discuss the personalism of Bowne, Brightman, and Bertocci

1 Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Craig (‘Personalism’).

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

32

The current view of personalism

as deWning personalism as such. Bowne is identiWed as ‘the principal founder of an American school of philosophy standardly called ‘‘personalism’’ ’, and this is said to be ‘the central sense of the term, at least in so far as it is applied to American philosophy’.4 As I have explained in the Introduction, I will not challenge this practice of regarding the American school of personalism as representative.5 But despite its focus on American personalism, the encyclopedia’s deWnition, as far as I have cited it, is so general that, as I will show, it covers the basic outlines not only of the concurrent personalism in Britain, but also of personalism as it emerged on the continent from the early nineteenth century. In a densely compressed form, it indicates the main themes that I will discuss in separate chapters. The statement that personalists are usually idealists in metaphysics is problematic only in the sense that it is not descriptive of all earlier stages of the development of personalism—a question to which I will return shortly. More serious problems arise with regard to the tracing of the historical lineage of personalism. Leibniz and Berkeley are said to be ‘seen as early personalists’, both being theists and idealists. Kant was ‘inXuential in personalism’s history’, despite the fact that he was ‘not strictly a personalist’. From here, the entry jumps Wrst to Bowne, who ‘borrowed freely from Kant, while refusing to accept a Kantian transcendentalism in which our basic categories apply in a knowledgegiving way only to appearances and not to reality’, and then to Lotze, who ‘made personality and value central to his worldview, and was a European precursor of American personalism’.6 Yandell mentions Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, Lotze, and Bergson as inXuences on Bowne. Although there certainly was direct inXuence, this account needs, I suggest, to be supplemented by a diVerent description of the nature and the ways of the inXuence of the Wrst three of these philosophers on personalism. Above all, to the account should be added the more relevant and proximate German background of Lotze. The Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie, which programmatically focuses on terminological history, maintains that personalism (Personalismus) was ‘originally used only as a designation for the idea of a personal God’, and traces it— that is, the use of the term—to Schleiermacher.7 In 1799 it is used in his ‘Entwurf

4 Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Craig (‘Personalism’). 5 The only important exception from this practice is the entry in Encyclope´die philosophique universelle, ed. Jacob, which, with the bare mention of one American title in the bibliography, is limited to Scheler and the French school. 6 Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Craig (‘Personalism’). 7 Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Ritter (‘Personalismus’). I have consulted the translations from German where such are available, but have often made considerable changes, so that I alone am responsible for the translations. In the case of Jacobi, I follow closely, for the most part, diGiovanni’s translations. In the case of Schelling, I build partly on J. Gutmann’s translation of the Freiheitsschrift and Snow’s translations, but with considerable changes. The same holds for B. Bosanquet’s translation of Lotze’s Metaphysik, E. Hamilton’s and E. E. Constance Jones’s translation of his Mikrokosmus, and G. T. Ladd’s translation of his Grundzu¨ge der Religionsphilosophie. All translations from Swedish and French are my own.

The current view of personalism

33

einer Religionsphenomenologie’ in Reden u¨ber die Religion. Here the Wo¨rterbuch is clearly on the right track with regard to the conceptual history of personalism: among other distinctions Schleiermacher diVerentiates between personalism and the ‘pantheistic mode of conception [Vorstellungsart] which is its opposite’. The personalistic mode of conception—‘the idea of a personal Godhead’—‘ascribes to the universe a distinctive consciousness and the other does not’.8 This is precisely the confrontation on the level of worldviews which had been brought to acute awareness long before 1799 by Jacobi and the Pantheismusstreit he initiated, and which was in the forefront of the work of all the leading thinkers of the age, including Schleiermacher. But the Wo¨rterbuch bypasses this and goes directly from Schleiermacher to Feuerbach, who is said again to take up the polarities, personalism and pantheism. Here terminological history easily distorts the picture, and makes it hard to see the conceptual reality of the situation. The opposition between, on the one hand, a philosophy which must be described as personalistic on the conceptual level, but which was not yet so termed, and on the other, a pantheistic philosophy, so designated, was well entrenched at the time Feuerbach restated it with the help of the term personalism. The Wo¨rterbuch continues by saying that the criticism of personalism became the key to Feuerbach’s criticism of religion: God is a projection of man: ‘the personality of God is the personality of man freed of all determinations and limitations of nature.’ Personalism is thereby also the theological foundation of a conception of the ‘nature of man’ which destroys its natural identity with itself and is thus responsible for the anthropological fact of self-alienation: ‘Pantheism identiWes man with nature . . . personalism isolates, separates him from nature, transforms him from a part to the whole, to an absolute being for himself.’9

This hints both at the real historical context of the emergence of personalism, and at its original import: the decisive dividing line in early nineteenth-century thought between theistic personalism and an impersonalistic pantheism which at the hands of the Young Hegelians was transformed into naturalism and materialism.10 But the full context and import are not explicitly indicated, and ignoring the later Schelling, the speculative theists, and Lotze, the article, keeping to its terminological programme, mentions only that after Feuerbach personalistic theology was still represented by E. Troeltsch and G. Gloege.

¨ ber die Religion, ed. Otto (1967), 256–8, cited in Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der 8 Schleiermacher, U Philosophie, ed. Ritter (‘Personalismus’). 9 Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Ritter (‘Personalismus’) (Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums, in Gesammelte Werke, v. 198–9). The Wo¨rterbuch also bypasses Feuerbach’s appropriation of the category of personality in the same work, in connection with his naturalistic version of I–Thou philosophy. 10 This is not to deny that the Young Hegelians, in their move away from Hegel, also learnt from the later Schelling’s—and the speculative theists’—criticism of Hegel; but they drew their own conclusions from it; see Frank, Der unendliche Mangel an Sein, and White, Schelling, 187–90. Feuerbach’s later, anti-Hegelian and naturalistic I–Thou philosophy is still in line with his earlier pantheism and hardly amounts to a personalistic position.

34

The current view of personalism

The entry then goes on, however, to introduce an important distinction and classiWcation. DiVerent forms of personalism use the term person with diVerent, and partly even mutually exclusive meanings, and this, the article holds, is an eVect of the many layers (die Mehrschichtigkeit) of the history of the term. The word for the mask worn by the actors on stage in ancient Greece, the prosopon, was used both for the mask itself and for the dramatic role, and in pre-Christian antiquity this double meaning was retained as the word was put to more general use, on the one hand for the social role of an individual, and on the other for the individual who was shaped by this role.11 ‘The concept that aims at the spiritgifted [geistbegabte] individual’ was deWned by Boethius and taken up by Thomas Aquinas, and from there entered ‘the substantialistic personalism’, which, ‘decisively’ inXuenced by Lotze, came to prominence, mainly in America, with thinkers such as Ladd, Royce, Bowne, and Brightman. ‘The concept developed from the role’, on the other hand, worked out by Augustine, Richard of St Victor, and Duns Scotus, returns in the ‘relationistic’ and especially the dialogical personalism which was developed in Germany by the Left Hegelians and in France by Renouvier. The Wrst was paradigmatically expressed by Stern, with the emphasis on individuality, substantiality, and causality; the latter by D. F. Strauss: in his formulation that ‘a person is a person only by the fact that it faces other persons’, he anticipated Buber’s deWnition.12 This is an important distinction. But again, by overlooking the full context of the origin of personalism, the conceptually—at the very least—personalistic philosophies of Jacobi and his various early nineteenth-century successors and their criticism of impersonal pantheism, the real relations between the two strands in the actual historical development of personalism are obscured. The social role side of personalism tended to be the one to which the ‘personalism’ of Fichte and Hegel was bound and limited. It is logical that it was this kind of personalism that the Left Hegelians, gradually transforming the pantheism of Hegel into naturalism, would retain. Even as developed by Fichte and Hegel, this kind of personalism was indeed inXuential on subsequent developments of personalism. It is also true that there are other forms of later personalism which focus preponderantly on ‘the spirit-gifted individual’. Yet in the early development of personalism (conceptual as distinguished from terminological) of Jacobi, the later Schelling, and the speculative theists, the two forms of personalism were often united. As I will show, from Jacobi and Schelling onward the co-presence of and the relation between the ‘substantialistic’ and the ‘relationistic’ sides of personalism, in the relation between human beings, in the relation between human beings and God, and, in some cases, even in the relations within God, were often explicitly discussed and made a central, deWning theme in personalism.

11 Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Ritter (‘Personalismus’). 12 Ibid. (Strauss, Die christliche Glaubenslehre, i (1840), 497; cf. Buber, Die Schriften u¨ber das dialogische Prinzip (1954), 65). Strauss represented a version of Young Hegelian personalism similar to that of Feuerbach; man, or humanity, is for Strauss the only God.

The current view of personalism

35

The best historical account of personalism may in fact be the very short one in Lexikon fu¨r Theologie und Kirche, which discerns an early nineteenth-century personalism distinct from traditional ‘Christian personalism’ and in opposition to ‘the monistic systems of German idealism’ as well as to ‘materialistic and mechanistic-postitivistic tendencies’: Reacting against the pantheism of German idealism, the speculative theism of I. H. Fichte, partly drawing on Kant’s and his father J. G. Fichte’s concept of the subject, and on the idea of freedom of the later F. W. J. Schelling, established a personalism with regard to the doctrine of God and to philosophical anthropology, comparable with writers like F. v. Baader, J. J. v. Go¨rres, A. Gu¨nther, F. A. Staudenmaier, M. Deutinger, R. H. Lotze, and Wnally H. Schell . . . 13

But Jacobi and the Pantheismusstreit are not mentioned, and no idea is given of the full range, coherence, and historical inXuence of speculative theism and the broader personalistic movement. Buber and other German dialogical philosophers were aware of the beginnings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in Jacobi, Fichte, Feuerbach, and others, of the ‘dialogic’ which, in some representatives, entered into early personalism. It is quite natural that they do not associate it with personalism as deWned by the American school, since speciWcally dialogical thought was not one of the latter’s most marked features. Although he limits himself to its twentiethcentury European developments, Michael Theunissen, in Der Andere (1965), mentions the need for the study of this historical background.14 The works on Jacobi, Schelling, and the speculative theists mentioned in the Introduction do not discuss them as contributing to or as parts of a broader personalist movement extending into the twentieth century. The same holds, with regard to the British and American personalists, of the few existing works about them. With few exceptions, British and American idealistic personalism has been covered only in larger works on the history of Anglo-American philosophy. Although Arthur Kenyon Rogers, in English and American Philosophy Since 1800 (1922), is aware of the inXuence not only of Lotze but of Scottish common sense on British personal idealism, he tends to regard the latter as a new, distinct movement, and to range Pringle-Pattison with the absolutists rather than with the personalists. Of course, there is an element of absolutism in that PringlePattison retains the concept of the absolute. Again, there is, more generally, a personalistic absolutism that is not the same as absolute idealism proper. But as will become clear, it could easily be misleading to say that Pringle-Pattison’s work as a whole represents merely ‘a correction of absolutism, rather than its repudiation’, where his later work (The Idea of God) brings out the true meaning of the 13 Lexikon fu¨r Theologie und Kirche, ed. Kasper (‘Personalismus’). 14 Buber recognizes Jacobi’s contribution in ‘Zur Geschichte des dialogischen Prinzips’, 293–4. Theunissen, Der Andere, 5; the study called for by Theunissen is not what I undertake here; my subject is personalism in general, not speciWcally dialogicism. Theunissen has contributed elsewhere to this historiography; see his ‘Die Aufhebung des Idealismus in der Spa¨tphilosophie Schellings’.

36

The current view of personalism

criticism in his early work (Hegelianism and Personality), which might otherwise ‘easily give the impression of a break’ with absolute idealism.15 Rudolf Metz, in A Hundred Years of British Philosophy (1938), is the Wrst historian to devote signiWcant space to the British personal idealists,16 and he seems to have established a pattern of judgements about them that is followed by subsequent scholars. The essence of these judgements, focused on PringlePattison, is that although he ‘was one of the ablest of the second generation of British idealists’, he was not ‘markedly original’. This is true, but for other reasons than the ones given by Metz. Pringle-Pattison’s worldview, he explains, grew out of mutual adjustments of the positions of Bradley, Bosanquet, McTaggart, and Ward, criticism of idealism’s opponents, and broad studies in the history of philosophy, avoiding the extremes of monism and pluralism, and absolutism and ‘personalism’.17 For these reasons, although it ‘commands respect’, it is ‘a compromise’, representing a kind of ‘normal idealism’.18 Although his Hegelianism and Personality was directed rather against ‘certain speculative developments’ of the ‘absolutist wing’ of the Hegelian movement than against the movement itself, it represented something like a revolution within the high quarters of the camp, and called into being an opposition movement to which all those who were unable to support the Absolutism of Bradley and Bosanquet eventually rallied. The aim of this opposition was to purify Idealism from certain Hegelian elements by looking forward to Lotze as well as backward to Kant. At the same time it signiWed a revival of Theism as an integral element of Idealism, and so far a return to the older Hegelian school and its alliance with religion. Pringle-Pattison’s strongly theological interests were here doubtless a deciding factor, and it is no accident that his book found a lively echo in the circle of Martineau.19

Pringle-Pattison defends and gives reasons for his employment of other thinkers ‘as a means of illuminating, either by aYnity or by force of contrast, the constructive position which is gradually built up’, emphasizing that his purpose is not critical but ‘constructive throughout’.20 It is hardly correct to say that he was dependent upon other thinkers to the extent and in the way Metz thinks. His philosophy was not merely a compromise. The decisive features of Pringle-Pattison’s philosophy are rather indicated by the mention of the links to Lotze and Kant, and by the statement about a ‘revival of Theism as an integral element of Idealism’. It is strange, however, that Metz, a German scholar, traces this merely to ‘the older Hegelian school and its alliance with religion’ and not to the

15 Rogers, English and American Philosophy Since 1800, 310, 315–16. 16 Muirhead uses neither the term personalism nor even personal idealism in his chapter on Pringle-Pattison’s Hegelianism and Personality in The Platonic Tradition. Nor is any broader historical perspective delineated. But Muirhead is himself rather an absolutist, and the chapter is signiWcantly entitled ‘Hesitation and Arrest’. 17 Metz here has in mind an extreme, ‘pluralistic’ form of personalism quite diVerent from the main current I will describe. 18 Metz, A Hundred Years of British Philosophy, 380–1. 19 Ibid. 381–2. 20 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, pp. vi–vii.

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37

stricter theistic opposition to Hegelianism that co-dominated German Kathederphilosophie and was developed out of the work of Jacobi and the later Schelling. Metz goes on to stress the pioneering qualities of Pringle-Pattison’s contribution and the way in which it pointed ahead, permanently dividing the British Hegelians into absolutists and personalists. But by thus stressing its novelty in this British context, he makes it seem much more unique in substance than in reality it was. And again, the designation of the division as one wholly within the Anglo-Hegelian school is misleading: Pringle-Pattison represented rather a British version of the kind of break with the Hegelian form of idealism that had taken place in Germany seventy years before. This view is perfectly compatible with the fact that there are many elements of Hegel’s philosophy in PringlePattison. None of the speculative theists rejected all elements of Hegelianism; in the work of some, they were dominant. Metz argues that Pringle-Pattison, because he rejected—with Bradley—‘the view that makes of the Absolute an empty undiVerentiated unity in which oppositions are not genuinely overcome but simply smoothed over’, and—against Bradley—the un-Hegelian dualism of appearance and reality, and because he accepted—again with Bradley—the doctrine of degrees of truth and reality, he ‘moved back towards his original Hegelian starting-point’; that ‘Despite much criticism of detail, his general attitude towards the new Absolutism, in Bosanquet even more than in Bradley, is a favourable one’; and that ‘Bosanquet in particular seems to have contributed outstandingly to the Wnal form of his metaphysic’. Metz even dismisses the question of the ‘agreement and diVerence’ between Pringle-Pattison and Bosanquet, a mere ‘domestic aVair of the school’, as something ‘we need not enter into’.21 This seems to me simply wrong: in no way can Pringle-Pattison’s criticism of Bradley and Bosanquet, any more than his criticism of Green or of Hegel himself, be said to have concerned mere detail. And the view that there is a change in Pringle-Pattison’s main charges against them, the charges which Metz himself recognizes as having caused a revolution in the school and the permanent division between personalists and absolutists, is equally misleading. It squares poorly with what Metz rightly says about the similarities between the criticisms against Bradley and Bosanquet of Pringle-Pattison and W. R. Sorley, H. Rashdall, and McTaggart.22 If this debate was at all an in-house aVair, it was a big house indeed. By portraying Pringle-Pattison’s philosophy as a mere variant of absolutism, Metz obscures the distinctiveness of the personalist philosophy in its most important British representative, and therewith the unity and continuity of the emergence of personalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.23 Seeing Pringle-Pattison against the background of the earlier personalist development in Europe, it becomes plain that it is rather to this personalist movement than to absolutism that he belongs.

21 Ibid. 383–4. 22 Ibid. 386–7; for Rashdall, see Introduction, n. 58. 23 By the same token, Stout’s characterization of Pringle-Pattison, in his entry on him in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edwards, as ‘a Scottish Hegelian with a diVerence’, is unsatisfactory.

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Metz concludes by citing Friedrich von Hu¨gel’s complaint that PringlePattison’s philosophy is ‘a pseudo-theism, a compromise, incapable of giving theoretical satisfaction’, whose ‘exaltation of human personality precludes from the start the idea of God as it has been generally understood’, and his statement that for its ‘more consistent working out we have to turn to Bradley with his doctrine of an impersonal Absolute and to McTaggart’s Atheism’.24 Metz is right that a strong element of nineteenth-century humanism entered into PringlePattison’s personal idealism, as it did in all modern idealism. But, as will become clear, the view that Bradley or McTaggart more consistently represent what Pringle-Pattison was trying to do is absurd. C. C. J. Webb similarly comes in for the criticism that his work does not rise to ‘that great originality of thought we admire in Bradley and to a lesser degree in Bosanquet’, and that his philosophy has grown ‘less out of an inner impulse after system than through the exposition and criticism of the ideas of other thinkers’.25 This misses the fact, characteristic of Webb, Pringle-Pattison, and Illingworth, that, as comparatively tradition-oriented thinkers, they were explicitly sceptical of much modern praise of originality, with its superWcial equating of ability with innovation. More importantly, missing again the true historical aYliation, it also misses the fact that despite this the emerging, broad personalist current to which Webb belonged did in fact, as a whole, present and variously expound distinct themes that were indeed new and original in the context of idealism and theism.26 John Passmore, in A Hundred Years of Philosophy (1957), rightly points out that Pringle-Pattison partly reverts to the Scottish tradition, and that for him philosophy ‘has somehow to justify, but must never venture to question, our ‘‘natural belief ’’ in God, in personal identity, in the existence of an external world’. What he does not say is that this was one of the original themes of Jacobi’s personalism, derived by Jacobi himself from the same Scottish tradition a hundred years earlier. When he goes on to add that Pringle-Pattison also appeals ‘to the testimony of Lotze, whose philosophy he interprets in a sense favourable to the Scottish point of view’,27 he ignores the fact that with regard to these central personalist themes there was in Germany a certain continuity from Jacobi to Lotze.28 24 Metz, A Hundred Years of British Philosophy, 388–9. The latter is a strangely one-sided formalistic coherence argument, which ignores Pringle-Pattison’s speciWc reasons for not doing this. It returns, as we will see, in Copleston. 25 Ibid. 412. 26 Metz correctly ranges Pringle-Pattison under ‘The Personal Idealists’, however, along with James Seth, Sorley, and Rashdall. Webb is grouped together with Ward, Taylor, and W. Temple in a chapter of their own, ‘Theists and Philosophers of Religion’. This somewhat obscures the extent to which the characteristic key themes of personalism in Pringle-Pattison and the older tradition are the ones which also dominate the work of Webb (and to some extent Ward and the later Taylor). 27 Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, 71. 28 Passmore then goes on to echo and reinforce Metz’s assessment. His chapter on Pringle-Pattison, McTaggart, Ward, and Royce is, however, appropriately entitled ‘Personality and the Absolute’. This makes it possible for him both to make a distinction between Pringle-Pattison and the nominal personal idealists headed by Sturt, and point to the partial continuity between them. When, in a later

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Frederick Copleston, in the eighth volume of his History of Philosophy (1966), devotes separate chapters to British and American personal idealism, which cover Pringle-Pattison, Ward, McTaggart, and Sorley, and Howison, Bowne, Flewelling, Knudson, Brightman, and W. E. Hocking respectively, but he also grants that there are other British philosophers ‘who can reasonably be described as personal idealists’: ‘How far we extend the application of the term ‘‘personal idealism’’ is, within limits, a matter of choice.’29 Other forms of personalism, such as Christian and realistic personalism, are dealt with under other headings, as is the philosophy of Royce, where the stress is rather on its absolute idealism than on what Yandell calls its ‘absolute idealistic personalism’. Copleston too, in my view, stresses unduly the diVerence between the early and the later Pringle-Pattison. What Pringle-Pattison says in Hegelianism and Personality ‘sounds like an abandonment of absolute idealism for theism’, whereas in his later works he ‘reaYrms absolute idealism or, more accurately, attempts to revise it in such a way that it permits more value being attached to Wnite personality than in the philosophies of Bradley and Bosanquet’. This, Copleston thinks, results in ‘an unsatisfactory amalgam of absolute idealism and theism’. The attempt to ‘combine absolute idealism with elements of theism’ yields an ‘ambiguous result’ which ‘suggests that he would have done better either to retain the Absolute and identify it with the historical process considered as moving towards the emergence of new values or to make a clear break with absolute idealism and embrace theism’.30 This assessment, and the whole of the analysis on which it is based, employs a too simple, rigid, and insensitive dichotomy of theism and absolute idealism as exhaustive and mutually exclusive alternatives. It echoes Metz’s judgement, but the dichotomy may well be determined by Copleston’s own realist, Thomist perspective. It slurs over the precise positions of Pringle-Pattison with regard to both theism and absolute idealism in his early as well as in his later work. Copleston’s view of the absolute is one-sidedly shaped by his own substantially Left Hegelian interpretation of Hegel, which does not hold for all British absolute idealists. He correctly states that ‘one of the basic factors in personal idealism is a judgement of value, namely that personality represents the highest value within the Weld of our experience’, and that it also involves ‘the conviction that personality chapter, signiWcantly called ‘Recalcitrant Metaphysicians’, he mentions some ‘younger Idealists who were Christian theologians’, and who sought ‘a safe route between Bradley’s Absolute and the scarcely less disconcerting heterodoxies of the Personal Idealists’, he obviously means by Personal Idealists Sturt and Schiller rather than Pringle-Pattison. But while in the later chapter he correctly describes Webb’s personalism in the earlier chapter’s terms of personality and the absolute, the separation of Webb from Pringle-Pattison again obscures the continuities and the distinct proWle of the personalistic tradition even within Britain. Ibid. 299. 29 Copleston, A History of Philosophy, viii. 251. Copleston goes beyond the usual historical references to Lotze when he mentions that Howison was inXuenced in Germany by the Right Hegelian Michelet and, with him, ‘interpreted Hegel’s absolute idea or cosmic Reason as a personal being, God’: ibid. 289. 30 Ibid. 238, 240.

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should be taken as the key to the nature of reality, and a sustained attempt to interpret reality in the light of this conviction’. But while correctly, if vaguely, indicating the nature of personal idealism, he captures none of the interesting, more precise formulations of the relation of monism and pluralism: the distinct way in which ‘a pluralistic conception of the universe’ is ‘held in check by [the] retention of the idea of the Absolute as a single all-inclusive experience’; the ‘endeavour to interpret the doctrine of the One in such a way as not to involve the submerging or obliteration of the Many in the One’; how ‘the change to unequivocal theism is checked by the inXuence [of] the tradition of absolute idealism’; and ‘the interpretation of ultimate reality as being itself personal in character and of such a kind as to allow for the dependent reality of Wnite persons’, according to which the concept of the absolute, into which the absolute idealists had transformed the concept of God, must be ‘re-transformed into the concept of God’.31 Some general characteristics of American personal idealism mentioned by Copleston are shared with all personal idealism, indeed with the whole current of early personalism: the attention given to ‘the subject of values, connecting them closely with the idea of the self-realization or development of personality’, and shaping the view of education with ‘emphasis being laid on moral development and the cultivation of personal values’. Copleston notes that not only idealism in general but personal idealism in particular proved congenial to the American mind, and that this explained its persistence in the twentieth century. He seems to regard American personal idealism partly as idealism given a ‘native stamp’. This is important; yet even so, it is in my view clear that the American personal idealists turned against many of the same pantheistic tendencies that the original personalists in Europe had turned against long before. Personalism in America seems to be driven in most cases by the same theoretical, moral, religious, and cultural motives as the earlier European personalism. Its explicit ‘insistence on freedom and on respect for the person as such’, and in particular the fact that it ‘has been sharply opposed to totalitarianism and a strong advocate of democracy’,32 were perhaps pre-eminently American phenomena. But in substance, with regard to the broader moral and metaphysical considerations on which this stance is based, this too can be traced back to the origins of personalism in the movement initiated by Jacobi and the later Schelling, despite its reactionary nature in the eyes of the radical impersonalistic pantheists of the Hegelian left. Early on, German personalists saw the potential threat to the individual posed by Hegel’s metaphysics and his theory of the state as characteristically conjoined.33 Yet the general failure to do justice to the positions of personal idealism, in Copleston as well as in Metz and Passmore, obviously has to some extent to do

31 Copleston, A History of Philosophy, viii, 250–1. 32 Ibid. 295–7. 33 Graf and Wagner (eds.), Die Flucht in den BegriV, 282–92 (Graf’s ‘Der Untergang des Individuums’).

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with the relative brevity of the sections devoted to its leading representatives. The problem is that this brevity in turn is explained precisely by the judgements that deWne this failure. To appreciate fully the nature of the personal idealist project and its suggested solutions to the problems indicated by Copleston, it has to be viewed in a broader and deeper historical as well as philosophical perspective. Regarding British personal idealism simply as a reaction within the British idealist school, Copleston too misses its continental background, and thus its true meaning also in relation to idealism in general. Copleston does recognize that there is ‘an intrinsic reason for the religious orientation of this line of thought’, since theism follows from its basic metaphysical tenet that ‘reality has no meaning except in relation to persons; that the real is only in, of or for persons’, that, ‘In other words, reality consists of persons and their creations’. He also acknowledges that personal idealism ‘represents the recurrent protest of the Wnite personality to absorption in a One, however it is conceived. It is easy to say that personality is ‘‘appearance’’; but no monistic system has ever explained how the sphere of appearance arises in the Wrst place.’34 Support for the argument that Martineau is to be regarded as belonging to the broader personalist movement I am tracing is found in Bernard M. G. Reardon, who makes him the central Wgure of ‘personal idealism’ in the chapter with that title in From Coleridge to Gore (1971).35 James Patrick is the Wrst to include Illingworth, one of the most typical British representatives of the broader current of personalism, among the personal idealists. Illingworth’s Personality Human and Divine is described as ‘perhaps the most eloquent Victorian defense of the primacy of personality’.36 Alan P. F. Sell gives the Wrst sustained and serious treatment of at least some of the leading British personal idealists—PringlePattison, Illingworth, Webb, H. Jones, and A. E. Taylor; while using the category of ‘personal idealism’ (Sell also calls the personal idealists ‘personalists’), Sell is well aware of the diYculties with regard to its boundaries. The personalistic and theistic elements or tendencies of the work of Green and Edward Caird are highlighted, and the divergence of the positions of Jones and Taylor from those of Pringle-Pattison, Illingworth, and Webb, not least with regard to the varying degrees of idealism, is discussed at length. The British roots of the personalistic version of idealism are clearly laid bare, not least Pringle-Pattison’s ‘commonsense inheritance’.37 The only correct situating of Pringle-Pattison in relation to the German background that I have found is Robert Stern’s and Nicholas Walker’s entry on ‘Hegelianism as an Intellectual Tradition’ in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where Pringle-Pattison (Seth) is said to have ‘followed Schelling, Trendelenburg and others, and criticized Hegel’s apparent panlogism’, and to have 34 35 36 37

Copleston, A History of Philosophy, viii. 253, 296–7. Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore, 312–20. Patrick, The Magdalen Metaphysicals, 36. Sell, Philosophical Idealism and Christian Belief, 90, 119.

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‘represented a parallel to the existentialist critique of [Hegel’s] system already developed in Germany’.38 With the exception of the mention of some of the relevant earlier representatives of personalism in Europe by the personalists themselves, with which I will deal in the next section of this chapter, I have found no evidence of awareness of this background and its importance in any of the standard works on the history of American philosophy. Gary Dorrien, in his recent history of American liberal theology, stresses the inXuence of Coleridge’s Aids to ReXection both before and parallel to the direct German inXuence of Kant and Schleiermacher. He also gives personalism a prominent place—indeed, it emerges as the central current in American liberal theology—but it appears as more original than it is when seen in the European context, which here as elsewhere is conWned to Lotze (and the mention of Ulrici). The Methodist background of Bowne, with its emphasis on freedom of the will, is duly noted, but as Dorrien observes, Bowne radically transformed Methodist theology with his personalism.39 Pioneering chapters on the whole current of personalistic theism in the Wrst half of the nineteenth century in Germany are found in Warren Breckman’s Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory.40 Breckman focuses directly on the ‘wide-ranging debate over the nature of Perso¨nlichkeit or personality’ in which various philosophical, theological, and political ‘questions about selfhood crystallized’ in the 1830s and 1840s. He rightly points out that the neglect of this theme in intellectual history is ‘surprising . . . because it directly contradicts the importance of the question of personality for the theologians and philosophers of the age’. He traces the emergence of ‘Christian personalism as the most signiWcant theological, philosophical, and political rebuttal of Hegel’s alleged pantheistic philosophy. Numerous Protestant, Pietistic, and Catholic theologians and philosophers polemicized against Hegelian pantheism’, and ‘the so-called ‘‘Positive Philosophy’’ of the elderly F. W. J. Schelling most profoundly inXuenced the personality controversy by giving philosophic respectability to Christian personalism’.41 Breckman discerns ‘ ‘‘personalist’’ thought as the core theme of anti-Hegelianism and as the putative alternative to the entire legacy of German Idealism’, tracing ‘a double trajectory’: ‘on one side, the evolving discourse of Idealism in the years between Kant and Hegel; on the other, the development of a counterdiscourse stretching from F. H. Jacobi to the elderly Schelling, the Speculative Theists, and Stahl, a counter-discourse that was simultaneously opposed to, and implicated in, Idealism.’42 38 Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Craig (‘Hegelianism as an Intellectual Tradition’). The authors’ assertion that Pringle-Pattison, in giving this critique ‘an ethical and political dimension’, followed the Left Hegelians, seems to me problematical, however, in view of Pringle-Pattison’s pronounced theistic idealism. 39 Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology, i. 371–92. The later development of personalism is covered in the second part of Dorrien’s work. 40 See Introduction. For a more extensive discussion of this work, see my review in History of European Ideas. 41 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 9, 17–18. 42 Ibid. 22–3.

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It was Jacobi who ‘opened the theistic counter-movement to rationalist philosophy’. Although his criticism was set forth ‘virtually at the beginning of the Idealist period in Germany’, this ‘irruption of Wdeism and theism within the domain of philosophy anticipated in striking ways the period of Idealism’s breakdown’: in the rising opposition against the ‘alleged panlogism and pantheism’ of Hegel, ‘variants of Jacobi’s theistic realism were to experience a second birth, as was his theologically oriented concern for individual freedom’. The ‘accusations of pantheism and Spinozism had lost none of their force since the ‘‘Pantheism Controversy’’ of the 1780s’; indeed, they had been a ‘permanent theme’ since then. The pantheism controversy had ‘helped to shape the language that was later applied to Hegel’.43 Citing I. H. Fichte’s autobiographical note about how he and C. H. Weisse ‘inscribed [their] banner with the principle of individualism, freedom and personality’, Breckman notes that their ‘Speculative Theism’, ‘Prominent in its own day, virtually forgotten in ours . . . deeply inXuenced the development of philosophic and academic theological anti-Hegelianism in the 1830s’.44 While noting the diVerences between the later Schelling and the speculative theists, Breckman emphasizes the ‘overlapping’ between their respective versions of theistic personalism evidenced not least by the centrality of the theme of freedom and their shared use of the terms negative and positive philosophy.45 Since I give priority to the historical tracing of the development of the worldview of personalism, and will thus not enter at any length into the ‘technicalities’ of philosophical argument, I will not, for instance, give any separate analysis or single, precise description or deWnition even of the central concepts of person and personality as used in emergent personalism.46 There is partial truth in Breckman’s observation that the concept of personality remained somewhat vague even for its champions. Far from reducing the usefulness of the concept, however, this lack of clarity actually enhances its utility for our purposes. Our interest, after all, is not really in establishing a valid or workable notion of personhood but rather in tracing the vagaries of an idea and its impact upon a speciWc historical moment. What Lovejoy once called the ‘metaphysical pathos’ of the obscure still serves as a useful reminder that clarity of conceptualization often stands in inverse proportion to the historical eVect of a speciWc idea. This does indeed seem to have been the case in the controversies that will concern us, since the concept of personality acquired immediate force because it was a term that gathered together a range of meanings within the concrete political, social and ideological context of the 1830s. Precisely because personalism became shorthand for a constellation of ideas, it could produce a ferment that a more clearly deWned term might not have.47

43 Ibid. 23, 27, 47. 44 Ibid. 49. 45 Ibid. 54. 46 The concept is of course notoriously elusive, and lengthy historical expositions are normally needed to get a Wrm hold on it. The best available is probably the one in the Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Ritter. 47 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 10–11.

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The theoretical understanding and scholarly purpose evident in the passage are, however, quite diVerent from my own. Although ‘obscure’ is hardly the right way to describe the concept, the wide range of meanings, the contexts (including ones other than those mentioned by Breckman), and the historical richness of the connotations rather make it analytically and descriptively pointless to attempt an unhistorical philosophical exposition apart from those given by the thinkers discussed, and one yielding a single, more narrow deWnition. The deWnitions given by the thinkers themselves should suYce for my present purposes. Breckman does, however, suYciently indicate in broad outline and in a historical perspective the characteristic aspects of the new concept of the person. It did not have today’s psychological meaning. After having been treated as ‘virtual synonyms’ from the seventeenth century, the terms person and subject were increasingly distinguished. The old epistemological meaning was linked by Kant to individual autonomy, yet this in turn was given a universal deWnition applying to ‘humanity’ and did not refer to the unicity of the individual person. Kant’s contemporary, G. C. Lichtenberg, held that ‘insofar as the subject thinks ‘‘ideas’’, knowledge does not actually require a personal subject. To replace the expression ‘‘I think’’, Lichtenberg proposed, ‘‘it [the idea] is thinking’’.’ From the Kantian notion of subjectivity arose therefore the absolute idealists’ idea of the absolute subject or spirit. Although the person is ‘always also a subject’ and shares with the subject ‘autonomy, self-containment, and self-identity’, ‘the idea of human personhood suggests the total life of an individual, deWned not only by a universally shared human essence but also by the contingent attributes of that particular individual. The person is thus conceived as an irreducibly unique locus of consciousness, rationality, and will.’48 By E´. Durkheim’s deWnition, ‘to be a person is to be an autonomous source of action. Man acquires this quality only insofar as there is something in him which is his alone and which individualizes him, as he is something more than a simple incarnation of the generic type of his race and his group.’49 This something, Durkheim interestingly continues, cannot be mere free will as an ‘invariable attribute’; for ‘concrete personality’ to be constituted, it is also ‘necessary for this faculty to be exercised towards ends and aims which are proper to the agent. In other words, the very materials of conscience must have a personal character’.50 Breckman observes that the early, Hegelian Feuerbach signiWcantly held that ‘the principle of personality’ was ‘inimical to philosophy, precisely because ‘‘personality in concreto’’ cannot be incorporated into philosophy’s vocational impulse toward abstraction and generalization’.51 But those who defended the Christian meanings of the term ‘person’—which, with the ideas of the Incarnation, 48 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 11–12. 49 Durkheim, On Morality and Society, 140–1, cited in Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 12. 50 Durkheim, On Morality and Society, 141. 51 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 12 (Feuerbach, ‘Zur Kritik der positiven Philosophie’, in Gesammelte Werke, viii. 189).

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individual providence, and resurrection, implied an ‘emphasis on empirical particularity’, not the identiWcation with the modern epistemological concept of the subject—came to object to this vocational impulse. The Christian ‘belief in the endless value of the individual person was predicated upon a relationship of analogy between the human person and the divine personality of God . . . Unlike the concept of the ‘‘subject’’, therefore, the Christian concept of ‘‘person’’ remains incomplete without relation to the archetypal divine person, a relationship expressed doctrinally in the symbolism of the Trinity.’ The ‘passage from Enlightenment universalism to a revival of particularistic notions of selfhood’ was due not only to Romantic individualism and the neo-humanist idea of individual Bildung, but to a ‘vigorous reassertion of the Christian idea of personhood itself ’.52 Missing in the deWnitions discussed by Breckman is the question of whether or to what extent the concept of the person, and the concept as used in early personalistic thought, is a gendered one. I believe that to some extent it is, and that one sign that this is the case is the rather striking fact that this question was not raised by the personalists themselves, even as they dealt with an aspect of reality where it could be considered to have been rather natural to do so in the historical period in question.53 At the same time, the nominal gender-neutrality of the personalist discourse could be interpreted as indicative of the considerable extent of its human and spiritual universality and its equal applicability to men and women. Like the Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie, Breckman focuses on the importance of Feuerbach’s engagement with and opposition to ‘Christian personalism’—as Breckman somewhat sweepingly designates the movement—for the development of his critique of religion and the radicalization of his political views. It is true of the radical Young Hegelians in general that their campaign against Christian ideas of the person—their attempt to ‘dethrone’ the self . . . leads us to the heart of their opposition to the conditions of their present. Hostility toward Christian personalism set Young Hegelian radicals against what was both the sovereign discourse of their day and a particular discourse of sovereignty. The controversy over sovereign personhood became a crucial vehicle for the discussion of state and civil society among the nascent intellectual Left in the Germany of the 1830s and 1840s. It crystallized the deeper assumptions of Hegelians and non-Hegelians alike about the human person and the social and political conditions that best actualize personhood.54

52 Ibid. 12–13. 53 Only Feuerbach stressed it: ‘personality is not without gender diVerence (GeschlechtsdiVerenz); personality is essentially diVerentiated in male and female personality. Where there is no Thou, there is no I; but the diVerence between I and Thou, the basic precondition of all personality, of all consciousness, is real, living, and Wery only as the diVerence between man and woman. The Thou between man and woman has a wholly diVerent resonance than the monotonous Thou between friends’: Das Wesen des Christentums, in Gesammelte Werke, v. 177–8. In Feuerbach, however, this was part of a crude sensualistic naturalism which hardly did justice to other aspects of personality. 54 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 19.

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Schelling’s positive philosophy ‘represented for Feuerbach and the other Young Hegelians the consummate example of the ‘‘personalist’’ Weltanschauung’.55 We plainly discern here the division between the worldviews of personalism and pantheism. Hegel himself is seen by Breckman as the crucial transitional Wgure in the development of idealism in the direction of self-dethroning pantheism; the novel ambiguities in his use of the themes of Christian personalism in reality undermined it, as the Christian personalists quickly saw, and opened up the Weld for its multifaceted reinterpretation and deconstruction at the hands of various prophets of more or less radical neoterism. Hegel’s elaborate reXections on the nature of personality, his distinction between ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ personality, the importance of the reciprocal process of Anerkennung for personal identity, are combined with an explicit depreciation of personality and direct criticism of Christian personalism and theism.56 It is this ambiguity that explains how Hegel could play such an important transitional role; his almost studied abstruseness in this regard—as Breckman points out, Hegel’s position in Prussia was not so strong, despite his fame, and towards the end of his life he probably made some self-interpretive concessions to the concerted pressures of Church and State—often hides the real dimensions of the conXict between personalism and Christian theism on the one hand and pantheism on the other. Breckman rightly points to the conservative setting of the personalist discourse, listing the restorative politics, and especially the Church politics, of Friedrich Wilhelm III, the religious revivalism and transformation of Pietism, and the strengthening of Christian orthodoxy. Yet his tendency to reduce the personalistic criticism of Hegel to a part of the ‘mounting conservative attempt to police religious discourse, an intensely politicized campaign against heterodoxy’,57 thus simply taking over the position of the Left Hegelian opposition of the period which it is his main purpose to elucidate and explain, is exaggerated. More than this was involved. Breckman is quite clear about the link between pantheism and radicalism in the Left Hegelians. The dethroning of the self and the dismissal of the civil society whose moral legitimacy was built upon a certain understanding of that self were seen by Marx as a political, historical necessity, the self ’s deWnition in terms of Christian personalism being nothing but the ideology and false consciousness produced by the ruling classes. But as Breckman shows, the opposition against what was perceived as the conservative and even reactionary Christian personalism also had to take other forms than the political. For in its integral systematicity the deWnition of the human person as a free and morally responsible subject was related to and dependent upon the deWnition of God as well as of the human person in terms of personality and freedom. Religion, ethics, philosophy, and politics were intimately interwoven, and seemingly subtle displacements in metaphysics were in fact closely linked to palpable social change. The identity of man 55 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 54. 56 Ibid. 33; cf. Poole, ‘On Being a Person’. 57 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 43–7.

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was not deWnable apart from the identity of God, and this internal, organic connection was also decisive for the understanding of the relations between men, of human society. The radical politics of the Young and the Left Hegelians were confronted with a systematic nexus of positions and deWnitions in which a certain understanding of ‘selfhood’ on the levels of both man and God was crucial, and even the seemingly purely theological struggles of biblical scholarship were therefore often in reality deeply involved political ones. Breckman notes that Jacobi himself was not as conservative as the later Christian personalists inspired by him. Jacobi asserted ‘the autonomy of the human person as part of the created world’, and ‘meant to rescue free and autonomous individuals and the domain of human values from the nihilistic monism of universal rationality’. He combined his ‘theistic argument for human freedom with a moderate liberal outlook’, and some interpret his ‘concern to limit reason’ as ‘motivated in the Wrst instance by his anxieties about the potentially despotic thrust of Enlightenment rationalism in politics’.58 He also notes the clear diVerences between F. J. Stahl’s Christian personalist political philosophy and the political philosophy of strict reactionaries like von Haller. When he correctly writes that Jacobi’s theologically oriented concern for individual freedom experienced a second birth in the 1830s, his insistence on the massive conservatism of the Christian personalists seems slightly inconsistent.59 The restatement of a position a generation on, and in other circumstances, can of course make it something very diVerent from what it was in its earlier appearance. But this was not always and everywhere what happened in this case. The new personalism opposed the heterodox currents of pantheism stemming from various historical currents of Gnostic and monistic mysticism, from Spinoza and later Enlightenment rationalism, and from Romanticism, and culminating—as the opponents perceived it—in the highly rationalized form of Hegel’s idealism. In this opposition, the personalists certainly in some respects joined forces with ecclesiastical orthodoxy, but the two never became identical. While distinguishing themselves sharply from central elements of Hegel’s philosophy and that of his pantheist predecessors, the idealistic personalists, while certainly ‘Christian’ in a wider sense, remained distinct in some respects from the positions of theological orthodoxy. Although Breckman duly notes this in connection with his treatment of I. H. Fichte and C. H. Weisse, this is of no real consequence for his overall interpretation of the philosophy which he shows to be the allimportant background of Young Hegelianism. Generally, it is all lumped together as one conservative Christian personalism.

58 Ibid. 27; cf. diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 4–7, 18–21, 25–6, 35–6, and Homann, F. H. Jacobis Philosophie der Freiheit. 59 Jacobi sometimes uses arguments against ‘philosophy’ similar to those of French counterEnlightenment thinkers, who could also draw selectively on Rousseau; and according to Atterbom, he had the demeanour of a ‘philosophizing courtier’: Aufzeichnungen des schwedischen Dichters P. D. A. Atterbom, 144. Yet Homann and others have clearly delineated his political position as an alternative form of liberalism; in some ways, Jacobi was part of the ascendant new mandarinate.

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Moreover, to describe this kind of personalism as the characteristic worldview of the Biedermeier era, as does Breckman, endorsing the view of M. Wundt,60 is to see only the forms that were watered down and reduced to petty idylls, and to neglect those, drawing on the rich older traditions of the West and linking them to what was of relevance in contemporary humanistic culture, that were most certainly not thus trivialized. Or, rather, it is to dismiss this kind of personalism from the perspective of precisely the form of pantheistic Romanticism that was eloquently criticized by the early personalists. Despite his clear perception of the defects of Marxism, Breckman’s attitude to the insights of Christian and idealistic personalism bespeaks the weakness of a perspective derived from ‘radical social theory’. Widening the focus beyond Germany to include Christian personalism in other countries makes possible a Wrmer grasp of the centrality and the meaning of this tradition in nineteenth-century thought. ‘Christian personalism’ was not a mere short-lived, context-speciWc phenomenon of the Wrst half of the nineteenth century in Germany, produced by a particular political situation in that particular country. As later in Britain and especially in America, personalism in Scandinavia was in no way conWned to the conservative variety, but early on exhibited an unambiguously liberal strand. For the leading Swedish personalist, Geijer, it was perfectly possible to link the conception of God’s sovereignty to liberal constitutionalism. Romantic pantheism was indeed precisely what it was perceived to be by the Prussian king, the ‘dragon seed’ of radicalism. But often, and in other countries, it was pantheism and its organicism which was long connected unambiguously by liberals with the reactionary side of Romanticism alone. Although personalistic liberalism rejected atomistic, quantitative liberalism, in Sweden, Geijer’s personalism too—and not least its Christian element— was considered a liberating, individualistic force, which could be linked to the English political tradition and even to some extent to classical political economy. In Germany, the theism of late idealism was to some considerable extent used in support at least of a kind of conservatism, while idealistic and Romantic pantheism was radicalized under the pressure of political reaction. But in Sweden, Geijer sought to draw liberal conclusions from the very same theistic personalism.61 I will argue that personalism is no mere admixture of theism and absolute idealism, but an independent, third alternative. In a similar manner, I suggest (although the case cannot be made in this book in terms of political philosophy) that its persistent tendency, from Jacobi to Bowne, to balance liberal, conservative, 60 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 22. 61 Later forms of personalism were decidedly radical, beginning with Renouvier’s, who, as ‘a child of the French Revolution . . . saw in the absolute God of traditional theology the bulwark of political despotism. The ‘‘King of Heaven’’ he declared to be the ‘‘last support of kings on earth.’’ Hence he regarded it as the duty of the modern man to ‘‘dethrone the Absolute’’ in religion as well as in politics, and to transform the ‘‘Kingdom of God’’ from a monarchy into a republic or a kind of cosmic democracy, in which other persons besides God have their eternal places and rights.’ Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 40. Admittedly, Renouvier does not belong in the main line of personalism that I describe.

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and in some cases ‘socialist’ elements in a certain sense—long before, as well as long after, the Biedermeier era, to the theoretical expression of which Breckman and Wundt, with a too narrow focus on less signiWcant manifestations of speculative theism in Germany, tried to reduce it—is so striking that in the full perspective of the whole of the development of early personalism, and with a Wrm grasp of its philosophical meaning, it must be concluded that this position springs organically and integrally from its deepest philosophical assumptions and positions. It is correct to regard the main line of personalism as opposed to Young or Left Hegelianism, and its liberalism as modiWed by conservatism. But it must be added that not only the revolutionary thinkers, but often also the reactionary ones were ‘impersonalists’. Personalism stands out from both as a distinct form of liberalism which cannot be described as a weak compromise and juste milieu. Its version of liberalism represents an independent position which is a distinct product of personalism, the application of personalism to social and political philosophy.

T H E V I EW O F T H E P E R S O NA L I S T S In addition to the view of the historians, some representative expressions of the historical self-understanding of American personalism, which, as we have seen, is considered at least in the Anglo-American world to be the representative form of personalism, must now be scrutinized. Together with the views of the historians, they provide the point of departure of this study, which will show in what respects they need to be modiWed and supplemented. The personalists have clear views and strong opinions on the import of personalism in a broad perspective, not only philosophical, but historical, cultural, and social—views that diVer somewhat according to the speciWc nature of their own respective versions of personalism. In this broad perspective, personalists enlist diVerent great names in the history of philosophy as precursors, or emphasize diVerently the same names. As for the proximate sources of their own personalism, however, they are all remarkably vague. We may proWtably begin with the famous self-characterization of Borden Parker Bowne himself, written in 1909, less than a year before his death: It is hard to classify me with accuracy. I am a theistic idealist, a Personalist, a transcendental empiricist, an idealistic realist, and a realistic idealist; but all these phrases need to be interpreted. They cannot well be made out from the dictionary. Neither can I well be called a disciple of any one. I largely agree with Lotze, but I transcend him. I hold half of Kant’s system, but sharply dissent from the rest. There is a strong smack of Berkeley’s philosophy, with a complete rejection of his theory of knowledge. I am a Personalist, the Wrst of the clan in any thoroughgoing sense.62 62 The passage is quoted in McConnell, Borden Parker Bowne, 280, and it appears as an epigraph in Knudson’s The Philosophy of Personalism. The letter containing it was Wrst published in The Personalist in 1921.

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As will soon become clear, with the partial exception of the words about Berkeley,63 these formulations are largely descriptive of the whole of the development of personalistic idealism from the later Schelling, through the speculative theists and the Swedish idealists of personality, to the British personal idealism of PringlePattison and his followers.64 Without denying Bowne’s importance, or that he did indeed add some variations of his own and develop some aspects of personalistic idealism in a new or fuller way, his claim to originality, as based on the formulations he himself uses, must in important respects be considered historically misleading. The claims are certainly made bona Wde, but again, we are more concerned here with the truth about the origins of personalism in general than with the question of the precise historical and contemporary inspirations of its leading individual representatives. Philosophically, Albert C. Knudson’s The Philosophy of Personalism (1927) is not among the most important works produced by the American school, but it is necessary to deal extensively with it here, since throughout it uniquely introduces personalism in general and Bownian personalism in particular in connection with a comparatively detailed discussion of their historical background.65 Knudson traces the term ‘personalism’ to the late eighteenth century, when it ‘served as a general term descriptive of theism by way of distinction from pantheism’. He notes Schleiermacher’s use of it, and that ‘Goethe spoke of the distinguished theist, F. H. Jacobi, as a ‘‘personalist’’ ’. He goes on to say that ‘this general or more or less self-evident meaning attached to the term ‘‘personalism’’ during the nineteenth century, but it was used very rarely, even by scholars, and more rarely in England than in Germany’. But this usage in late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century German thinkers, corresponding to a ‘general and more or less self-evident meaning’, is not considered by Knudson to have been related to philosophies of any importance for the development of personalism as a distinctive modern philosophical movement: ‘We are not . . . here concerned with the general philosophical use of the term, but with its use as the designation of a deWnite philosophical system; and this is of quite recent origin, falling within the present century.’66 Knudson provides what is probably the best existing overview of the historical antecedents of personalism. It is therefore important to note that even here a misleading view of the proximate, speciWc origins of personalism is given. Knudson is vaguely aware of the Pantheismusstreit and the use of the term personalism in connection with the theistic opposition to pantheism. But to regard this use of personalism as nothing but ‘a general term descriptive of theism by way of distinction from pantheism’, the meaning of

63 Only partial: there is a strong Berkeleyan element in the ‘absolute personal idealism’ of Bostro¨m and his school in Sweden, and later, in Rashdall in Britain. 64 An idealistic realism or realistic idealism (Real-Idealismus) was very much what Schelling presented in the Freiheitsschrift, but it should be noted that such terms was rightly used, albeit in a diVerent sense, to describe even Schelling’s early system of identity and Hegel’s system. 65 On Knudson, see Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology, ii, ch. 5. 66 Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 17–18.

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which is ‘general and more or less self-evident’, and to distinguish it in principle from the ‘deWnite philosophical system’ of personalism which is ‘of recent origin, falling within the [twentieth] century’, must be regarded as signiWcantly misleading. Bowne was certainly one of the greatest modern personalists. But many of the deWnite and speciWc characteristics of Bowne’s twentieth-century system of personalism were, as I will show, developed in the personalistic theism which opposed pantheism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And in many ways, albeit often indirectly, the former was related to and derived from the latter. The vagueness of Knudson’s terminology and distinctions becomes evident in the sequel. Between the ‘general and more or less self-evident’ theism and Bowne there appears what Knudson terms ‘typical theistic personalism’, by which he means a current that had its sources in Leibniz, Berkeley, and Kant, but owes ‘its Wrst general and distinctive formulation to Lotze’. Lotze wove the ‘personalistic elements contributed by his predecessors’—that is, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Kant— ‘into a new type of theism’, thus becoming ‘the chief protagonist’ of a new movement. ‘It is largely to his inXuence that the revival of theism during the past thirty or forty years is due . . . the most striking movement in contemporary philosophy of religion.’67 The movement, which spread during the last decades of the nineteenth century, includes the British personal idealists (more precisely, Fraser, Ward, Pringle-Pattison, J. Cook Wilson, Rashdall, Sorley, and Webb), the German R. Eucken, and the American G. T. Ladd. It also includes Bowne,68 although Knudson considers him to have gone much further than the British thinkers in developing out of it personalism as a ‘deWnite philosophical system’. But if Knudson is wrong to distinguish Bowne so sharply from the early ‘general and more or less self-evident’ theism, I believe he is even more mistaken so to distinguish ‘typical theistic personalism’. Knudson is right that Bowne’s personalism developed out of ‘typical theistic personalism’, but the latter in turn developed out of the earlier theism which Knudson mistakenly regards as ‘general and more or less self-evident’. Knudson correctly identiWes many of the new features of ‘typical theistic personalism’, but seems to regard the earlier nineteenthcentury theism that is not a ‘typical theistic personalism’ as indistinguishable from other, earlier forms of theism, from the theism of Christian theological orthodoxy or what he calls ‘classical’ or ‘traditional’ theism. Knudson does speak of a general ‘speculative theism’, but the reference seems to be merely to such ‘classical’, ‘traditional’ theism, the theism of the tradition of natural theology.69 All of these distinctions and classiWcations are blurred, however, when Knudson speaks of personalism in more general terms. In its broadest Knudsonian usage, personalism includes everything from classical theism, over ‘typical theistic personalism’, to Bowne, as well as what he regards as the less typical modern versions, Stern’s pantheistic personalism, McTaggart’s atheistic personalism,

67 Ibid. 62.

68 Ibid. 62–3.

69 Ibid. 35, 46, 64–5.

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Renouvier’s relativistic and Wnitistic personalism, Howison’s teleological personalism, and ‘personalism in the form of absolute idealism’, represented by Edward Caird, Jones, Royce, Calkins, and Hocking.70 Normally, however, he leaves out the latter, deviant forms; but the terminology remains general in that, although his purpose is to describe and defend Bownian personalism, the only personalism which in his view is a ‘deWnite philosophical system’, he continuously draws on everything in earlier forms of what he considers to be personalism broadly deWned, that is, in ‘typical theistic personalism’ as well as ‘classical’ or ‘traditional theism’, that is in line with it. This is partly what makes for the strength of his book, in that many of the deep, general historical roots of personalism are indeed laid bare. But unfortunately the general usage of the term personalism in this connection also makes for the book’s historical imprecision. When he speaks of ‘personalism’, ‘the personalistic movement in philosophy’, ‘the main current of personalistic thought’, ‘thoroughgoing personalism’, ‘the true genius of personalism’, ‘traditional and personalistic theism’, and ‘normative personalism’,71 it is often impossible to ascertain exactly to which historical current or currents— classical theism, ‘personalism’ which is merely theism with ‘self-evident meaning’, Lotzean ‘typical theistic personalism’, or Bownian personalism—he attributes the respective positions discussed. ‘Typical theistic personalism’ clearly in Knudson’s view introduced novelties in comparison with classical theism. After having discussed the similarities, he also properly points to the diVerences. But what he fails to see is that in the ‘personalism’ which he considers to have been merely a name for traditional theistic opposition to pantheism, there also appeared distinct philosophical and theological innovations, that this current fed into and merged with ‘typical theistic personalism’, and that it is from the former that not only ‘typical theistic personalism’ as represented by later thinkers mentioned by Knudson (including some of the personal idealists in Britain), but also Bowne’s American personalism received decisive impulses and took over most of its characteristic themes and positions. As I will show, all of the innovations in comparison with ‘classical theism’ which Knudson attributes to the Leibniz-Berkeley-Kant-inspired ‘typical theistic personalism’ of Lotze and his followers, were introduced or rendered in their personalistic form by personalistic thinkers long before Lotze, thinkers whose inspirations were mainly other than Leibniz, Berkeley, and Kant. These innovations are the following (and it should be observed in this connection that Knudson regards personalism as a particular constellation of positions that are in themselves not peculiar to personalism): the phenomenality of the material, space-time world; the idealistic view of nature; the rejection of the Kantian distinction between the empirical and the ontological self; the interpretation of 70 Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 30 (emphasis removed). Knudson also says that ‘the history of theism may be regarded as the gradual and logical unfolding of its personalistic implications’, but while stressing continuities, he also distinguishes in this connection between ‘ancient and mediaeval theism, on the one hand, and modern theism, on the other’: ibid. 238. 71 Ibid. 23, 35–7, 64–5, 67, 74, 76, 78, 86.

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reality in terms of self-consciousness; the dismissal of thought without a thinker and activity without an agent; the view of personality as what is alone ontologically real; the idea of causality as derived from experienced personal agency; the rejection of one-sided rationalism and intellectualism; the stronger emphasis on will; the view that life is deeper than logic; and the stress on freedom.72 Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century thinkers who are misunderstood in or omitted from Knudson’s survey plainly displayed the distinctive features of ‘typical theistic personalism’ as well as of the American school. What Knudson regards as ‘typical theistic personalism’, culminating in Bownian personalism, is in its later manifestations, mainly in the British personal idealists, in continuity not only with Leibniz, Berkeley, and Kant, but even more with the personalism of such thinkers. There is in Knudson’s list of representatives of ‘typical theistic personalism’ a characteristic leap from the last ‘source’ mentioned, Kant, to its Wrst formulator, Lotze (later, Knudson will in some respects include Hegel in the lineage, but that does not make any diVerence in the present regard), and because of this, it misses the all-important, speciWc and distinctive origins of this personalism in Jacobi, the later Schelling, and the earlier, pre-Lotzean speculative theists, despite the earlier mention of Jacobi. In Knudson’s view, not only the deviant forms of personalism mentioned above but pre-Bownian ‘typical theistic personalism’ too falls short of the standards of Bowne’s ‘systematic methodological personalism’, ‘the most distinctive form of personalism’,73 in that in it personalism had not yet become ‘a philosophical method as well as a body of conclusions’. Knudson asserts that it was Bowne ‘who Wrst took the personalistic conception of reality, grounded in the Kantian epistemology, developed its implications in a comprehensive way, and made it the center and constitutive principle of a complete metaphysical system’. He then gives the deWnition of personalism in accordance with Bowne’s positions: it is ‘that form of idealism which gives equal recognition to both the pluralistic and monistic aspects of experience and which Wnds in the conscious unity, identity, and free activity of personality the key to the nature of reality and the solution of the ultimate problems of philosophy’.74 For all of the merits of Bowne’s systematization, crediting him as the Wrst to set out these deWning positions systematically seems to me historically misleading. Knudson stands on Wrmer ground when he deals with the more distant roots of personalism. Although he locates personalism as a deWnite philosophical system in the twentieth century, he also argues that it ‘represents one of the oldest and broadest currents in the history of human thought’, that ‘it stands organically and structurally related to the spiritual philosophy of all the ages’, and that it is ‘the ripe fruit of more than two millenniums of intellectual toil, the apex of a pyramid whose base was laid by Plato and Aristotle’.75 For this reason he describes the main steps in the development of personalism in the history of Western philosophy, and it is worth giving a brief account of this description here, with the help of

72 Ibid. 65–7, 73–4.

73 Ibid. 87 (my italics).

74 Ibid. 85–7.

75 Ibid. 434.

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Knudson’s own recapitulation at the end of the book, as supplemented with a few other passages when especially pertinent. Although the emphases vary, and the leader of the Californian branch of American personalism, R. T. Flewelling, renders it slightly diVerently,76 the description and understanding of the origins of American personalism that Knudson thus provides has, to my knowledge, not been considered controversial. Although it conXicts in some respects with the account that would be given by representatives of European personalism, as representative of the dominant American school it provides the best general account of its selfunderstanding with regard to personalism’s historical sources. Plato established ‘The superiority of thought to sense, the conception of immaterial existence, the objectivity of the ideal, the speculative signiWcance of self-activity, the shadowy and unsubstantial character of matter, various arguments for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul’.77 He ascribed ‘true being only to the logical, the ideal, and the self-active’, which, ‘at least by way of implication’, meant ‘the virtual limitation of metaphysical reality to the realm of spirit, to what we would call the personal’. Here is a signiWcant tendency to 76 Flewelling, in his contributions to Runes (ed.), Twentieth Century Philosophy (1947) and Winn (ed.), American Philosophy (1955), and in a series of articles in The Personalist in 1950 and 1951, ‘Studies in American Personalism’, added valuable perspectives on the importance of the distinctly American cultural climate and intellectual traditions for the development and Xourishing of personalism in America, arguing for speciWcally American sources of personalism in Walt Whitman and some aspects of the work of the transcendentalists and the early American idealists. He showed that Bronson Alcott and William Torrey Harris came strongly to oppose Hegel’s pantheism, were determined to ‘make out Hegel as a Personalist’, and more and more became proper personalists: Winn (ed.), American Philosophy, 156. Alcott’s ‘serious use’ of the term personalism ‘to designate a system . . . as early as 1857 comes close to establishing the designation as of American priority’, ‘Whatever priorities might be claimed for the casual use of the term by Kant, Jacobi, Goethe, and others’. The reference to Jacobi in this place does not go beyond Knudson’s, but in his brief account of the continental European background, Flewelling, after having mentioned some of the older classics of Western philosophy that Knudson deals with at length, and having listed also the French philosophers in whom personalistic principles are to be found, writes that ‘a similar movement’ in Germany ‘would bear the names of Jacobi, Teichmueller, and Lotze’. But there is no evidence that Flewelling made any study of Jacobi, and the passage itself evidences no knowledge of the depth and the width of the movement, and its other important names, nor of the extent to which it had already developed what were to become the themes of American personalism. The latter, in their metaphysical aspects, he describes in terms identical with those of Knudson and the later historians: personalism holds that ‘all reality is in some sense personal; that there are only persons and that which they create; that personality is the possession of self-consciousness and self-directedness, both in Wnite individuals and in the Supreme Person; that the peculiar nature of personality is the presence of both immanence and transcendence, these being contrapletes rather than contraries’ (ibid. 158). However, Flewelling’s account raises the interesting question of the possible inXuence of early European personalism in America before Howison and Bowne. Although he builds on Knudson’s account, E. S. Brightman, in his chapter on ‘Personalism (including Personal Idealism)’ in Ferm (ed.), A History of Philosophical Systems (1950), omits Pringle-Pattison while emphasizing instead thinkers whom I believe should be seen as less representative for early personalism as such, although they were certainly important for American personalism at the time of Brightman. Ulrici is mentioned alongside Lotze, however. In The Development of American Philosophy, a sourcebook edited by the personalist W. G. Muelder together with L. Sears (1940; 1960), mention is made of both Ulrici and Trendelenburg: op. cit. 211. 77 Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 428.

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identify idealism as such with personalism, which seems to have become particularly common in America. Some of the early European personalists, in their search for the roots of the impersonalistic worldview in all of its forms, traced it precisely to the generalistic tendencies of Plato’s rationalism, and Knudson’s description would have been diYcult to reconcile with the cardinal themes of their personalism had he not later explicitly included the latter as well. In fact, he turns immediately to their beginnings in Aristotle, who ‘emphasized the view that reality is concrete and individual, and thus corrected a rather strong tendency in Plato toward an abstract metaphysical universalism’. Aristotle also ‘gave to his world-view a more distinctly spiritual and monotheistic cast by substituting for the Ideas, the Demiurge, and the World-Soul of Plato a single self-conscious Being, a ‘‘prime’’ or ‘‘unmoved mover’’ ’. Knudson’s formulations on Plotinus again bear witness to the more marked idealistic character of American personalism. Plotinus not only ‘aYrmed more emphatically and deWned more precisely than had heretofore been done the immateriality of the human as well as the divine spirit, bringing out more clearly the unique and active nature of selfconsciousness’; he also ‘reduced nature more completely than Plato had to pure phenomenality’, to ‘absolute nonbeing, a mere outer husk behind which the truly active reality existed in the form of souls and spirits. In this respect he anticipated the modern panpsychistic form of personalism.’78 The Christian Platonists (and Aristotelians), although they ‘aYrmed the substantiality and immortality of the individual soul’, did ‘not deWne its individuality in such a way as to make it individual through and through, nor did they ground its individuality in their philosophic systems in such a way as to make it secure’. Their conception was vitiated by realistic universalism.79 Augustine ‘might in a sense be called the Wrst personalist’: To him we owe (1) a more highly developed conception of the unity of the mental life, (2) a new insight into the signiWcance of the will in the life both of God and man, (3) the earliest clear formulation of the great truth that self-certainty is more immediate than our knowledge of the external world and hence should be used as the starting-point of philosophy, and (4) the Wrst clear grasp of the fact that a valid metaphysics must be based on the self-knowledge of Wnite personality.80

The full import of the last two insights ‘was not recognized until centuries after the time of Augustine’, but then ‘they eventually lifted from oV its hinges the earlier uncritical objectivity of thought’, and ‘not only put thought above thing but the thinker above thought’. Aquinas ‘gave a more personalistic cast to the teaching of Aristotle’ by ascribing ‘eYcient as well as Wnal causality to God’, thus making ‘the world directly dependent upon the divine will both for its origin and its preservation’, which meant that God acquired ‘a more distinctly personal character’, and by interpreting ‘the somewhat vague and apparently universal ‘‘active reason’’ of Aristotle in an individualistic sense’, thus establishing ‘a basis . . . for the belief in personal immortality’.81 78 Ibid. 429.

79 Ibid. 185.

80 Ibid. 429–30.

81 Ibid. 430.

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Leaving out the development of Augustinianism in the Franciscan tradition, and, as it seems, reducing medieval voluntarism to Ockhamism,82 Knudson nevertheless does brieXy indicate elsewhere personalism’s aYnity with the Platonic tradition in Christianity. Personalists accept that Christian faith and revealed theology go beyond speculation, they recognize in them ‘a unique content that owes its origin to revelation or history or some other extralogical source’. This content, however, is for personalism not ‘so superrational that it lies completely beyond the range of the human intellect and is to be accepted simply on the ground of external authority’. Thomism had limited the range of reason to ‘abstraction and generalization based on sense-data’, which necessitated the distinction between revealed theology and natural theology, a distinction taken over by Protestant dogmatics.83 But personalism reverts to the earlier, ‘broader Platonic standpoint’, with its closer relation between philosophy and theology and its wider scope of reason, although this standpoint is given a distinctly modern, liberal interpretation: It recognizes the unique content of the Christian faith and allows it a place of pre-eminent importance in the human quest after truth, but it declines to admit that it is immune to rational criticism or entirely beyond the reach of rational construction. The distinctive doctrines of the church grew originally out of attempts to construe rationally the mysteries of the divine grace, and since they had such an origin they are, of course, open to criticism and to revision. There is no inner core of Christian teaching so diVerent from the general body of religious truth that it rests upon an entirely diVerent basis and is to be accepted on totally diVerent grounds. The distinction between Natural and Revealed Theology in its old form thus vanishes. All theology is from one point of view revealed, and from another point of view it is natural.84

Christian revelation remains unique, it has ‘supreme worth’, and it cannot be displaced by philosophical theism, yet personalism, while ‘favorable to historical Christianity’, is ‘primarily interested in the philosophical foundation of religion in general’, representing ‘a reaction against the agnostic tendency of much postKantian thought and a return to the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition’.85 These comments on medieval philosophy are found in an earlier chapter in Knudson’s book; in his historical recapitulation in the last chapter, he jumps directly from Augustine to Descartes, who ‘revived the Augustinian doctrine of the primacy of self-certainty, and made it basal in his system’, and who ‘broke the spell which the Aristotelian distinction between matter and form had exercised over the human mind for almost two thousand years, and put in its place a radical distinction between thought and extension or mind and body, thus making the mind independent of the body and by virtue of its own unique self-identity capable of an immortal destiny’.86 Leibniz ‘corrected the universalistic tendency latent in the Cartesian system and carried by Spinoza to its logical pantheistic conclusion, by deWning more

82 Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 218–19. 85 Ibid. 257. 86 Ibid. 430–1.

83 Ibid. 255–6.

84 Ibid. 256–7.

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precisely the nature of individuality and by ascribing to the individual a large degree of metaphysical independence’. He also conceived of substance, ‘as realized both in the InWnite and in Wnite monads’, as ‘psychical and active’.87 This account should be supplemented by other passages, where Knudson sets out with greater precision the signiWcance of Leibniz for personalism. Leibniz found ‘the one true exempliWcation’ of individuality in the soul, emphasized the experiential basis of the separateness and activity of the individual self, regarded self-determination as the type of true causality, and held that since the soul is the key to individuality, it is also the key to reality. Individuality was conceived by him as unitary agency. Volitional causality was asserted after having been obscured both by Spinozism and, to some extent, by Platonism and Aristotelianism, which tended to identify it with rational ground or reason, thus making it purely analytic. In comparison with them, Leibniz’s law of suYcient reason marked a step forward. Regarding all concrete reality or real existence as originating from the dynamic causality of divine purpose, he recognized a contingent element in causality. Cause, or force or power, is spiritual, personal; the idea of causality is derived from our own experience of volitional causality. Substance is interpreted as causal, so that reality and the essence of being are seen as active and dynamic, and a voluntaristic element is introduced in thought-activity. Yet Leibniz was still too rationalistic in subordinating divine will to divine reason, regarding the divine will as controlled by abstract logic, and in denying real freedom of human will, leaning towards determinism.88 Berkeley was ‘more thoroughgoing in his immaterialism’, ascribing to ‘souls alone and to God . . . metaphysical reality’. Again, a strict idealist lineage is stressed. Knudson signiWcantly goes on to say that Berkeley’s system ‘was thus, in the strict sense of the term, a personal idealism, the Wrst of its kind in the history of speculation’.89 Although Kant ‘was not himself a metaphysical personalist’, ‘indirectly’ he ‘probably did more to promote the spread of personalism than any other thinker’: By his doctrine of the creative activity of thought he gave to the spiritual individualism of Leibnitz and Berkeley a deWniteness of content that it had previously lacked and also supplied it with a Wrm epistemological basis. By his conception of personality as an end in itself he laid the foundation of ethical personalism, and by his doctrine of the primacy of the practical reason he justiWed the belief in God, freedom, and immortality. In his synthesis of apriorism with empiricism is also to be found the justiWcation of the profound metaphysical signiWcance attributed by personalism to self-experience.90

This should be compared with an earlier passage where Knudson characteristically holds that the ‘traditional theistic arguments’ criticized by Kant, although they ‘attempted to prove too much’ and were not ‘demonstrations in the strict sense of the term’, ‘still had their value, and are of permanent worth’.91 And

87 Ibid. 431. 90 Ibid. 431–2.

88 Ibid. 186, 188, 216–19. 91 Ibid. 257.

89 Ibid. 431.

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although the argument should indeed rather be based on practical reason, which Kant rightly regarded as primary, Knudson objects that to institute a sharp and radical distinction between the theoretical and the practical reason and to insist that religion must be based exclusively on the latter, is to do violence to the unity of human nature. What the heart requires and what the head aYrms cannot be matters of mutual indiVerence; they must ultimately conform to each other. And if so, it is evident that the Platonic-Aristotelian attempt to ground the belief in God and immortality in the intellect as well as in conscience cannot be mistaken.92

Maine de Biran, regarding activity as the essence of consciousness, changed the Cartesian principle into ‘ago ergo sum’. For him, consciousness as activity and volitional causality are more clearly a fact of experience than in Leibniz; it is ‘the source of the categories, not their product’, and all metaphysical concepts are derived from it. While thus overcoming both the sensationalism of Hume and the intellectualism of Leibniz, Maine de Biran could not, however, explain the universality of this volitional causality.93 Hegel ‘established the rationality of the real’, which truth is ‘the ultimate basis of the immaterialism of Leibniz and Berkeley, and of idealists in general’. ‘The material or space-time world cannot meet the test of rationality’, Knudson writes, in an account more reminiscent of Bradley than Hegel: ‘It is shot through and through with inconsistencies and contradictions, and hence must be condemned to phenomenality.’94 Here again, American personalism goes along with such idealism more unreservedly than most European versions. But just as Aristotle corrected Plato’s ‘abstract metaphysical universalism’ by emphasizing that ‘reality is concrete and individual’, it is clear from its acceptance of Lotze, that it nevertheless does not break away from the European movement; Lotze corrected the Hegelian tendency toward an abstract and universalistic type of metaphysics by successfully maintaining that reality is concrete and individual, that it is inWnitely richer than thought, and that in the form of personality it oVers an adamantine resistance to every dissolvent that thought is able to apply, for without a thinker there can be no thought. The self is a presupposition of thought. True existence must, therefore, be something more than thought; it must be existence for self. Lotze thus transformed the logical rationalism of Hegel into a personal rationalism, and the absolute idealism of Hegel into a personal idealism.95

Kant, Fichte, Maine de Biran, and Lotze all ‘identiWed the reality of the self more completely [than Descartes] with its own self-conscious unity and freedom’.96 With Lotze, we are back to Knudson’s ‘typical theistic personalism’. I have pointed to the absence of Jacobi, the later Schelling, and the earlier speculative theists. But this omission notwithstanding, Knudson’s historical synopsis is comparatively substantial and comprehensive, and the reader is eager to see what it is that he considers so unique about the contribution of Bowne. The latter, we are told, ‘transcended Lotze in two main respects’. In the Wrst of these he ‘took the idea that personality is the key to reality and made it the central 92 Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 258. 93 Ibid. 219–20. 94 Ibid. 432. 95 Ibid. 432–3. 96 Ibid. 244.

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and organizing principle of his entire philosophy’. Although Lotze had seen that ‘self-experience is the solvent of such fundamental antinomies as those between unity and plurality and between identity and change’, he did not do ‘anything enthusiastic with it’, whereas Bowne ‘seized upon this facet of the soul’s life and turned it into a steady glow’, making it ‘the one great illuminating principle of his entire system’, carrying it ‘as a torch’ through ‘all the ramiWcations of metaphysics’, and Wnding that ‘it revealed the way to a uniWed view of reality and to a solution for the basic diYculties that confront human thought so far as such a solution is possible’. For this reason, Bowne became ‘the systematizer of personalism’, the founder of ‘systematic methodological personalism’.97 Despite the poetry of the language, this is somewhat disappointing as a climax. There can be no doubt about Bowne’s ‘enthusiasm’ and the ‘steady glow’ of the central torchlike principle in his philosophy, and certainly he added some new formulations and developments. Yet with regard to the substance of Bowne’s insights, as to that of ‘typical theistic personalism’ in general, Knudson’s account is historically inadequate. The fact that many of Bowne’s insights are derived from Lotze, and that Knudson does not mention the inXuence of Ulrici on Bowne, which was also strong, is of comparatively little importance. More seriously, by jumping from the more or less personalistic elements of most of the masters of Western philosophy up to Kant and Hegel directly to Lotze, Knudson misses many of the real historical origins of what he considers the unique and speciWc contributions of Bowne. Although Bowne’s analysis of self-experience as the solvent of antinomies was in some respects new, personality must, as we will see, be said to have been made ‘the key to reality’ and ‘the central and organizing principle’ of entire philosophies not only long before Bowne, but long before Lotze. Many of the speciWc features of Bowne’s analysis of personality and selfexperience as a key to reality, which Knudson considers to have been developed only in the twentieth century, were in fact evident already in what he regards as the mere conventional theism that opposed impersonalistic pantheism towards the end of the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The same is true of the second respect in which Knudson considers Bowne to have transcended Lotze. Bowne is said to have supplemented Lotze’s conception of reality as self-existence by introducing into it as an essential and controlling factor the thought of free self-activity. Lotze . . . also recognized the fact of freedom, but he did not, like Bowne, give to it a place of coequal importance with self-consciousness. Bowne made freedom a touchstone of reality. Only that which is free did he regard as truly real. He also made freedom, as Lotze did not, a fundamental presupposition of epistemology. He showed that without it there could be no distinction between truth and error, no standard of truth, and no way of using such a standard if there were one. For him freedom was thus constitutive of both knowledge and of reality.98

Again, Bowne undoubtedly developed the understanding of the importance of freedom in personalism. Neither Augustine nor Descartes, Knudson points out, had realized the epistemological and metaphysical signiWcance of their insight 97 Ibid. 433.

98 Ibid. 433–4.

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that error was due to the freedom of the will.99 Yet although Bowne certainly brought out more clearly the theoretical implications of freedom,100 and despite some other diVerences, it must be added that it was precisely freedom, insisted on against pantheism already by Jacobi, that was the most important issue that caused the development of personalism in the later Schelling, and that it then remained a central theme in most of the representative thinkers in the whole of the subsequent development of personalistic idealism on the European continent and in Britain. Nor did all of the pioneers of personalism focus exclusively on practical or moral freedom; some were certainly aware of its epistemological and metaphysical import. In his discussion of the aberrant forms of personalism in his Wrst chapter, ‘The DeWnition of Personalism’, Knudson, applying the standards of Bownian personalism and ‘typical theistic personalism’, in fact outlines the whole of the worldview that was gradually developed in the work of Jacobi, the later Schelling, and the speculative theists. Every single feature of true personalism that Knudson brings to bear in his criticism of non-typical versions of personalism as well as— throughout the book—of non-personalist philosophies, can be found in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century thinkers whom Knudson omits from the lineage of ‘typical theistic’ and Bownian personalism. With regard to the substance of the worldview of personalism, Knudson’s formulations read like a comprehensive and detailed summary of the early European personalism that he leaves out. In my exposition of the latter in Chapters 2–4, I will cite, by way of introduction, alongside the more general encyclopedia deWnitions, some of these formulations to underscore its rightful place in the history of personalism. Bowne and others were of course inXuenced to some extent by all, or almost all, of the thinkers mentioned by Knudson, directly and indirectly. But while Knudson’s overview of the sources of personalism from Plato to Hegel is largely correct as far as it goes, and valuable in its comparative exactness, it displays the central weakness which, as we have seen, is still not remedied in the latest accounts of the history of personalism. As we will see, it was rather Jacobi, Schelling, and the speculative theists who brought together the personalistic beginnings in earlier Western philosophy and theology, synthesized them, and lit the torch of the insights about free personality as the key to reality and the central and organizing principle of philosophy which glowed steadily throughout the whole of the subsequent development of personalism.101 99 Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 152 n. 30. 100 Knudson himself relates, however, that Bowne’s analysis of this aspect of freedom had been made also by Renouvier and his friend J. Lequier: ibid. 151–2. 101 Of course, all of the past masters discussed by Knudson had a direct inXuence on the personalists of the Wrst half of the nineteenth century; and some received special, renewed attention. Plato’s inXuence was pervasive, Trendelenburg’s criticism of Hegel, for instance, was connected with his Aristotelian studies, and Leibniz became a decisive force in the speculative theists’ and others’ criticism of Hegelian idealistic generalism. But the distinct synthesis of such elements and the rounded whole of a new theistic and idealistic personalist worldview that was taken over by British and American personalists bear, in my view, the mark of what I try to reconstruct as a central, if not exclusive, Jacobian-Schellingian-speculative theist line.

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Among the third-generation American personalists, L. Harold DeWolf, in an article on ‘Personalism in the History of Western Philosophy’, discusses the deWnitions of personalism in Rudolf Eisler’s and Andre´ Lalande’s older European philosophical encyclopedias, which do not say anything diVerent from the newer ones I discuss here, as well as in older American encyclopedia entries by Flewelling and Brightman, and makes some brief but not unimportant additions to Knudson’s historical account. Mention is made of Duns Scotus’s view of form and not matter as the principle of individuation, and of his less equivocal and abstract understanding of freedom. DeWolf points to J. G. Fichte as the thinker who introduced the position that knowledge presupposes active consciousness, will, and freedom on the part of the knowing subject, that without freedom truth and error cannot be distinguished. Defending Hegel against the ‘false accusation of abstract rationalism’, DeWolf prefers to describe him as employing ‘an empirical logic of coherence’. He even mentions the later Schelling, but, noting the problem with the esoteric or mystical dimension of his view of freedom, he unfortunately misses the personalistic import—due in large measure to Jacobi’s inXuence—of Schelling’s criticism of Hegel and of his own alternative.102 John H. Lavely, another third-generation personalist, deWnes ‘Personalism’ in Paul Edwards’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy as ‘a philosophical perspective or system for which person is the ontological ultimate and for which personality is thus the fundamental explanatory principle. Explicitly developed in the twentieth century, personalism in its historical antecedents and its dominant themes has close aYliations with and aYnities to other (mainly idealist) systems that are not strictly personalist.’103 Lavely’s entry contains most of the information and characteristic perspectives and omissions that were later to shape Yandell’s in the Routledge Encyclopedia discussed above. Here too, American personalism is seen as representative: the article concentrates ‘on American personalism, although the movement is not only American; there are and have been advocates of personalism or closely related positions in Europe, Great Britain, Latin America, and the Orient’. The deWnition of personalism is accurate; but again, there are problems with regard to the historical antecedents indicated. To regard personalism as explicitly developed only in the twentieth century implies much too restricted a perspective, to some extent caused by a one-sided focus on terminological history.104 The terminological diVerences between ‘personalism’, ‘personal idealism’, and Perso¨nlichkeitsidealismus alone, some of which terms were prominent in Europe in the nineteenth century, hardly justify making the terminological invention of ‘personalism’ the basis of a historical demarcation. For a neglect of the conceptual history is then involved, which overlooks the presence of the positions of what was later termed personalism at a much earlier stage under other terminological designations. It is 102 DeWolf, ‘Personalism in the History of Western Philosophy’, 35, 37. 103 Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edwards (‘Personalism’). 104 The precise term personalism was indeed systematically used in philosophy only in the twentieth century.

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true that, as Lavely writes in the above quotation, personalism has ‘close aYliations with and aYnities to other . . . systems that are not strictly personalist’. But the more important truth is that twentieth-century personalism has close aYliations with and aYnities to systems that are strictly personalist, although they were not designated by that term. In comparison with this fact, the terminological diVerence is insigniWcant. Moreover, Lavely holds that the ‘not strictly personalist’ systems with which personalism has aYliations were ‘mainly idealist’. Leaving aside the problem of the understanding of the meaning of idealism, this must be said to be true, if what is intended are the systems of Plato, Leibniz, Berkeley, and the German idealists. But Lavely’s formulations miss the decisive and characteristic fact about the emergence of personalism, namely that despite its further development more or less within the framework of idealism, it was made possible by non- or extraidealistic impulses that can only be described on the one hand as realist, and on the other as existentialist. And these impulses were decidedly anti-systematic. Thus, although there were indeed aYliations with mainly idealist systems that were not strictly personalistic, I shall argue that there were equally important aYliations with non-idealist non-systems that were strictly personalistic. The philosophical aYliations aside, Lavely recognizes that the inXuence of more or less orthodox Christian theology was crucial in the emergence of personalism when he states that personalism ‘in general’ has been ‘decisively inXuenced’ not only by ‘the Greek metaphysical’ but also ‘Biblical religious motifs of the dominant Western theological tradition’, and that ‘in virtually all its forms’ it ‘has been integrally connected with theism’. To this general and obvious observation it should be added that some speciWcally Roman inXuences on Western theology also help explain the practical moral emphasis of personalism. And at least the Scandinavian personalists were also very much aware of the speciWcally Germanic sources in the culture and mentality of northern Europe of the worldview of personalism.105 Since its integral connection with theism has not prevented personalism from having ‘usually considered itself a system defensible on philosophical grounds’,106 the article looks a little more closely at its historical aYliations, but with only small variations from Knudson’s Plato-to-Kant story. When Lavely argues that Descartes bequeathed the understanding of the identiWcation of personal experience with ‘mental substance’ to ‘nearly all forms of personalism’,107 it should be noted how some forms, also in America, had problems, of the post-Kantian kind, with the concept of substance in this connection.108 Lavely adds the observation that Berkeley contributed to Bowne’s personalism the reinterpretation of material substance ‘as the ‘‘language’’ of the Divine Person’.109

105 On these sources, see Gurevich, The Origins of European Individualism, and my review article (‘Forgotten Roots of Individualism’) 106 Encyclopedia of Philosophy (‘Personalism’). 107 Ibid. 108 See Schneider, A History of American Philosophy, 401. 109 Encyclopedia of Philosophy (‘Personalism’).

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I suggest, however, that these historical impulses did not primarily reach the American personalists directly from their sources in the philosophers mentioned, but more typically as transformed and developed by their admixture with the often indirect inXuences of Jacobi, German post-Kantian idealism, the later Schelling, and the pre-Lotzean speculative theists. Hegel may indeed have been ‘the single most important inXuence in the development of absolute idealism’, but again, in the light of the historical perspective on the development of personalism that I shall present, especially the Hegelian version of absolute idealism cannot rightly be equated with ‘absolutistic personalism’. Neither is it clear that Hegel’s ‘emphasis on dialectical movement toward wholeness’ had a ‘decided inXuence’ on ‘other’ forms of idealistic personalism except the one that is given as the notable example, that of Brightman. Hegel’s ideas of ‘the concrete universal’ and of ‘the ultimacy of spirit’, on the other hand, did inXuence idealistic personalism in other forms than Brightman’s, but as with dialectical thought, the idea of the concrete universal was imperfectly assimilated and developed due to the personalists’ perception of their problematic, more precise formulations and meanings in Hegel’s work, which often were seen to typify the shortcomings of absolute idealism. From Hegel there is the characteristic leap to Lotze, a thinker ‘who does not compare with the foregoing Wgures in eminence’ and therefore ‘deserves to be mentioned’ merely because of his inXuence on Bowne and Ladd. The judgement that the historical antecedents of personalistic philosophers like Renouvier, Stern, and Bowne ‘are so pervasive and for the most part so well-known that they need not be discussed in detail’ is not warranted.110 The article makes a distinction between ‘realistic personalism’, which ‘can best be understood in the context of supernaturalism and traditional metaphysical realism’, and ‘idealistic personalism’, which can best be understood ‘in terms of metaphysical idealism’. To the former belong thinkers like Maritain, Gilson, and Mounier. The latter can be subdivided into (1) the ‘absolute idealism’ which the article problematically equates with ‘absolutistic personalism’, represented by Green, Edward Caird, Royce, Taylor, Calkins, Hocking, and others; (2) ‘panpsychic idealism’, represented by Leibniz, Ward, F. R. Tennant, H. W. Carr, A. N. Whitehead, and C. Hartshorne; (3) ‘personal idealism’, which ‘is idealistic: all reality is personal’, ‘pluralistic: reality is a society of persons’, and ‘theistic: God is the ultimate person and, as such, is the ground of all being and the creator of Wnite persons’, and is represented by Howison, Bowne, Knudson, Flewelling, Brightman, and Bertocci, that is, the American school. This, the article reports, ‘is usually considered the most typical form of personalism’, and for this reason, again, the remainder of the article exclusively discusses the personalism of these Americans.111 The distinction between realistic and idealistic personalism is certainly valid, especially in view of the clear-cut forms of Thomistic realism on the one hand and personalistic forms of absolute idealism. But the relation between them is complex, and what the distinction misses is the fact that the historical development of 110 Ibid.

111 Ibid.

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personalism was not only shaped but made possible by a speciWc interaction of realistic and idealistic elements. Early on, personalism came to be characterized precisely by a speciWc synthesis of these elements. To separate them as two diVerent kinds of personalism is therefore misleading, with regard both to personalism’s origins and to its nature. Even the more absolute idealist forms of personalism were, I contend, inXuenced to some extent, directly or indirectly, by the realistic (and existentialist) impulses that obviously determined the development of more representative forms.112 As we have seen, some of the historians whose accounts we have considered tend to dismiss the debate between the personal and the absolute idealists in Anglo-American philosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an esoteric quibble within the narrow ranks of a dwindling current of modern idealism. Although the question cannot be explored in detail within the conWnes of this book, I suggest that this view is mistaken, that the debate marked a more central dividing line within the development of modern Western thought. If, Wrst of all, it can be seen as a continuation and permutation of the earlier continental European debate resulting from the challenge of Jacobi, the later Schelling, and others against pantheism and absolute idealism, the depth and scope of the conXict more plainly emerges. This is even more the case in light of the fuller knowledge we have today of the nature of the impersonal pantheism impugned by the early personalists. Not least important in the distinctly modern development of impersonal pantheism, as has been amply demonstrated by recent work in intellectual history, was the Xourishing of the Western esoteric tradition, in systematized and gradually secularized forms. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this tradition is in some respects constitutive of Western modernity; it has contributed both to its rationalistic, scientiWc strand and to the Romantic countercurrent. Of special importance among the recent works on absolute idealism and esotericism is Glenn Alexander Magee’s Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (2001).113 This is an important part of the background against which we must today see personalism’s emergence in opposition to impersonalistic pantheism.114 But ultimately, the contours of even more universal typological diVerences on the level of worldviews can be traced. The old tension between Wdeism and

112 There is also the more general problem of the deWnition of idealism, or ‘metaphysical idealism’. British and American philosophers tend to see Berkeley as the paradigm of idealism, but German idealism was diVerent from Berkeley’s version. Although Berkeley’s inXuence was greater on the American school, personalism as such developed mainly in relation to the German form of idealism, to which had been added the modifying impulses of Jacobi and the later Schelling. For discussions of the meaning of German idealism, see Beiser, German Idealism, and Ameriks (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, passim. 113 See also O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel. 114 There are also ‘esoteric’ versions of some of the central positions of personalism that I will discuss: the reason–understanding distinction, the personality of God, the creation of Wnite beings, even the insistence on the importance of the category of the person itself; but the stricter philosophical and theological personalism that I focus on was, in my view, characteristically on its guard against the typical wider setting of the esotericism in which these versions Wgured.

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rationalism can be found in the background of the development of personalism, but the characteristic personalist solution is not to side with one against the other. Rather, the similarities between personalism and the Augustinian, early scholastic, and Franciscan tradition in medieval philosophy, which sought in its own way to synthesize them, are in many ways striking. Modern personalism developed as a new version of synthesis, diVerent from the Hegelian one, in response to the deeper and more timeless tension between religion, revelation, and faith on one side and reason and philosophy on the other, which has shaped all traditions in which the distinction between them is fundamental. It was clearly a new synthesis, since not even Jacobi’s criticism was purely Wdeistic, a mere restatement of St Paul’s, Tertullian’s, al-Ghazzali’s, St Bernard’s, or Pascal’s criticism of the God of the philosophers. As diGiovanni and others have shown, Jacobi was in fact established in the Enlightenment tradition in a broader sense. By focusing on experience and the concept of the person, personalism approached the problem of the tension, and achieved its synthesis, in a new way, in the context of the confrontation between the results of rationalism and the religious dimension beyond it. It is on this general level that I suggest the most important broader philosophical tradition to which personalism belongs, or rather of which it can be said to be a modern development or version, is the Augustinian-Franciscan current of medieval thought.115 To some limited extent, elements of this older spirituality were renewed, in a new cultural and religious situation, in Evangelical and Pietist currents which were more direct inXuences on personalism. In many obvious ways the personalism I will describe is of course a Protestant phenomenon. But the philosophical explicitness and precision of personalism still makes the comparison with the medieval traditions more apposite than looking for personalist parallels or anticipations in Luther or Calvin. A general, older Protestant inXuence and impulse is certainly there, but it is mainly the moral sense, the idealist, and the liberal currents which developed later within Protestantism that produced personalism, and in their distinctly personalist form these currents themselves managed interestingly to reconnect in substance to the older themes of the Augustinian and Franciscan tradition and to resume its theologico-philosophical project.116 While not directly investigating these parallels, I believe that in the course of my presentation this medieval tradition’s notions of a higher, intuitive reason, its insistence on the primacy of will, its emphasis on a personal relation to God and on individual providence, and its defence of concrete individual reality against some uses of conceptualist and realist abstraction will be readily recognizable in the new, modern form of personalism. Comparative perspectives that are relevant for the understanding of modern personalism extend even further. Brightman wrote brieXy about the Wrst leading representative of theistic Vedanta in India, Ramanuja, as a personalist, and this 115 On personalist themes in St Augustine, see Berlinger, Augustins dialogische Metaphysik. 116 Twentieth-century Catholic personalism, even as developed by Dominicans and relying on Thomism, seems to me to have received a decisive impulse from the Franciscan tradition.

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comparative beginning was developed at greater length by Bertocci.117 The tradition was also mentioned by C. C. J. Webb.118 Although these parallels, which do conWrm the universal and contexttranscending aspects of early personalism, will be mentioned where relevant, they cannot, considering not least the complex methodological and hermeneutical questions involved, be systematically included within the conWnes of this book. My point here is that with all of the larger perspectives I have mentioned missing, the historians of philosophy have tended to judge personalism in the light of the philosophies that became dominant in the twentieth century. With this limited perspective, the true import of personalism and the conXicts in which it was involved have been obscured. While acknowledging the merits of the historians’ and the American personalists’ contributions to the study of the history of personalism, I will substantiate in the following three chapters the partial objections I have suggested are in place. In the light of evidence from the work of Jacobi, Schelling, the speculative theists, and the British personal idealists, it will become clear that almost all of the deWnitions and descriptions of typical personalism discussed in this chapter apply to these earlier thinkers, and that in the respects I have indicated, the history of personalism needs to be rewritten. 117 Brightman, ‘Personalism (including Personal Idealism)’, 341; Bertocci, ‘The Logic of Creationism, Advaita, and Visishtadvaita’, in The Person God Is (1970). 118 Webb, God and Personality, 88.

2 Personal ‘reason’ and impersonal ‘understanding’ In this chapter I shall look at the broadly epistemological aspect of early personalism, the aspect in which, according to the deWnitions introduced in Chapter 1, it ‘develops a worldview that begins with immediate, self-conscious experience’, and which ‘involves the claim that the basic categories or fundamental concepts of our thought should be understood in terms applicable to persons and their experiences’ (Yandell). Personalists, we have also seen, ‘construct their theories of knowledge by inference from the data of self-awareness’ (Yandell). I will argue that these positions, apart from being of course situated within the normal modern epistemological trajectory from Descartes to German idealism, developed, in their more speciWcally personalist features, out of the late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century criticism of abstract rationality and the pantheism to which it was seen to lead, both in earlier Enlightenment philosophers and in the post-Kantian idealists. The focus on the individual person and his experience, the concept of the person as the ‘key to reality’ (Knudson), was in many respects present from the outset in Jacobi’s work, and it was made central in the work of the later Schelling. Already in the late eighteenth century, the familiar thematic of the primacy of subjective experience in modern philosophy and in liberal theology broadly deWned, from the Enlightenment and Schleiermacher, was given a distinctly personalistic tournure. The criticism of the subject in terms of the person implied a new personalistic worldview. In the light of the Jacobian insights, the early personalists transformed the idealist idea of subjective self-consciousness into the idea that personality is ‘the fundamental explanatory principle’ (Lavely). A ‘sustained attempt to interpret reality in the light of ’ the conviction that ‘personality should be taken as the key to the nature of reality’ (Copleston) was in some respects made by them already long before Lotze found ‘in the conscious unity, identity, and free activity of personality the key to the nature of reality and the solution of the ultimate problems of philosophy’ (Knudson). The early Feuerbach shared the perception of the fact that ‘personality in concreto’ ‘cannot be incorporated into philosophy’s vocational impulse toward abstraction and generalization’ (Breckman), but he took the opposite view of what consequences were to be drawn from this. In its negative, critical aspect, idealistic personalism is a further development of the criticism levelled by Jacobi, but the personalists claimed to be able to overcome pantheism while still upholding crucial tenets of classical as well as

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modern idealism. The new insights were thus reinserted into a partly reformulated traditional framework, and utilized in the service of the defence of a modern concept of the person. Knudson more speciWcally lists, and discusses extensively, four ‘main articles’ in the epistemology of personalism in the strict, Bownian sense: ‘(1) the dualism of thought and thing, or idea and object, (2) the creative activity of thought, (3) the trustworthiness of reason, and (4) the primacy of the practical reason.’1 Although I will not cover these separately in this order, it will become clear how the development of this epistemology was in line with the non-systematic, realistic criticism of Jacobi and the anti-systematic, semi-realistic, and existentialistic criticism of the later Schelling, as well as with the subsequent reinsertion of both of these by the speculative theists into a modiWed idealistic framework. With regard to its personalistic results, it must to a considerable extent have been from these traditions that these epistemological themes were taken over by British personal idealism and American personalism. To self-consciousness as the point of departure belong the active aspect of will and the experience of freedom, especially but not exclusively moral freedom. These will have to be dealt with both here and, with regard more to their metaphysical and ethical signiWcance, in the following chapters.

JAC OB I Far from being simply ‘traditional’ theism, Jacobi’s personalism presented an analysis of the ‘impersonalistic’ consequences of modern rationalism and pantheism which was in some ways original.2 It also set forth a defence of theism which introduced new arguments and positions not to be found in what can reasonably be designated traditional, classical, or typical theism. Inspired by the Scottish common-sense and moral-sense tradition in combination with Romantic intuitionism and a new kind of Wdeism, Jacobi developed a version of the common analysis of his time of the errors that resulted from abstractive reason, and a defence of concrete experience, that both supplied fundamental themes for subsequent personalism. Interestingly, he also came close to the intuitive, innatist side of the modern rationalism which in other respects he turned against, and not least to Plato himself, despite his criticism of abstract metaphysical universalism.3 Emphasizing, however, like Aristotle against Plato and Lotze against Hegel, that reality is concrete and individual, Jacobi sought to understand and explain the organ in man which apprehends this reality both in the outer, material and 1 Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 99. 2 General discussions of the Pantheismusstreit, in which this analysis was Wrst introduced, are found in Timm, Gott und die Freiheit, Beiser, The Fate of Reason, diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, and Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism. 3 Jacobi, Werke, ii. 19–20, 28, 58, 75–6, 237, 260.

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the inner, spiritual and moral world. The aspect of his experientialism that is of importance here, and which was also central to Jacobi himself, is its personalistic elements and implications. The problem of individuality and universality runs as a central theme through Western philosophy, and many echoes of the controversies of Plato versus Aristotle, realism versus nominalism, rationalism versus empiricism, and Spinoza versus Leibniz are to be found in Jacobi’s writings. It was given a new twist by the early Romantic movement of which Jacobi was to a considerable extent a part, and not least by historicism. Jacobi added new and re-emphasized old insights into the possible dangers of abstract rationality and abstract universality. Kant had sought to show through the antinomies that God was not accessible to theoretical reason. If Kant nevertheless held that theoretical reason does produce an idea of God, although it could not prove, or disprove, the existence of a corresponding reality, Jacobi sought to show that theoretical reason of itself tends to disprove God as a moral, personal being. Jacobi averred that, left to itself and consistently pursued, it leads to the closed mechanical system of naturalism and materialism, and thus also to fatalism. Jacobi obviously connects to an old tradition of criticism of the God of the philosophers. The novelty of his criticism consisted in the extreme conclusions to which he took this criticism, in the fact that the criticism was not undertaken from the position of pure theological Wdeism but from a new kind of experiential personalism, and in that it was applied to speciWcally modern forms of pantheism and, later, to speciWcally modern idealism. Although there were elements of a kind of Wdeism in Jacobi, this was an experiential and philosophical Wdeism, not an appeal to outer authority and revelation. His concept of personality, like that of Kant, often retained some of the old, scholastic and classical meanings, but combined these with the new individualism of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism. Above all, he applied his criticism with a new focus on personality that was so pronounced that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that, although the criticism is highly fragmentary, rudimentary, unsystematic, frequently unclear, and sometimes Xawed by error, he established through it, in outline, the proWle of a new personalistic worldview in sharp contrast with the impersonalism of abstract rationality. It was only with Jacobi’s work, and more specifically with his new personalism, that the full implications of the typological distinction between the worldviews of impersonalistic pantheism and personalistic theism became clear in the modern Western context.4

4 Timm goes too far, however, when he asserts that it was Jacobi who gave the word its current meaning: Gott und die Freiheit, 139. The word pantheism had been used by J. Toland in a sense distinct from deism and similar to Jacobi’s in its esoteric connotations, in the early seventeenth century, and it was used throughout the century as synonymous with ‘Spinozism’; the materialistic and atheistic import of pantheism was likewise a common theme. Holbach conWrms the association by using the term as descriptive of his syste`me de la nature, the starkness of whose materialism was not mitigated by Romanticism. See the entry on ‘Pantheismus’ in Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Ritter.

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Jacobi’s was among the Wrst of the thorough criticisms of the implications of Western Enlightenment rationalism that have ever since been central in Western philosophy. Rationalism sets out to explain everything rationally; Spinoza seeks to deduce reality from an immanent ground. But free will and Wnite individuality cannot be thus explained, even in principle, and must therefore, Jacobi thinks, be left out and even in some ways denied by rationalism. And the personal God, in the full sense of the words as understood by Jacobi and his successors, cannot be thus proved. The explanation of given reality must instead, according to Jacobi, ultimately be in terms of an impersonal concept of a ‘Wrst cause, of inWnite nature . . . [a] Wrst, general, original stuV’, without reason or will.5 This is an atheistic concept, denying not only the personality of God but the supernatural and supersensory in general, and carrying with it also the consequences of determinism and fatalism.6 According to Jacobi, because of the pious reservations of other rationalists, it was only with Spinoza that it became plain that this was the ultimate result of rationalism. Spinoza, ‘more than any other philosopher’, led him ‘to the perfect conviction . . . that certain things cannot be explained [sich . . . nicht entwickeln lassen], to which one may therefore not close one’s eyes, but which one must accept as one Wnds them’.7 Although he admitted the pragmatic and to some extent philosophical validity and necessity of abstraction, Jacobi, developing further critical, empiricist tendencies that had remained inconclusive in Enlightenment philosophy, reached these results by concentrating on what followed from the emphasis on the abstractions of reason from the particularities of concrete experience, historical and spiritual, when these abstractions were left to themselves and, having lost their connection with existence, were taken as the basis for further reasoning. Since abstractions are simpliWcations, an ideal world of abstractions cannot be taken as the source of intelligibility with regard to reality; the possibility of determinate objects cannot be established on the basis of abstract concepts; reality cannot be reconstructed out of such concepts by means of conceptual inference.8 It is an illusion to think that one can reach the concept of the unconditioned through ‘continued abstractions of the understanding [des Verstandes]’: For in the abstraction one leaves out the particular relations and characteristics [Merkmale] that determine an object of the senses; one only retains the general, which then in comparison with the particular seems to be less limited [unbeschra¨nkter], no more tied to the singular determinations of the particular [die einzelnen Bedingungen des Besonderen]; and one then believes that through an abstraction from all limitations, the understanding must reach the concept of the unconditioned. This abstraction, however, is in fact not the concept of freedom as the proper [der eigentliche] concept of the unconditioned, but only the empty [nichtige] illusion [pretence, Vorspiegelung] of a whole without all content, and therefore without all limitations; a concept of the completely undetermined, since in the

5 Jacobi, Werke, iv/1. 58. 7 Ibid. iv/1. 70.

6 See e.g. ibid. ii. 99, 119, 121; iv/1. 55, 216–23. 8 diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 19, 49, 157.

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abstraction all particular determinations were disregarded. With regard to its contents this Highest Concept, to which the understanding can proceed through abstraction, is the concept of the pure negation, the pure nothingness. If one considers it to be the unconditioned ground, from which everything conditioned proceeds, then this ground is really the absolute nonground [Ungrund], a completely undetermined becoming, out of which the determined that is already become [das Bestimmt-Gewordene] shall have arisen; an all without any quality, as ground of a real world with an inWnite manifold of determinate qualities.9

Against this illusory method, Jacobi, as we will see, with a certain Xuidity and vagueness in the use of the terms meant to describe the self ’s immediate experience, insists that true rationality depends on the concrete experience of the senses as well as of inner feeling, faith, or, as he later preferred to regard it, the higher form of ‘reason’. Descartes, although he started from the intuitive principle of the cogito and the equally intuitive innate idea of God, proceeded to develop his philosophy as a system of strict conceptual demonstration; seeking to prove the existence of God, he relinquished immediacy for mediation. The problem with Spinoza is due to the further steps he takes in this direction in seeking to explain reality by the requirements of abstract conceptual reXection. Explanation is a process of reXective synthesis of representations of the known, where what is to be explained is explained through its similarities with what is already known. Spinoza, however, leaving the realm of the legitimate abstraction that is the conceptual representation of concrete, individual existence, sought explanation through a concept which would allow the most comprehensive synthesis of other representations, and regarded that concept eo ipso as the veridical representation of being. The concept he reached was that of substance—a diVerent concept than the one designated by the same term in the Aristotelian tradition—which was thus established in his system as the criterion and principle of explanation as well as of existence. Yet this, Jacobi urged, was an abstract metaphysical construction of reality out of the empty concept which in reality was impossible: the explanatory chasm between the realm of abstract rationality and what remained in fact unexplained concrete, Wnite individuality led in Jacobi’s view to a form of irrationalism.10 For Jacobi, there was no possible passage between this substance and Wnite individuals.11 At the same time, Jacobi recognized that Spinoza’s system accepted and indeed presupposed an immediate supra-rational vision of this substance, and thus of the whole of reality, sub specie aeternitatis.12 But the relation between the concept and the vision was tenuous, since Spinoza, as Jacobi saw it, maintained that the 9 Jacobi, Werke, ii. 78–9. 10 This general criticism is repeated throughout Jacobi’s works, and more references with regard to particular points will be given below; here I rely mainly on diGiovanni’s summary: diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 78–9. 11 Jacobi, Werke, iv/2. 101. 12 Spinoza describes his view of the levels of knowledge in part 2 of the Ethics, where, however, the highest level, the ‘third kind’ of knowledge, is only brieXy mentioned (The Collected Works, i. 478, 482); he returns to it in part 5, where the intuitive element is also found; it is also mentioned in the Short Treatise and in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect.

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visionary element could not be explained. Jacobi agreed with this latter concession, which distinguished Spinoza from later Enlightenment philosophers. But no more than he accepted Spinoza’s concept of substance did he accept the descriptions Spinoza nevertheless gave of the intellectual intuition. For despite its transcendence of discursive rationality and Wnitude, this vision, which his whole system required, was still determined by the abstraction of the concept of substance and of the conceptuality of the system as a whole. Not only did it transcend rationality, it also obliterated the distinction between subject and object. The vision supported and legitimized the abstract system by supplying a spurious existential basis for it. As based on the concept of substance, the system could not explain Wnite modes and individuality. But nor did the vision warrant them. In diGiovanni’s words, it ‘evoked in Jacobi’s mind the picture of a sheer outburst of self-creating energy that does not aim, itself, at anything in particular and in relation to which, therefore, the Wnite modes are superXuous by-products’. Neither necessarily nor intentionally could ultimate reality thus intuited aim at or relate to particularity and individuality, and neither to Wnite individuals nor to anything else could it stand in the relation of an intelligence to its object. Concrete individuality remained wholly arbitrary. Not even rationality itself, which erected the conceptual system, was warranted by the intellectual intuition or explained by the system, since it was necessarily a product of the unexplained distinctions of Wnitude.13 Since the absolute, inWnite, unitary substance could have no object of thought and will, and since real, particularized thought was exclusively mediate and a modiWcation or determinate form of it, Spinoza’s God could not, on Jacobi’s interpretation, be conscious intelligence at all: The proposition, from which Spinoza drew the conclusion that God, or the natura naturans, was neither understanding nor will, quite as little (which should be well noted) an inWnite as a Wnite, is this. Real thoughts, explicit [ausdru¨ckliches] consciousness, understanding, is a certain determined kind and manner, a modiWcation (modiWcatione modiWcatum) of the absolute thinking. The absolute thinking itself, unmodiWed, (inWnita cogitationis essentia) is immediately brought forth from the substance; all the diVerent kinds of thought, however, only mediately; i.e. they can all Xow immediately only from the Wnite, and must be counted as part of the created, but in no way of the uncreated nature.14

Jacobi thus shared in principle Spinoza’s view that immediate, trans- or supraconceptual certainty and insight into truth was fundamental, not the secondary certainty derived or inferred from abstract principles. But for the reasons stated, he considered Spinoza’s account of that certainty fundamentally erroneous, and as to the content of the insight, his own account could hardly diVer more radically. The conclusions of Spinoza, Jacobi maintained, could not be rationally refuted, as Leibniz, WolV, and Mendelssohn had thought. Or rather, they could not be refuted by the kind of reason that rationalism exclusively accepts and employs: the abstractively conceptual, discursive ‘understanding’, der Verstand, 13 diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 76.

14 Jacobi, Werke, iv/2. 88; cf. ibid. ii. 122.

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with its merely classiWcatory, formally logical, demonstrative, inferring, and deriving mode of operation.15 Rather, against rationalism and its conclusions, what was actually revealed through what, according to Jacobi, was the proper, higher, immediate, intuitive insight must be opposed: this could also be expressed as requiring a supra-rational leap of faith which he called a salto mortale.16 Or, as he was to say later, seemingly returning to the Platonic and pre-Thomistic intellective tradition of scholasticism, it could only be refuted by a higher form of reason, an organ with immediate, intuitive awareness of unconditioned reality. Knowledge and reality are not conWned to the limits of the understanding. God cannot be known by rational cognition; rather, rational cognition is itself dependent on the unconditioned being that is the absolute ground of the possibility of knowledge.17 But it is the nature of the higher reason to know precisely this. It is ‘on the one hand . . . a capacity of perception [Wahrnehmungsvermo¨gen] of a divine outside and above man’, and ‘on the other . . . a capacity of perception of a divine in man’.18 The self or the soul, perceiving its true spiritual nature, also thus becomes conscious of immortality, of the ideas of the true, the good, and the beautiful, and of God. But crucially, all of these higher dimensions of the self and knowledge are in Jacobi’s view inseparable from and dependent on the self as personality, as free and willing. For Jacobi the higher reality in man and beyond him is also a reality of reciprocal relation between the higher human personality and the personal God. It is through an ineradicable moral feeling, faith, or intuition in the innermost core of his being as a living person that man becomes aware of all of these aspects of higher reality. Jacobi regards it all as a revelation or manifestation of God in the inner depths of the soul.19 Jacobi acknowledged the considerable similarity of Kant’s project to Plato’s, and that Kant saw Plato as a precursor; Kant’s position was opposed to that of the new idealistic monism in a way similar to that in which Plato’s was opposed to Spinoza’s.20 Within the conWnes of his critical philosophy, Kant too made a distinction between Vernunft and Verstand;21 his analysis of the latter, while being more developed than Jacobi’s, is similar. Yet Jacobi rejected Kant’s view of the regulative ideas and the position that the idea of God is merely a necessary postulate of practical reason. Kant too, however, had an idea of a higher intuitive insight, which he called the intellektuelle Anschauung, and under the same name several diVerent versions of higher intuition were to appear in the subsequent 15 ‘[T]he power of mere concepts, judgements and conclusions, which soars (schwebend) over the senses (die Sinnlichkeit), and which cannot reveal anything at all immediately out of itself’: ibid. ii. 10; ‘a power which only creates concepts, reXecting merely over the world of sense and over itself, the understanding’: ibid. 21; cf. 28; ‘a power of reXection on sensual perceptions (Anschauungen), a power of abstractive distinction (Absonderns) and reuniWcation (Wiedervereinigens) in concepts, judgements, and conclusions’: ibid. 65. 16 Id. Werke, iv/1. 59. 17 Id. Eduard Allwills Briefsammlung, 303. 18 Id. Werke, iii. 239 n. 19 Baum, Vernunft und Erkenntnis, ch. 11. 20 Jacobi, Werke, iii. 356–7. 21 See e.g. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 302/B 359, A 664/B 692. On Kant’s distinction, see Lovejoy, The Reason, the Understanding, and Time, 3–4, 11–12, 21.

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development of German idealism. For Kant, it represented an ideal of knowledge which is possible only for God, and which human consciousness, as bound by sensibility, can never attain but merely approximate.22 For Jacobi, what he calls the Vernunftanschauung is rather, as for some of the Romantics, the equivalent of sensory perception, giving direct, intuitive knowledge of supersensory reality.23 This has sometimes been considered a theologically unorthodox idea; Jacobi does speak of reason and indeed the rational being itself as ‘originally of divine nature’—if it were not, it could attain ‘neither a true knowledge nor a true love of God’.24 But this did not imply a monistic identity of the Wnite person and God—this was precisely what Jacobi turned against. The higher perception is inseparable from the moral feeling and willing of the free person. When Jacobi sought to establish his own version of the distinction between Vernunft and Verstand, it had to be quite diVerent from the monistic ones. His sometimes ambiguous view of man’s organ of higher knowledge, combining Wdeistic, Platonic, Spinozistic, Scottish, and Romantic elements, can be seen to be close in some respects to the Augustinian and Franciscan tradition;25 the distinction between Vernunft and Verstand corresponded in some respects to the classical distinction between nous and dianoia and the medieval distinction between intellectus and ratio. The reason why he took up the distinction was that he came to regard his earlier use of the terminology of faith as a mistake that had given rise to accusations of irrationalism. Since Coleridge, the terminological distinction is rendered in English—less felicitously, it seems to me—as that between reason and understanding.26 Jacobi maintained that it was only a question of a correction on the terminological level. He had Wrst chosen the term faith, he explained, because he had mistakenly identiWed the understanding with reason. But from the beginning, the important thing for him had been the diVerence between the understanding and the higher faculty of faith/reason.27 In a terminologically interesting way, Jacobi also distinguishes between the Wahrnehmungen of the sensory and the Vernehmungen of the supersensory (cf. Vernunft), and holds that philosophy begins only as the latter are clearly perceived to be distinct from the former.28 Jacobi also used other expressive German 22 On Kant’s view of this faculty, see Lovejoy, The Reason, the Understanding, and Time, 21. 23 This could be compared to William Alston’s defence of ‘perception’ of God as comparable with sensory perception; see Alston, Perceiving God. 24 Jacobi, Werke, iii. 239 n.; cf. 400. As a tendency to divinization of man (man, or the rational essence of man, was originally of divine nature), this was of course quite diVerent from Feuerbach’s humanization of God (man qua man is God), although the latter is a further development of the humanism of which the former too is an expression. 25 In some respects it also comes close to the contemporaneous French Catholic ‘ontologism’. 26 On Coleridge’s distinction, see Lovejoy, The Reason, the Understanding, and Time, 17; it was taken up also by Carlyle, and in America by Emerson; ibid. 15–19; cf. diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 161–2. 27 Almost the whole of the long ‘Vorrede’ to the 1815 edition of David Hume in the Werke, which also serves as an introduction to the Werke as a whole, is devoted to the explanation of the distinction. 28 Jacobi, Werke, ii. 56. According to Kaufmann, ‘the word ‘‘reason’’ is for Buber—in distinction from Kant, and as in the circle of J. G. Hamann, J. G. Herder and Jacobi—the principal noun that goes

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terminological constructions such as Geistesgewißheit and Wesenheitsgefu¨hl; for our purposes, the important thing to keep in mind is the inseparability of this multidimensional higher faculty from the person—Jacobi’s Vernunft is indeed identical with personality.29 Jacobi was well aware that modern pantheism also had mystical roots, that there was a connection between older monistic mysticism and modern rationalistic and Romantic pantheism—alluding to the Kabbalah and its inXuence on Spinoza, he speaks of the ‘immanent Ensoph’—and he thus seeks to distance himself from such mysticism, as his epistemological position could appear to approximate it.30 With his idea of faith/reason, he asserted the primacy not only of the concrete experience of external reality, but also of the awareness of metaphysical reality. In his early work he used the term faith for the immediate certainty of both. In his later work, the term reason was reserved for the latter. Jacobi sees faith as being in both cases the acceptance of a revealed reality, in the sense of a self-revealing reality. When Jacobi spoke of revelation, it was not the ‘outer’ revelation preserved and transmitted by Church authority that he had in mind, but the ‘outer’ revelation of sensorily perceived reality as well as—and still more—the ‘inner’ revelation through intuitive awareness of the world of spirit and divine transcendence. In both cases there was an element of passive receptivity in the perception of the given character of reality.31 But Jacobi also pointed both to an element of active grasping of the higher content of reason and to the personal, moral prerequisites of its revelation. What Jacobi termed faith or reason in the higher sense was introspective and intuitive, immediate, underived, above demonstration, a consciousness of transcendent reality which included and superseded Kant’s faith as well as his practical reason.32 It was distinct not only from the understanding as deWned above, but also from the dialectical, connective, totalizing or synthetic reason which Hegel sought to show that the understanding must in reality be developed or extended into. In addition to the traditions already mentioned, the early Jacobi was strongly inXuenced by Rousseau, and elements of Romantic emotionalism also clearly entered into this notion. Jacobi did not remain an uncritical Romanticist, however, and he later rejected important aspects of Rousseau’s teaching and character, especially those expressed in the Confessions and Du contrat social. This was probably after painful personal experience of the hazards of the Romantic ‘beautiful soul’.33

with ‘‘perception’’, so that reason forms the bridge between I and Thou’: ‘Martin Buber’s Philosophy of Religion’, 214. 29 Baum, Vernunft und Erkenntnis, 186. 30 Jacobi, Werke, iv/1. 56, 217–20; Timm, Gott und die Freiheit, 156. 31 diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 80; cf. Jacobi, Werke, ii. 107–8; Jacobi an Fichte, 45–6. 32 Jacobi, Werke, ii. 9, 28, 58, 74–6, 106. 33 Ibid. 74, 105–6. Schmid, in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, devotes one chapter to Jacobi as a ‘founder’ of Romanticism and another to him as its ‘opponent’. For the Rousseauan inspiration, see Christ, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi; for the criticism of Rousseau, see Heraeus, Fritz Jacobi und der Sturm

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The essential thing for Jacobi, however, was that it was always a question of the same supra-rational, non-abstractive intuition.34 Jacobi was a realist in the sense that he accepted immediate, intuitive contact with reality. Individual experience was the primary as well as the highest form of knowledge. The higher intuition was for Jacobi an immediate certainty and the presupposition, even the origin of truth. The certainty of proof depends on and is derived from it.35 In it, the objective reality of the ideals of goodness, truth, and beauty implied and was implied by the objective reality of God. It was a natural capacity present in all men, although the degree to which it was actually developed was dependent on the improvement of moral character, on education, and on the assimilation of tradition.36 Jacobi emphasized strongly the practical, moral preconditions of knowledge. What philosophy we choose depends on our personal mentality and character (and for Jacobi, there are ultimately only two philosophies, Spinozism and Platonism).37 Man’s thought depending more on his actions than his actions on his thoughts, ‘the way of knowledge is a mysterious [geheimnisvoller] one— not syllogistic—not mechanical’.38 It is also, for Jacobi, eminently a personal one. That freedom is related to Jacobi’s ‘epistemology’39 becomes clear in the following passage, where he gives an account of the—in his view—illusory scientiWc grounding of abstractive rationality, which he calls an ‘absurdity’. Jacobi explains that the concept of freedom, as a true concept of the unconditioned, is ineradicably rooted in the human mind [Gemu¨the], and makes it necessary for the human soul to strive for a knowledge of the unconditioned that lies beyond the conditioned. Without the consciousness of this concept no one would know about the limitations of the conditioned that they are limitations; without the positive perception or feeling of reason [Vernunftgefu¨hl] of something Higher than the world of sense the understanding would never move outside the circle of the conditioned, and would not even have achieved the negative concept of the unconditioned. Now it is, however, nonsensical to put a mere negation at the head of all philosophizing; but the feeling of reason subdues the sense of [u¨berwa¨ltigt] this absurdity in the understanding, and because the abstraction can proceed to the most general and most undetermined, one holds the absolute-undetermined [das Absolut-Unbestimmte] to be the truly undetermined [das Wahrhaft-Unbedingte], the concept of freedom itself, and

und Drang, 18–20; for the hazards of the ‘beautiful soul’, see Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism. In his Wction, Jacobi critically portrayed the ‘beautiful soul’. 34 diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 31. Higher reason did not, for Jacobi, have merely a general idea of God; similarly, Jacobi diVered from Reid in holding that we have immediate knowledge of objects in our perceptions, that our knowledge is not primarily of ideas of objects. 35 Jacobi, Werke, iv/1. 210. 36 Ibid. iii. 278–9; iv/1. pp. xxv, 212, 214, 231–2, 234–6, 238, 240–2, 249; Jacobi an Fichte, 45–6. 37 This position, developed also by Fichte and Schelling, was stressed in the Wrst biography of Jacobi, Zirngiebl’s Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, 181–2; this work is perceptive also with regard to other ‘personalist’ aspects of Jacobi’s work: ibid. 164–84, 365–6. 38 Jacobi, Werke, iv/1. 249. 39 The term, and indeed the full understanding of it as a distinct part of philosophy, is a later nineteenth-century one.

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ignoring the true source, namely the perception of reason, one looks for its root in the understanding.40

Although he rejected Kant’s synthetic apriorism,41 Jacobi, breaking with traditional theism, largely accepted Kant’s criticism of pure reason as a rejection of false rationalism, and as paving the way for a theism based on a true rationalism.42 Science must be misleading as a guide to ultimate truth, depending as it does on abstractive demonstration. God is indeed unknowable and indemonstrable by reason as understood by Kant. Since proof always depends on something outside that which is to be proved, Jacobi thinks that a God who could be known by demonstrative proof would not be God at all;43 in this, Hegel concurred. For Jacobi, philosophy must begin with intuition and with life as a process of immediacy. In the unity of personal consciousness, it is reason’s intuitive awareness of an absolute and supreme transcendent reality, of freedom, and of personality, the principle of unity that the soul itself provides, that generates in the understanding the tendency to order the whole of experience under some such unitary principle. The impulse of science is driven by this imperfect reXection in the understanding of the content of reason, which the understanding expresses in terms of principles of abstract universality.44 Working only with concepts abstracted from sensory, world-immanent experience, and with ideas construed out of concepts, the understanding cannot supplant reason, but only substitute these concepts and ideas. It is thus fundamentally misleading with regard to a reality which experience reveals as irreducibly individualized.45 Demonstration being for Jacobi purely analytic, the understanding cannot reveal any reality by itself. By forcing its abstractions upon reality, the understanding denies the reality of that which in fact motivates its working. Thence the pantheism of Spinoza. Unable to reach the realities perceived by that sense for the supersensible that is reason, the understanding is not only, because of this very nature, caught in antinomies when it reaches for them, but tends to deny them.46 The consequence is what Breckman, as we have seen, terms ‘the nihilistic monism of universal rationality’, the worldview that emerges out of the practice of science as it replaces philosophy as wisdom, as the concern with the things of the higher reason. In fact, ever since the speculation of the pre-Socratics, it was, according to Jacobi, this confusion of the abstractive rationality of the understanding and the awareness of reason that had given rise to various pantheistic or atheistic worldviews. The tendency having been further reinforced since Aristotle, and still more with Descartes, its terminus was the scientism of the radical Enlightenment. The immediate, the original, intuition, perception, were subordinated to the mediate, the derived, the concept, reXection. Rationalistic philosophy accepted only what 40 Jacobi, Werke, ii. 80–1; cf. 101. 41 With other early critics he understood this as yielding knowledge before experience. 42 Jacobi, Werke, ii. 21. 43 Ibid. iii. 7; cf. ii. 105; iv/1. 210, 223, 230. 44 Ibid. ii. 80–1, 100. 45 Ibid. iv/1. 57–8. 46 Ibid. ii. 19. For Jacobi, in (a certain kind of) idealism, the understanding also leads to the denial of the reality of the external world: ibid. 108.

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could be demonstrated by the understanding, by mediation of concepts and ideas, generating concepts out of concepts, moving indeWnitely from one abstract idea to another quite apart from experience: an ultimate principle which is unconditioned only as empty and indeterminate.47 However, while endeavouring to show the absurd consequences of denying the experience of a reality that transcends external nature, Jacobi does not yet challenge the description of nature of contemporary science in terms of physics and mathematics, as ruled by uniform laws (although, as so often, it is diYcult to ascertain Jacobi’s precise position), as the Romantics were soon to do. The personalists would normally agree on the phenomenality of the space-time world, whereas Jacobi’s realism in its ‘external’, sensory aspect implies its objective reality. And yet it was Jacobi’s own insights into a higher intuitive, personalist Vernunft that were later developed in the direction of a new, ‘non-realist’ way of experiencing time. It should also be pointed out that Jacobi, with Leibniz, denied the possibility of an exclusively mechanical universe. Mechanism was for him merely accidental and dependent on the activity of the conscious ground of the universe. He disagreed with the Romantic idealists who thought that insistence on transcendence implies contempt for nature.48 Elsewhere in his thinking, however, Romanticism is predominant. Among the modern elements in Jacobi’s view of philosophy we Wnd his insistence that the sphere of the higher intuition is that of life: Jacobi’s Platonic tendencies are supplemented by a distinctly Romantic dynamism with regard to the concrete content of this intuition. Some Jacobi scholars have thought that this makes him a pioneer of early twentieth-century ‘philosophy of life’. There are connections, but what is normally overlooked is that Jacobi would have rejected outright the new kind of irrationalism. What he did was to subordinate rationality to a suprarational life, whereas the new life-philosophy was preponderantly sub-rational. More importantly, Jacobi argued that philosophy’s role was positively to reveal or unveil existence: ‘In my judgement the greatest merit of the philosopher [der Forscher] is to unveil and reveal existence [Daseyn zu enthu¨llen, und zu oVenbaren]. Explanation is for him a means, a road towards the goal, a proximate, never an

47 See e.g. Jacobi, Werke, ii. 11–12. Jacobi did not, however, reject the conceptual mediation of the understanding, the function of the abstractive operations for limited purposes. This is one respect in which he diVered from Rousseau, as well as from his friend J. G. Hamann, by whom he was also inspired and with whom he is often compared. Because of the conceptual identity behind the terms faith and reason, the accusations of irrationalism were answered not only by this change of terminology, but also by his admission that the understanding did indeed have a ministrative function not only in relation to sensory knowledge but also in relation to the intellectual content of reason: to the extent that it was capable of it, Jacobi now held (moving closer to Hegel), it also expressed the latter, in representations and reXective, abstract concepts. Yet ideas are derived from experience as understood by Jacobi, and philosophy must always remain in contact with the latter; see diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 163. Jacobi’s acceptance of Verstand is stressed by Baum; on Jacobi’s divergence from Rousseau in ¨ ber das Verha¨ltnis von Erkenntnisgewißheit und Anschauungsgewißheit this respect, see also Baum, ‘U in F. H. Jacobis Interpretation der Vernunft’, 14–15. 48 Jacobi, Werke, iv/1. 26; ii. 113.

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ultimate goal. His ultimate goal is what is not susceptible to explanation: the indissoluble [or unanalysable, das UnauXo¨sliche], the immediate, the simple.’49 Not only the older rationalism, but also the new idealism, building on abstraction, denied or failed to reveal existence, to grasp the true place of concrete, individual reality intuitively experienced. Jacobi turned against Kant’s representational syntheses, which, not only being unable truly to represent freedom and the personal God, also precluded direct, intuitive knowledge and contact with the real on any level. For Jacobi, idealism ultimately made the mind itself or the subject the source of all knowledge. He clearly saw Fichte’s metaphysics as related to the revolutionary ideology in France. Idealism was for Jacobi partly a variation of Enlightenment rationalism; it was, as Fichte himself said of his own philosophy, a ‘reversed [umgekehrt] Spinozism’,50 which, just like the earlier rationalism, sought to explain everything and necessarily had to do so in terms of an abstract concept of a single empty principle; in this version, it was the subject. Already in Kant’s deduction of the categories of experience from a unitary self-consciousness Jacobi saw a dubious monism; Fichte deduced the universe from an absolute I. Ultimately, Jacobi sought to show, it all leads to what, with a newly invented term, he calls nihilism.51 Idealism and materialism both denied the dual reality of the spiritual subject and the objective world and sought to reduce the one to the other. The subject-objectivity of Schelling’s identity-philosophy was, as Jacobi clearly saw, merely a variation of Spinoza’s ultimate identiWcation of thinking and extended substance. Although Spinoza’s system was materialistic, thought and extension being irreducible to each other, the former thinking only the latter, which was thus the real, objective, or ‘formal’ being, there was, with only one substance, with the identity of subject and object, of body and soul, only a small step to idealism. In light of the underlying mysticism, it could easily be reconceived as idealism.52 The diVerence between idealism and materialism was in Jacobi’s view unimportant; they both denied the decisive duality of the experience of persons. Against such impersonalism Jacobi opposes a wholly diVerent mode of philosophizing. Fritz Kaufmann speaks of a tradition extending from J. G. Hamann and Jacobi to Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, and Buber, which ‘sees the function of philosophic thinking rather in the Deixis (the pointer), the striking example, than in the Apodeixis (the demonstration), and takes cognition as recognition,

49 Ibid. iv/1. 72 (my italics). 50 Ibid. iii. 12, 354. 51 Ibid. ii. 108; iii. 44. On the origin, the earlier use, and Jacobi’s use of the term nihilism, see Po¨ggeler, ‘Hegel und die Anfa¨nge der Nihilismus-Diskussion’, Man and World, 3 : 3 (1970), 179–81, 186–9, 198–9 nn. 2, 6, 9; Timm, ‘Die Bedeutung der Spinozabriefe Jacobis fu¨r die Entwicklung der idealistischen Religionsphilosophie’, 79–81; Mu¨ller-Lauter, ‘Nihilismus als Konsequenz des Idealismus’; and Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche, pp. xvii, 65–7, 275–6 n. 5, and my review article on this work in Humanitas. The term had been used in a positive sense, in connection with his acceptance of Kant, by the pantheist mystic J. H. Obereit. 52 Jacobi, Werke, iii. 10–12, 354, 430–3 n.; Timm, Gott und die Freiheit, 138. Spinoza’s position is stated in part 2 of his Ethics.

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knowledge as acknowledgement’.53 In this mode, Jacobi sought to reveal existence also in his philosophical novels. diGiovanni shows that Jacobi was groping towards a historical and social form of reason, citing Hegel’s late approval of his work. On one level, what was at issue in Jacobi’s thought was ‘Leibniz’s original problem of connecting universal truths of reason with contingent facts of history without sacriWcing either the concreteness of history to the abstractions of metaphysics or the universality of truth to the relativism of space and time’. Jacobi was, diGiovanni argues, concerned to show that ‘rationality could not be based on metaphysical abstractions but had to be deWned . . . in terms of relations between actual individuals. Theory of rationality and theory of human individuality had to be inextricably bound together.’ He was looking for a reason concerned with ‘rationality as it emerges through human actions—within relations between human individuals and (as Jacobi would insist) between human individuals and God, which relations establish meanings and values that are absolute yet never to be abstracted from the historical contexts within which they arise’.54 As diGiovanni seeks to show, Jacobi had at his disposal a model of rationality according to which natural right ‘had more to do with the dignity of persons (which can never be emptied of historical content) than with any cosmic theory’. Such inspiration, not ‘the ideology of the standard liberalism of his day’, was behind Jacobi’s early political defence of individual freedom.55 More precisely, Jacobi was inspired by a British, and to some extent a Swiss, version of liberal thought,56 and turned against the Jacobin one. Jacobi is in line not only with Hegel, in one aspect of his thought, but also with the historicist conservatism of Burke, in the latter’s opposition to the ‘thoroughbred metaphysicians’ of the Enlightenment and the transgressions that ensued from their disregard of historically evolved concrete particulars.57 Yet Jacobi’s age, diGiovanni says—seemingly oblivious of Burke and his inXuence in Germany—was not ready for these insights, seeing in historicism nothing but relativism. diGiovanni holds that for Jacobi faith was ‘the matrix of reason’, and must always be a ‘historical phenomenon’.58 With ‘at least some Christians’, Jacobi, he thinks, should have explored, as did Hamann, the religious tradition of those who ‘staked their beliefs in universal values on the testimony of highly individualized events’, instead of relying on ‘Spinoza’s intellectual vision’: ‘on Jacobi’s avowed premises, that faith ought to be the matrix of individual encounters resulting in highly particularized actions and expressions’, and not, as in Spinoza’s vision, ‘the point at which time and space, 53 Kaufmann, ‘Martin Buber’s Philosophy of Religion’, 206. 54 diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 83–4, 165. 55 The political import of Jacobi’s defence of freedom has been stressed by Homann. 56 Jacobi had studied in Geneva. 57 Jacobi was an explicit critic of the French revolution; for the connection between the Pantheismusstreit and this criticism, and between Jacobi and Burke, see Ferry, Philosophie politique, 2. Le syste`me des philosophies de l’histoire (1984), 41–3, and Homann, F. H. Jacobis Philosophie der Freiheit, ch. 2. 58 diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 85; Jacobi, Werke, iv/1. 234–7.

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even language, is absorbed into the all-encompassing substance’. Jacobi should have been led ‘to that testing and interpretation of witnesses, that constant dialogue with others and reXection upon oneself that make for historical truth’.59 The problem with this interpretation is that it does not seem to take full cognizance of the meaning that Jacobi himself attached to one aspect of what in his early work he termed faith and in his later work he called reason. We have already seen how his use of the idea of intellectual intuition diVered from Spinoza’s. As diGiovanni is well aware, Jacobi wanted to account not only for the relations to the objects of sense and to Wnite personal individuals, but also for the relation to God. It is true that, from man’s point of view, encounters with God are ‘highly individualized events’ and ‘highly particularized actions’, in the sense that they fall within man’s historical and local existence. But in that they are at the same time encounters with a being who in some sense transcends time and space, they are also encounters with the eternal and inWnite. In fact, personal reason itself has in Jacobi’s view an extra-temporal reach. Such encounters certainly leave a historical record, in testimonies that can be examined, but the encounters themselves, by which, according to Jacobi, man is ultimately individualized, must take place on the side of man by means of a faculty or aspect of his inner life which is diVerent from that which apprehends the space-time world, its objects, and other Wnite beings subject to it, a faculty which in some sense transcends their limitations. The higher reason is indeed intuitive, but it must in one aspect also be trans-historical, as is indeed faith. For Jacobi, it guarantees a dualism of spirit and matter. Not least in his late book Von den go¨ttlichen Dingen, which diGiovanni unfortunately does not translate, but also in the earlier ones, Jacobi turns explicitly and sharply against the view that reason develops out of sensuality or irrational nature: being spirit and originated in God, it is completely separate from the lower nature; it is not born out of it, it is not a further development of sensuality, but ‘proceeded immediately out of God’; man ‘feels and knows himself to be at the same time subjected to nature and elevated above it, and calls that in himself which elevates itself above nature, his nobler and better part, his Reason, his freedom’.60 Denying, as it seems, that the later term reason merely expressed one aspect of what Jacobi had earlier termed faith and that it left the earlier description of the understanding standing, diGiovanni writes that, ‘to the extent that in his Wnal thought he reinterpreted reason as an inner light, he actually withdrew it from the Xux of history, whereas the central problem of the Enlightenment was precisely to show how reason, qua reason, could nevertheless be a historical act’. But if this is so, it is hardly accurate to say that the intention to conceive of reason historically is ‘the one theme that brings together all aspects of [Jacobi’s] work’.61 Linking Jacobi to present agendas in philosophy, diGiovanni does not seem to take seriously enough Jacobi’s interest in religious thought and the dimension of 59 diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 84–6. 60 Jacobi, Werke, iii. 378, 398; cf. ii. 9, 20, 26–8, 106, 119–20. 61 diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 50, 66.

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the epistemological problem that followed from his view of the distinct nature of God. This despite the fact that he is aware, for instance, that ‘Jacobi found the ‘‘eye’’ metaphor especially Wtting as a characterization of human reason because the physical eye, just as human reason, according to Jacobi, must presuppose its object as given’, and that the metaphor thus ‘underscored the diVerence between a reason that, like the human, is Wnite and receptive, and God’s creative one. The distinction was motivated by the desire to retain a Wlial-like, personal relationship between creature and creator.’62 It is true that Jacobi’s language is ambiguous in many respects, and it is obvious that he left many questions open. But his formulations about a higher intuitive reason which is to some extent transhistorical but whose very essence is such as to prevent the Wnite subject, the Wnite individual person, being ‘absorbed into the all-encompassing substance’, must be seen not only as central to Jacobi’s philosophy, but as a step in the development of the new personalist understanding of knowledge. The intuition of higher reason was for Jacobi another concrete experience, since God was another concrete reality. Such reality was not exhausted by the exclusively human and worldly historical realm. Although Jacobi tends to view God as personal in a sense similar to that in which humans are personal, the ‘Thou’ of God is for him of course also diVerent from the ‘Thou’ of other men, as we shall see more clearly in subsequent chapters. Because of Jacobi’s emphasis on the primacy and ultimacy of this relation to the ‘Thou’ of God, and of the faculty through which it is experienced, diGiovanni’s interpretation of Jacobi’s reason in Hegelian terms must be said to be taken a little too far. diGiovanni himself reports that even as the late Jacobi was gratiWed to receive a sympathetic review from Hegel, he insisted on the remaining diVerence with regard to the manner in which they went beyond Spinoza.63 If the higher perception belonging to the later Jacobi’s idea of reason and the aspect of the early Jacobi’s faith to which this, at least in Jacobi’s own view, corresponds are added to diGiovanni’s account,64 we get the whole picture of the personalistic analysis of consciousness and knowledge which Jacobi opposed to logical rationalism. Jacobi began to see in personality, in Knudson’s and Copleston’s words, the key to reality, and the solution to at least some philosophical problems. In human personal experience, the unity of freedom, apprehended through faith/reason, and necessity, apprehended through the understanding, was a reality, but a reality that, as Jacobi saw it, must remain a mystery.65 This is not to say that Jacobi’s analysis of the understanding and of reason which he bequeathed to early personalism is complete or satisfactory. There is missing a development of the insights into the nature of a a kind of historical, dialectical, philosophical reason, diVerent from both the understanding and the

62 diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 99. 63 Ibid. 166. On Hegel’s praise of Jacobi, see Lovejoy, The Reason, the Understanding, and Time, 5–6, and Verra, ‘Jacobis Kritik am deutschen Idealismus’. 64 For the latter, see further diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 95–9, 164–5. 65 Ibid. 163–4.

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higher reason as Jacobi describes them—a partial truth in Hegel which was obscured for him and for his personalist successors by the ambiguities of Hegel’s incomplete formulation of it and by the problems with the metaphysics of which in his work it was a part.66 To philosophers, Jacobi’s formulations often seem none too precise. But as an expression of his novel, non-scholastic mode of thinking and communicating, they seek at least to describe and defend the full range of a distinct organ of awareness in man which is inseparable from his personhood. And he was tending towards the view that its awareness was of a reality that is itself ultimately personal.

SCHELLING Jacobi’s criticism was decisive not only for the personalist movement, but also for the development of post-Kantian German idealism. Despite the fact that Jacobi was persistently critical of this idealism, his ideas strongly inXuenced Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Accepting Jacobi’s challenge, Fichte responded by trying to work out a new, vitalistic philosophy which would not diminish the fullness of experience but do justice to it by building on the heart and the will and not the mind and understanding alone. Yet although he himself thought otherwise, Fichte did not in fact go beyond what Jacobi insisted remained the fundamental idealistic subjectivism of his position.67 Jacobi too had defended and explained the essential and unique features of self-consciousness. But Fichte also accepted Kant as Jacobi had interpreted and rejected him, making the ‘self ’ the sole and suYcient Wrst principle of his philosophy: the self is ‘practical, self-legislating, and to that extent entirely determined through itself: it itself determines, and determines itself. It is at once actor [agens] and that which is acted upon [patiens].’68 Developing his own version of the intellectual intuition, Fichte formally shared Jacobi’s view that such intuition is beyond and inaccessible to concepts, that it is immediate and original, and that philosophy must be based upon it.69 But for Fichte this intuition was nothing other than self-consciousness itself, the self ’s awareness of itself and its activity. Although it contained some of the aspects of feeling and will that Jacobi had insisted on, it was not an intuition or experience of anything higher than the self: the self was indeed the highest reality, and possibly the only reality.70 On Jacobi’s analysis, it must remain an empty principle. Although Fichte, like the other major German idealists, in some respects 66 For a recent defence of this kind of reason, as further described by B. Croce, see Ryn, Will, Imagination and Reason. 67 On Fichte’s understanding of himself as in agreement with Jacobi, see Lovejoy, The Reason, the Understanding, and Time, 6–7. 68 Fichte, Gesamtausgabe, ii/3. 176, cited in Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 44. 69 Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 41. 70 Fichte later to some extent modiWed this position.

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inXuenced personalism, this was not the way in which personalism makes inferences from or begins with the data of immediate self-conscious experience. Schelling too adopted unapologetically the position of the self as the principle of philosophy, yet even his early elaboration of this non-Jacobian position is plainly inXuenced by Jacobi himself, as in the following passage from the preface to Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy (1795): allow me to note, with regard to the principles that are the foundation of this dissertation, that the business of a philosophy that is based on the nature of man itself cannot be dead formulae, like so many prisons of the human spirit, or merely a philosophical artefact [Kunststu¨ck], which reduces the present concepts to higher ones and buries the living work of the human spirit in dead mental faculties; that it must rather, to say it with an expression of Jacobi’s, reveal and unveil existence, that its nature, its spirit must thus not be formulae and literalism [Buchstabe], its highest object not what is mediated through concepts, laboriously joined in concepts, but what is immediate in man and present only to itself . . . 71

On this basis, Schelling proceeded to develop his own, distinct version of the intellektuelle Anschauung.72 Like Jacobi, Schelling accepted Kant’s merely hypothetical, supra-discursive intuition as real, necessary, and possible not only for God, but present to some extent in human consciousness. He also accepted Jacobi’s own view that the true philosopher is not to be identiWed with the prevalent image of philosophy: for people whose whole philosophical energy is limited to the analysis of ‘dead and abstract concepts’, there is nothing real. The activity of the self is not reducible to or dissolvable into mere thought-processes: One who feels and perceives [erkennt] nothing real in himself and outside himself—who altogether lives only in concepts, and plays with concepts—whose faculty of perception [Anschauungsvermo¨gen] is long ago killed . . . through . . . dead speculation—whose own existence itself is to himself nothing but a pale thought—how can such a one speak about reality (the blind about the colours)?73

The adoption of philosophical positions depends on preconceptual factors. In his own version of the leap beyond rationalism, Schelling holds that ‘every system bears the mark of individuality on its forehead, since none can be completed other than practically (i.e. subjectively)’. He takes the argument far: ‘The more a philosophy approaches the system, the more freedom and individuality has a part in it, and the less it can claim general validity.’ In a more moderate formulation, 71 Schelling, Werke, i. 156; cf. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ii. 171 n. N: ‘The perfect science shuns [scheut] all philosophical artefacts, through which the I itself is, as it were, dissembled, and is split in faculties which are not conceivable under any common principle of unity. The perfect science is not about [geht nicht auf] dead faculties which have no reality, and are real only in the artiWcial abstraction; rather is it about the perfect unity of the I, which is itself in all expressions of its activity; in it all the diVerent faculties and actions which philosophy has always postulated, become only One faculty, only One action, of the same identical I.’ 72 See Lovejoy, The Reason, the Understanding, and Time, passim. Frank discusses the inXuence on Schelling of Jacobi’s feeling or faith and his understanding of unconditioned, original being, in The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, lectures 3 and 4. 73 Schelling, Werke, i. 353.

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Schelling holds that: ‘A system of knowledge is necessarily either artefact, a play with thoughts . . . or it must achieve [erhalten] reality, not through a theoretical, but through a practical, not only through a perceiving [erkennender] faculty, but through a productive, realizing one, not through knowing, but through action.’74 The practical emphasis is clearly stronger than in Jacobi: ‘no man can convince himself of one [of two opposite] system[s] except pragmatically, i.e. by realizing the system in himself.’75 But as for Jacobi, the experienced, and as such irrefutable, reality of freedom is fundamental: whichever system we choose ‘depends on the freedom of the spirit, which we have ourselves acquired. We must be that which we theoretically want to claim; that we in fact are this, however, of this nothing but our own striving to be it can convince us. This striving realizes our knowledge to ourselves; and this becomes precisely thereby a pure product of our freedom.’76 It is under the inXuence of Jacobi that the early Schelling breaks radically with Kant and elevates intuition, as intimately related to action and character, as primary in knowledge. And already in the early Schelling there likewise followed from the emphasis on the immediate strong tendencies to a new, Jacobian appreciation of the individually and concretely existent. Schelling criticizes Spinoza for taking the position of a privileged observer—what is today called ‘the view from nowhere’—and dismisses the mechanistic model of nature with the argument that—in Snow’s words—‘any philosophy unable to account for the existence of the philosopher who thinks it (the knowing self) is deWcient, or at the very least, incomplete’. Schelling ‘scornfully rejects the shortcut of abstraction as employed by the dogmatist . . . This dogmatic (science) typically consists of the selection of certain abstract principles and understands nature only insofar as it conforms to them.’ From an early stage, Schelling’s absolute idealism diVered from Hegel’s, whose claims on behalf of the concrete were soon often perceived to remain largely nominal and were insuYciently grounded in his metaphysics: incapable of breaking with the legacy of Platonic abstract universalism despite his eVorts at establishing a new point of departure for philosophy, Hegel was seen to deWne man by thought and philosophy by thinking in terms of the universal and essential. Furthermore, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, introducing a complex play of opposed, dynamic forces, also resulted in an elevation of the will and a discovery of the unconscious, thus leaving further behind the rigid faculty psychology of Kant and approaching a more concrete understanding of the human person.77 Schelling’s Wnal move away from his own version of absolute idealism had thus been prepared by important new elements already in his early philosophy of the 74 Ibid. 304–5. 75 Ibid. 306. 76 Ibid. 308. This, Snow observes, Schelling wrote two years before Fichte made his more famous statement of the same insight: ‘What sort of philosophy one chooses depends . . . on what sort of man one is; for a philosophical system is not a dead utensil that we can accept or reject as we wish, it is rather a thing animated by the soul of the person who holds it.’ Fichte, Ausgewa¨hlte Werke, i. 434, cited in Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 31. Jacobi commented on the passage in his letter to Fichte: Jacobi, Werke, iii. 55. 77 Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 7, 66, 73–4, 83.

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self and in his Naturphilosophie.78 Jacobi’s work had been decisive for the introduction of these themes in Schelling’s early philosophy. It became even more central in his later development. Yet there remained the diVerence that Schelling continued in large measure to defend reason against the one-sided intuitionism that he thought Jacobi presented. In 1811 Schelling refused to accept Jacobi’s contention that ‘It is . . . in the interest of science that there be no God’.79 Schelling insisted that reason, in the non-Jacobian sense, can reach the highest reality, that philosophy is real philosophy ‘only so long as the view or conviction persists [u¨brig ist] that through it something can be scientiWcally [wissenschaftlich] decided [sich . . . ausmachen lasse] about the existence or nonexistence of God’.80 When, as he perceived it, he was attacked by Jacobi in Von den go¨ttlichen Dingen (1811), Schelling immediately seized upon this aspect of Jacobi’s position: a simple appeal to immediate intuition was nothing but dangerous irrationalism, the kind of Schwa¨rmerei that Kant had rightly warned against. Hegel famously condemned Schelling for similar illusory shortcuts to insight, but it is noteworthy how clear Schelling himself is in his polemic against Jacobi and in most of his later philosophy about the necessity of their condemnation. Against Jacobi’s new kind of Wdeism and intuitionism, Schelling, in his Denkmal der Schrift von den go¨ttlichen Dingen v. des Herrn Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, perhaps somewhat truculently put out the following year, denied that philosophical and scientiWc reason must ineluctably lead to atheism.81 For a long period in Schelling’s career, the themes of personalism are introduced more clearly than in Jacobi into the domain of rational philosophy, and are considered defensible on its grounds. If Jacobi came to hold that what he had once called faith was a kind of reason, Schelling revised his view of reason but did not wholly abandon it. The new search for the ground of nature and spirit which replaced his earlier preoccupation with the problem of the relation between them was still a philosophical quest which retained a place for reason, even as the existentialist and irrationalist themes became increasingly dominant in the understanding of the Ground in God and the play of forces within God which he signalled in the Freiheitsschrift and expatiated on in Die Weltalter and his later lecture series. Schelling’s later philosophy was irrational in a sense diVerent from Jacobi’s. Developing his so-called ‘positive philosophy’, which, in Schelling’s Wnal view, was alone capable of exploring the trans-rational ground, he did not dispense with the ‘negative philosophy’ of the understanding’s abstract conceptuality.82 The latter was now subordinate to the former; only as independent and self-suYcient was it misleading. 78 The continuity in Schelling’s development was Wrst demonstrated by Schulz. 79 Only on this condition, Jacobi held, ‘can there be only nature, and this nature be independent and all in all—and science reach its goal of completeness, become equal to its object, and thus Xatter itself upon being itself all in all’: Jacobi, Werke, iii. 384–5; Schelling, Werke, viii. 41; cf. Tilliette, Schelling, i. 567–8. 80 Schelling, Werke, viii. 42. 81 Ford cites Atterbom’s impression of Jacobi’s reaction to this attack: ‘The Controversy Between Schelling and Jacobi’. 82 Schelling, Grundlegung der positiven Philosophie, 250–3.

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Yet the new steps Schelling takes are still drastic. The philosophy of nature had already broken through the limits of a rational idealistic system based on abstract concepts. Without relinquishing entirely his faith in reason, Schelling seeks, in the Freiheitsschrift, to draw out the further consequences by developing a philosophy which does justice to the resistance of the intractable, opaque, irrational elements of experience and reality. Central among them is, for Schelling, the experience of freedom, especially in relation to the reality of good and evil. The result of his new speculation is a pantheism of freedom, a ‘vital realism’, built on a new and subtle understanding of the relation between creative freedom and necessity. This philosophy, like Jacobi’s, crucially seeks to replace the epistemologically charged concept of the subject by that of living personality;83 in many ways it is a critique of the former by means of the latter. Combining Romanticism and a further development of his dynamic-organic alternative to Enlightenment mechanism with a new speculative version of theism, the work of the later Schelling expands on distinctly Jacobian themes. In his lectures on the System der Weltalter in 1827–8, Schelling distinguishes between system in a good and a bad sense.84 The emphasis is on the redeWnition of reason, and the critique of Enlightenment reason, of ‘the false clarity of its pseudo-scientiWc style’, is in the forefront.85 But as in Jacobi, the new idealism comes in for much the same criticism: the generalities of idealism cannot help us. With such abstract [abgezogenen] concepts of God as Actus purissimus, such as the older philosophy produced, or such as the newer, out of a need [Fu¨rsorge] to distance God far from all nature, keeps producing, nothing at all can be accomplished. God is something more real than a mere moral world-order, and has wholly diVerent and more living forces of movement [lebendigere Bewegungskra¨fte] in himself than the meagre subtlety that abstract idealists ascribe to him. The abhorrence of everything real, for which every contact of the spiritual with it is a deWlement, must naturally also be blind to the origin of evil. Idealism, when it is not given a living realism as its basis, becomes quite as empty and abstract a system as the Leibnizian, Spinozistic, or any other dogmatic . . . Idealism is the soul of philosophy; realism its body; only both together form a living whole . . . If a philosophy lacks this living foundation, which normally is a sign that also the ideal principle in it was originally only weakly eVective, then it loses itself in those systems whose abstract concepts of aseity, modiWcations, etc. stand in the sharpest contrast to the force of life and the fullness of reality.86

Schelling was quite explicitly, like Bowne, an ‘idealistic realist’ and a ‘realistic idealist’, and in a diVerent sense than that in which Hegel too could be thus described. Life is deeper than thought; reality cannot be deduced, it is other and more than thought. Increasingly aware of Hegel’s inability to explain contingency and of reason’s inadequacy in comprehending the absolute, Schelling now asserted the presence 83 Drews uses the interesting term Perso¨nlichkeitspantheismus in connection with Schelling’s later philosophy: Die deutsche Spekulation seit Kant, ii. 348. 84 Schelling, System der Weltalter, 9–14, 19–20. 85 Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 143. 86 Schelling, Werke, vii. 356.

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in the absolute of something which must always elude or resist reason, and which cannot be overcome by any process of rational enlightenment. The Freiheitsschrift explored the irrational element in being and its implications for philosophy. The problem of freedom and, in connection with it, the problem of the reality of evil, present a decisive challenge to all systematic philosophy. God being free, he must be known through his unpredictable historical acts, through revelation. Freedom cannot be philosophically explained and integrated in a rational philosophical system. Schelling’s response to this challenge is, Snow rightly notes, ‘what sets him apart from every other thinker of his time’; it is ‘what forces him ultimately to produce a devastating critique of what he later calls negative philosophy, that is, a philosophy which can grasp only what is understandable in terms of concepts’.87 Freedom, the reality of good and evil, the unavoidability of decision, as concretely experienced, cannot be thus grasped: ‘The real and living concept [of freedom] is that it is a power of good and evil.’88 It could be argued that it was to a considerable extent the partial move beyond idealism which this—to some extent Jacobian-inspired—insight necessitated that opened the deWning space of personalism. Hegel sought to replace the atomistic understanding of the individual characteristic of abstractive, analytic Enlightenment reason—its impoverished version of what the Historisches Wo¨rterbuch called the ‘substantialistic’ view of the person, a person who was rather deWned by self-interest than ‘spirit-gifted’—and present also in contemporary Protestant theology, with his own development, in the Pha¨nomenologie and the lectures on the philosophy of religion, of the ‘social role’ view into a relational view. The isolated, independent ‘abstract personality’ is overcome as the ‘concrete personality’ develops and comes to know itself through Anerkennung in the social relations to other persons. While abstract personality was uniform in its egotism, concrete personality, through the simultaneous unity and distinctness, dependence and independence which the mutual recognition comprises, both preserves diVerence and acquires universality. Hegel also applied this view to God, or, more precisely, to the Trinity. Yet his theistic opponents objected that, given his description of the logical idea and its development, Hegel’s organicism was incapable of accounting for or even properly describing the concretion of individual personality or any concrete individuality at all. They saw in him the same weakness that he himself—in partial agreement with Jacobi—had seen in Spinoza.89 Seizing on the unexplained contingency and the consequences of the recognition of its unexplainability in terms of Hegel’s system, Schelling focused on the positive experience of the given particulars which cannot be exhaustively comprehended by reason and formulated in concepts. For Schelling, Descartes had initiated the era of ‘negative philosophy’, of abstract rationality distinct from real existence. With Hegel’s attempt to comprehend all of reality by means of dialectical logic, the striving of the era at the same time 87 Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 146. 88 Schelling, Werke, vii. 352. 89 See Hegel’s chapter on Jacobi in ‘Glauben und Wissen’, Werke, ii.

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culminated and deWnitively failed. For despite Hegel’s claims, in his system reality and dialectical logic remained separate, there was no satisfactory explanation of the passage from the latter to the former, of why there was something rather than nothing. It was thus impossible to accept the identity of thought and being as asserted by Hegel. All purely rationalist philosophy must fail in this way to pass from nothing to something. The truth of this criticism, the truth that thought must begin from concrete reality as given in self-conscious experience, that this concreteness is not per se attained by thought at the ‘end’ of its dialectical process, could, it seems, easily be granted without relinquishing other subtle insights of Hegel into the dialectical movement of thought. Finite, particular, contingent being could, it appears, be compatible with a modiWed version of it. The importance of Hegel seems not least to have been his insight, however groping and imperfectly formulated, that contrary to the reiWed abstractions of rationalism proper, this movement is the mode of operation of a diVerent kind of reason which seeks to articulate the concrete universal. Yet although the personalist movement that emerged partly from the Schellingian criticism tended to lose sight of the partial truths and the potential of Hegel’s dialectic with regard to such articulation in conjunction with their own kind of acceptance of the givenness of reality in its concreteness and individuality, it seems to have been right in focusing on the problem of how reality entered into his system in the Wrst place. Hegel plainly knew it was there; but the insuYciency of his account of it and his way of dealing with it led to serious problems—not least with regard to the understanding of personality. And precisely the latter was what the early critics focused on. When this reality was found by Schelling in experience, the emphasis was mainly on ‘inner experiences [innere Erfahrungen]’, which were characterized by the dynamic voluntaristic and active qualities, like decision (Entschluß) and deed (That), of personal life. Schelling thus opposed what he considered false empiricism, and described philosophy as a ‘science of inner experience [innere Erfahrungswissenschaft]’.90 In the later Schelling’s version this new science, the new, irrational understanding of the will was increasingly developed, and the forces of the unconscious were interpreted in terms of it. And it was one with his new metaphysics. As the ground of being, it was also understood in terms of Bo¨hme’s Ungrund. In Schelling’s last works it is in principle inaccessible to reason. Against the Enlightenment as well as the Hegelian view of reason and reality, Schelling famously proclaimed already in the Freiheitsschrift that ‘will is primordial being [Wollen ist Urseyn]’.91 As a consequence of his new insights into the limitations of the Cartesian ideal of clear and distinct conceptuality, Schelling employed a new poetical, allusive, metaphorical, and analogical language. Reason grows out of primordial irrationality, and the knower of both joins them in himself, being inescapably part of both: ‘High as we indeed place reason, we do not believe for instance that anyone may be virtuous, or a hero, or in any way a great man, not 90 Schelling, System der Weltalter, 74–8, 89.

91 Id. Werke, vii. 350.

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even, according to the familiar saying, that the human race can reproduce itself, through pure reason. Only in personality is there life; and all personality rests on a dark foundation, which must . . . nevertheless also be the foundation of knowledge.’92 It is this ‘dark foundation’ that Schelling sees as making possible a metaphysics that both accommodates the reality of evil and explains life, freedom, and the dynamic quality of reality. The real is no longer the rational, although its precise relation to the rational is somewhat unclear. The only thing that is clear is that it is not, as in Jacobi—despite his Romantic leanings— preponderantly supra-rational. Still, as in Jacobi, philosophy had to be redeWned if freedom and being were not rational and thus to a decisive extent beyond the reach of both Jacobian Verstand and Hegelian dialectic. In his youth Schelling had hailed Jacobi as a spiritual heir of Plato,93 and towards the end of his career he could again see Jacobi’s contribution in a calmer light of reconciliation. In his lectures on the history of modern philosophy, he holds that no other philosopher has conceded so much to pure rationalism . . . as Jacobi. In fact, he lay down his arms before it. It will therefore be evident to everyone that I rightly place Jacobi at the point of transition from rationalism to empiricism. With his reason he belonged completely to rationalism, with his feeling he strived, albeit in vain, to reach beyond it. In this respect Jacobi is perhaps the most instructive personality in the whole history of modern philosophy—of all modern philosophers [he has] experienced the need for a historical philosophy (in our sense) the most vividly. There was in him from his youth something which revolted against a system that reduces everything to mere rational relations and excludes freedom and personality.94

Jacobi admired Spinoza for heroically pursuing rationalism to its ultimate end, and thus making plain its unavoidable consequences. Contrary to the easy dismissals of Spinoza as an atheistic pantheist on the part of orthodox theologians, WolYan philosophers, and others, Jacobi took him seriously and presented an analysis that was at the time on a new level of sophistication. It was Jacobi’s book on Spinoza that initiated not only the paradigmatic Pantheismusstreit, but also the general new interest in Spinoza among the leading thinkers and writers of the Romantic age.95 This intellectual openness and consistency was the reason why Schelling found Jacobi such an instructive Wgure. Jacobi showed that reason even thus empowered could never, in principle, give us what we wanted, that ultimate reality was beyond reason. He had understood the true character of all modern systems, namely that instead of what we really desire to know, and, if we want to be honest, alone can consider it worth the trouble to know, they oVer us only a tiresome substitute, a knowledge, in which thinking never gets outside itself, and only proceeds within itself, whereas we really desire to move beyond

92 Schelling, Werke, vii. 413. 93 Tilliette, Schelling, i. 572. 94 Schelling, Werke, x. 168; cf. Grundlegung der positiven Philosophie, 250–1. 95 Jacobi’s rendition of Spinoza’s positions thus also contributed to the new, and in many respects quite diVerent, Romanticized interpretations.

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thinking, in order to be liberated from its torment [Qual] through that which is higher than thought.96

Beyond ‘thought’ lay the all-important, vital reality of personality, freedom, and God. Yet although Schelling now acknowledged Jacobi’s contributions, he could still not approve of his alternative, since he refused to accept his understanding of Vernunft as having an immediate knowledge of God as personality: ‘With a personal being I must stand in an empirical relation. Such an empirical relation is however excluded from reason, as is everything personal whatsoever. What reason immediately knows, must therefore, like itself, be free from everything empirical and personal.’97 Jacobi’s new deWnition of reason was for Schelling a peculiar invention on his part, ‘the worst gift that philosophy received from Jacobi’, an ‘easy immediate knowledge, through which one is lifted above all diYculties with One Word’.98 No matter how far Schelling had now come to stand from Hegel and indeed his own early philosophy, he could still turn against Jacobi a criticism similar to the one that had been directed against himself by Hegel even at the time when he was an absolute idealist. To understand the special, simultaneously empirical and spiritual reality of the personal, living God, the work of the active spiritual power of the person that is ‘illuminated understanding [Verstand]’ is needed.99 But what is to be understood here is of course a personal God who is in decisive respects diVerent from Jacobi’s—it is Schelling’s still largely pantheistic, developmental God, in whose development the work of the human understanding somehow takes part. Breckman states clearly why the philosophy of the later Schelling was not a reversal and return to traditional theism. It had a ‘continued, though weakened, aYnity with Idealism’ in its ‘willingness to probe the nature of divine being’, its ‘commitment to philosophical knowledge’. It was also, ‘like that of the Speculative Theists . . . both an attempt to recover Christian tradition and a speciWc response to what he regarded as the failure of Idealism: the apparent inability of German philosophy since Kant to explain the relation between the subject and the object of knowledge’. Schelling’s solution of ‘grounding reason in the reality of being’, while pointing ‘both backward to traditional theological motifs and forward to postmetaphysical thinking’, at the same time ‘reveals a continuous engagement with the speciWc problems of Idealist epistemology’. Like Heidegger, Schelling did not ‘renounce philosophy in favour of theology’ in the face of the collapse of identity philosophy, but searched ‘for a new way to think of being’. Yet despite his insistence on their diVerences, the way in which he did this bears a stronger resemblance to Jacobi: ‘reason, having recognized its limits, must eventually become ek-static, moving outside itself to acknowledge that which is not itself as its own ground and the condition of the possibility of all knowledge—‘‘Positive’’

96 Schelling, Werke, x. 169. 97 Id. Grundlegung der positiven Philosophie, 252; cf. Werke, x. 173. 98 Id. Werke, x. 172. 99 Ibid. viii. 99; cf. 81–2.

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knowledge begins with the acceptance of the unknowable God as the beginning and end of reason.’100 By the time of Schelling’s Berlin lectures against Hegel, his focus seems purely ‘existentialist’, calling directly and expressly for a philosophy of existence rather than mere essences. The criticism becomes ever more extreme; Hegel’s system presents a meaningless play of abstractions, opposed to reality and foreign to life and its needs. At this stage, despite his distance from Jacobi, Schelling’s philosophy did tend, like the life-philosophy of a later period, to become bogged down in Romantic irrationalism. I think it could be argued that despite Schelling’s criticism of what he perceived as Jacobi’s disparagement of reason, the nature of what Schelling considered to be Jacobi’s irrationalism is such that it avoids the pitfalls of Schelling’s own, distinctly Romantic irrationalism. As we have seen, Jacobi denied that he was an irrationalist and changed his terminology to prove it. Clearly Jacobi was in many ways a Romantic too. But not only were his roots Wrmly in the late Enlightenment period, as diGiovanni and others have shown; more importantly, the nature of what was accessible to his faith or higher reason was exclusively what any Christian Platonist would have accepted as such. Suprarational rather than subrational, Jacobi’s position could perhaps be described as a benign ‘irrationalism’—if the latter designation, which in this case could only mean the acceptance of Vernunft as higher than Verstand, not the rejection of the latter, is at all useful. It had little or nothing to do with the unconscious, with irrational will, with the ‘terrible’, which Schelling now explored. Despite the fact that it is Schelling who defends philosophical reason against Jacobi, it is the same Schelling, rather than Jacobi, who in one aspect of his late philosophy paves the way for more malign dismissals of reason. It was Jacobi who unambiguously pointed to the way beyond the morally as well as theoretically problematic pantheism in whose grip—in the highly Romanticized version—even the later Schelling remained caught. Yet Schelling at the same time made other, decisive contributions to the new personalistic theism. Not only the criticism of negative philosophy, now chieXy represented by Hegel, but also some of the elements of personalism that were part of Schelling’s alternative, were given a paradigmatically clear expression. Emil Fackenheim sums up the position and importance of the later Schelling in the history of philosophy in the following way: ‘Schelling is not only the Wrst in a long line of post-idealistic metaphysicians, but he also possesses unique qualiWcations. For having himself been the founder of absolute idealism, he is the critic who can be trusted most to understand what he is criticizing.’101 And in a Wne characterization of the later Schelling, Walter Schulz described him as standing ‘between two ages’: ‘He could on the one hand no longer maintain unproblematically the rationality of the world, as he had done in the beginning, and on the other hand he did not want to elevate the will as a dark force to an absolute 100 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 59, 61. 101 Fackenheim, ‘Schelling’s Conception of Positive Philosophy’, Review of Metaphysics, 7 (1953–4), 566, cited in Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 181.

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principle, like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.’102 Alongside, and as a development of central aspects of, the work of Jacobi, this position turned out to mark the beginning of what in time came to be termed personalism; it opened up its historical possibility.

S P E C U L AT I V E T H E I S M Jacobi and the later Schelling decisively inXuenced the work of the Hegelian right, but they also inspired an alternative, independent current of theistic and personalistic philosophy in Germany. The short entry on ‘Theismus, spekulativer’ in Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie indicates succinctly the cardinal theme of the new ‘school’ as established by the work of I. H. Fichte and C. H. Weisse: ‘The basic demands made in the name of a speculative, concrete . . . ethical . . . and Christian theism are: A doctrine of God, to be developed within the framework of a speculative theology, must not subjugate the personhood [die Personalita¨t]—and thereby also the personhood of man—to the apriorical, logical systematic thinking; it is rather the principle of the system of reality.’103 The entry also signiWcantly states both that Fichte emphasized that this theology must be bound by experience, and that the movement was concerned to safeguard the ‘true beginnings [echte Ansa¨tze]’ of German idealism.104 These formulations summarize much of the essential nature of German speculative theism, and pinpoint features which were decisive for the development of personalism in general in Britain and America. Speculative theism was the result of a synthesis of ‘realism’ and idealism, inspired by the work of Jacobi and the later Schelling, but characterized, in comparison with them, by a stronger element of idealism. The same holds for the ‘idealism of personality’ in Sweden. Although there are some diVerences, with regard to the basic motives, inspirations, causes, and goals the two movements are in reality one. They are merely national variations of a single European current of thought. Idealism of personality was a speculative theism, and speculative theism was an idealism of personality. Almost from the outset, the personalism that these philosophies in reality represented ‘considered itself a system defensible on philosophical grounds’ (Lavely). The criticism of rationalism made necessary by the ‘realistic’ and ‘existentialistic’ testimony of concrete personal experience did not lead to a repudiation of philosophy and rational conceptuality in favour of Wdeism and irrational intuitionism. The Wdeistic elements are also considered to be of a philosophical nature or to be amenable to philosophical investigation, if only on the condition that philosophy is somewhat redeWned. It was long before Lotze 102 Schulz, Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus, 23, cited in Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 215. 103 Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Ritter (‘Theismus, spekulativer’). 104 Ibid.

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that ‘logical rationalism’ and ‘absolute idealism’ turned into ‘personal rationalism’ and ‘personal idealism’ respectively. Entering, perhaps for the Wrst time in the English-speaking world, into a closer investigation of the early German speculative theists, Breckman notes that Weisse accepted Hegel’s description of the absolute as pure subjectivity, but ‘rejected the equation of the Absolute of pure thought with the living, personal God’. Hegel’s idea of Gottheit as mere universal spirit was a negative, formal deWnition which had to be replaced by a positive concept in which the category of personality was central, and which excluded the ‘self-identiWcation of the human mind with God’. However, remaining closer to Hegel than the later Schelling, while accepting the testimony of religious experience as supplementary, Weisse’s alternative to Hegel’s view of universal subjectivity was to discover ‘within reason . . . an already-existing idea of the transcendental, personal God’.105 For Schulz, this is proof that Weisse remained in large measure within the identity-philosophy of the main current of post-Kantian idealism.106 But as we have seen, Jacobi’s realism also Wnally embraced at least the notion of a reason that somehow had in itself the capacity for grasping the nature of transcendence as a personal God. It all depends on what kind of idea of God it is: a communicated, intuited idea of the kind personalism was now beginning to consider was soon increasingly identiWed by other personalists with inner experience. Against Hegel’s grasping of God ‘merely as dialectical process, as absolute reason, as primordial thought [Urdenken]’, Fichte sought to reach through concrete experience the ‘idea of a personality of primordial reason [einer Perso¨nlichkeit der Urvernunft]’.107 Religious experience was for Fichte ‘the highest psychological fact’ as well as ‘the highest fact of the ‘‘world’’, because it has proven to be the deepest and most creative force in history’. By ‘an inductive process from these ‘‘facts’’ of psychology and history, Fichte claimed to arrive at the highest absolute, the personal God, which humanity knows only a posteriori through His revelation in the world’.108 The inXuence of Jacobi and Schelling is traceable in Fichte’s and Weisse’s combination of the concept of personality, based on the analogy between the divine and the human, with an ‘assertion of the human personality’s freedom’ which ‘required a resolute rejection of identitarian thinking’ of the kind represented by Hegel’s dialectical logic.109 Breckman cites Weisse’s complaint about ‘the pure categories or the absolute forms of thought and knowledge’ being

105 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 50–1. 106 Schulz’s analysis of the diVerences between Schelling and the speculative theists is quite as important for an understanding of the development of personalism as the similarities pointed to by Fuhrmans: Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus, 167–86. Breckman re-emphasizes the similarities. 107 Fichte, Die Idee der Perso¨nlichkeit, 10–11, cited in Jaeschke, Die Vernunft in der Religion, 383. 108 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 51; cf. Fichte, Vermischte Schriften, i. 62. 109 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 52.

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regarded simply as ‘at the same time the absolute forms of being and truth’.110 Leaving out one aspect of what could perhaps be called the ‘transcendental empiricism’ of Weisse and his idea of God within higher reason, Breckman summarizes at least the other important elements of Fichte’s and Weisse’s synthesis of Jacobian and late Schellingian themes—in a manner which also brings out the way in which personalists, seeing only the by now obvious weakness of Hegel’s system, failed to appreciate the need for dialectical, concrete thought attuned to historical existence and experience: Believing that dialectical logic subordinates reality to the categories of thought, Weisse and Fichte asserted the non-identity of reason and reality; reason is always abstract and generalizing, reality always particular, concrete, and individual. Indeed, they maintained, reality is pervaded by an individualizing power that escapes rational categorization. This power, identiWed as the source of freedom, is none other than will itself—in the Wrst instance God’s will, in the second, that of His creature. Freedom becomes synonymous with this individualizing power, with the assertion of personality that Wnds its ‘Ur-form’ in God’s will. Freedom thus lies outside or beyond reason . . . 111

While Fichte and Weisse received impulses from Schelling, all of the main points of their criticism of Hegel were present already in Jacobi.112 They also took over his use of the word ‘nihilism’. Needless to say, they also considered Jacobi’s philosophical elaboration of his insights highly insuYcient. Their work displays weaknesses of their own; but their main contribution was the further emphasis and elaboration on the category of personality as necessarily central in the needed revision of idealism. The idea, best known today in Bowne’s form, that the categories are explained only through, and as existing in, self-conscious, willing personality, was clearly developed and made into a central philosophical doctrine by Fichte. ConWrmation of the nature and inspiration of speculative theism could be cited endlessly from the works of Fichte, Weisse, Ulrici, and many others. But it is in my view of even greater interest to look more closely at the development of the Jacobian and Schellingian themes in Sweden that took place before this school had fully emerged in Germany, and to some extent even before Schelling himself had fully elaborated the themes of his later philosophy. This was at the time when, in Britain, Coleridge developed his own Romanticized Platonic reXections on pantheism and theism, inXuenced by both Schelling and Jacobi, and some similarities in the mode of philosophizing can readily be discerned.

Biberg For Nils Fredrik Biberg, as for Jacobi, discursive reason—Verstand, the understanding—can have both the sensory and the non-sensory as objects for its ¨ ber die eigentliche Grenze des Pantheismus und des philosophischen Theismus 110 Weisse, ‘U (1833)’, in Graf and Wagner (eds.), Die Flucht in den BegriV, 85, cited in Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 53 n. 110 111 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 53. 112 Mu¨ller-Lauter, ‘Nihilismus als Konsequenz des Idealismus’, 158–60.

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merely formal operations. Consciousness of the non-sensory is manifest both as rational ideas and as intellectual (fo¨rnuftig) representation in the form of imagination and feeling. This grants a prominent place to the understanding in relation to reason, yet it clearly marks a break with the constructionist strand of modern idealism (in German, Konstruktionsidealismus) which took the self, or self-consciousness, to be the sole and ultimate principle of reality and not just as the starting point of philosophy. Applying Jacobi’s etymology, Biberg writes that ‘Intellect itself perceives [Fo¨rnuftet fo¨rnimmer sjelf], and from this comes also its expressive name’.113 There is what was to become the fundamental personalist stress, against constructionist idealism, on the givenness of reality, discovered through such perception, independent of our own subjectivity: personalism’s characteristic element of realism. The activity of thought contributes to our apprehension of reality, but is not identical with it. Reality is revealed as given in experience, and it is with this that philosophy must begin. Biberg seeks, with Schleiermacher, to restore religion, which, in Kant and Fichte, was subordinated to ethics or identiWed with the moral world order. He retains the Schellingian insistence on the importance of experienced freedom and the understanding of its nature, and makes original formulations of a markedly decisionist and character-based view of philosophical systems and their adoption. Yet as to the awareness of the absolute, it is for Biberg unambiguously suprarational, and less ‘irrational’ even than in the later Jacobi. In this way, Biberg emphasized sensory as well as intellectual ‘experience’. Parallel to Jacobi’s influence, there is a living continuity between Biberg and the other Swedish idealists of personality and the school of moral sense; in Biberg’s case, it also reaches beyond it to the rationalist Platonism of the Cambridge school. SigniWcantly, however, Biberg’s position in important respects transcends both moral sense and modern rationalist intuitionism, and comes close to a ‘Franciscan’ kind of Platonism, where the stress is on the primacy of the individual and the concrete. An ‘original perceiving’, Biberg writes, ‘guides reXection’; ‘but it is a synthesis achieved by reXection that is the goal of reXection and this reXecting synthesis, taken up and enlivened through the never-denied, neverceasing original perceiving, is Philosophy itself or speculation’.114 Henningsson directly equates the ‘philosophy of faith’, as this position despite the obvious diVerences is sometimes called because of the inXuence of (the early) Jacobi, with what he calls ‘intelligible empiricism’.115 It is equally important to note that Biberg here both accepts much of Hegel’s understanding of and purpose with his dialectic, and, in the same sentence, remedies its fatal Xaw. Without adopting the special development of the understanding of the absolute in Hegel’s dialectics, Biberg accepts some of his formulations in his exposition of how knowing is on the one hand developed systematically 113 Biberg, Samlade skrifter, i. 280–1. 114 Ibid. 287. 115 Henningsson, Na˚gra frihetsproblem hos Nils Fredrik Biberg, 132. For Biberg on the relation between reason and faith, see Biberg, Samlade skrifter, i. 287–8.

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and actualized, from obscurity to clarity, for us, and on the other in some sense given in itself in the absolute reason or intellect (det absoluta fo¨rnuftet).116 It is, however, Biberg’s emphasis on a clearer distinction in principle between the two, and on the meaning of it, that is evidence of his departure from Hegelian as well as from Spinozistic pantheism. Remaining, in contradistinction to Hegel, within the framework of Platonic dualism, Biberg insists that also on the level of ideas or forms, the manifold must be understood as concrete and individually determined. This was an aspect of his philosophy that Jacobi had not developed with full clarity; by focusing on it, Biberg deepened the whole of the deWning personalist criticism of what Bowne calls ‘the fallacy of the universal’ and ‘the fallacy of abstraction’.117 Against the abstract concept, Biberg sets the idea, deWned not in Kantian terms but, in Nyblaeus’s words, as ‘a perception of reason, which has the supersensory reality as its content, and which as such is immediate and fully concrete’.118 For Biberg, an abstract idea is a contradictio in adjecto.119 Against Kant’s merely regulative ideas he sets epistemic contact through Platonic, intellective reason. But against Platonic generalism Biberg at the same time, while steering clear of Hegel’s immanentism, pursues with Hegel ‘a unity which is not turned away from [afva¨nd fra˚n] or contrary to the plurality, but which apprehends its life in order therewith to Wll its own. The oneness which we seek to apprehend in knowledge . . . is . . . not in itself an empty oneness, no mere generality, but a oneness which is inWnite fullness, inWnite determination, inWnite life.’120 Against the concept Biberg sets ‘the thought of intellective reason, the idea, which has the fullness in itself, and which, contrary to the unity of discursive reason, far from diminishing in content, with its growing in comprehensiveness, increases in both dimensions at the same time’.121 The similarities with Hegel are obvious, but also in important respects deceptive. As we will see in the next chapter, for Biberg the concretely and individually determined variegatedness must be given also in the purely qualitative, essential and actual reality of ideal transcendence. Faced with the necessity of theoretically accommodating real, concrete individuality, Biberg saw modern idealism as having no choice if it wished to remain an idealism but simultaneously to revert to and modify Platonism. In this way Biberg Wrmly established Swedish philosophy on the path towards an idealism that was ‘concrete and spiritual rather than abstract and logical’,122 emphasizing reality as individual and rejecting the deWnition of the idea as a mere abstract universal. To the metaphysical signiWcance of all this we shall turn in the next chapter.

116 117 118 119 121

Henningsson, Na˚gra frihetsproblem hos Nils Fredrik Biberg, 9–10. Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 188. Nyblaeus, Den WlosoWska forskningen i Sverige, iii/2. 27. Ibid. 87 n. 2. 120 Biberg, Samlade skrifter, i. 305–6. Ibid. 306. 122 Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 210–11.

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Grubbe Samuel Grubbe gave one of the Wrst systematic, detailed, and precise statements of the distinct philosophical positions of the personalistic idealism that was now emerging in Europe. The decisive contribution of Grubbe, as of Biberg, whose work he continued, and of the speculative theists in Germany, is the reinsertion of the new personalist themes of Jacobi and the later Schelling within the framework of philosophical idealism, in a way that allows the former strongly to modify the latter. On the one hand, their reassertion of idealist systematicity may seem to take the speculative theists far from Jacobi and Schelling, but on the other, the modiWcation of idealism was plainly a result of their inXuence. Idealism is now also of a new and more Platonic inXection. In Grubbe, the Kantian preoccupation with God, the soul, and freedom was dovetailed with the Platonic concern with the true, the good, and the beautiful. Both were mobilized in the eVort to circumvent the impersonalistic forms of absolute idealism in Germany; but both were also modiWed in the new alternative of personalistic idealism. Claude Piche´ notes that Weisse, together with his diVerentiation between Wnite and absolute subjectivity, similarly opposed the Platonic triad of the true, the good, and the beautiful as distinct ideas, irreducible to each other, as an alternative articulation of spirit, to Hegel’s ‘monism . . . of the idea’ and ‘absolute knowledge . . . which absorbs in itself all the moments of its becoming’.123 Grubbe turned against what he regarded as the ‘speculative mysticism’ of early Schellingian idealism, according to which in intellectual intuition the subjective I coincides with an absolute elevated above all subjectivity.124 Although the alternative view of the Vernunftanschauung defended by Jacobi is also modiWed by Grubbe as the awareness of the idea of the absolute given in reason, this idea is diVerent from the Kantian idea of reason in that it gives some knowledge of the absolute. The emphasis of Grubbe in this connection is rather on the preservation of the distinction between the Wnite and the inWnite subject, and on the status of both precisely as subjects, as intelligences. In both respects, Grubbe anticipates most of the core positions of the later developments of personalism. In the part of his work edited under the title ‘Phenomenology’,125 Grubbe takes his point of departure in self-consciousness by giving a detailed analysis of how phenomenal experience arises and is constituted by the nature of the mind. Having Wnished that part of the exposition of his system, however, he also—at the beginning of the work published as the ‘Ontology’126—seeks to show why philosophy must begin from self-consciousness also in the investigation of ‘the development of the concepts through which our intelligent faculty in the highest of its expressions seeks to lift itself above the sphere of sensual phenomena’, when it seeks ‘to specify, as far as it is possible for Wnite human reason, their ultimate ground and understand them in connection with it’.127 The reason why this approach is necessary, Grubbe makes clear, in an idealist epistemological 123 Piche´, ‘Hermann Lotze et la gene`se de la philosophie des valeurs’, 508. 124 Cullberg, Samuel Grubbe, 185, n. 1. 125 Grubbe, Skrifter, v. 126 Ibid. vi. 127 Ibid. 1.

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positioning that preWgures that of all subsequent personalism in the main line, is that those forms of philosophy which have not thence taken their point of departure have failed. Rationalism and mysticism, insisting on the accessibility of complete knowledge of the ultimate ground and its connection with the phenomenal world, are unduly naive and uncritical. Scepticism and sensory empiricism conXict permanently with our moral and religious consciousness.128 Fideistic supernaturalism, Wnally, fails since if man had no sense of the supersensual or any idea of it as part of the nature of his reason, if the proof of the truth of a supernatural revelation was not given through its own appeal to more or less clearly developed ideas already present in the human mind, there could be no reliable judgements about the truth and falsehood of conXicting claims of divine revelation.129 Our consciousness is simultaneously and interdependently self-consciousness and self-determination, and always present together with its perceptual content. The certitude that this is so is original and underivable from anything else, even as the clear understanding of its own nature arises for consciousness only through reXection.130 There is thus an identical, active I or subject which is primary, the basis of the continuous development of consciousness with all its shifting determinations, and it is this that constitutes my ‘personality’.131 This understanding of personality does not imply any underlying substance or substrate separate from, under, or before consciousness as given, as in Kant’s view of the real or noumenal self or soul distinct from the transcendentally uniWed empirical one. No such thing is given through consciousness,132 nor is it speculatively defensible. Yet the real self is given in actual consciousness. Thus Kant’s distinction collapses. This position is not attributable to Lotze, but was developed by the earlier post-Kantian personalist idealists, of whom Grubbe is representative, in partial continuity with some of J. G. Fichte’s positions as disentangled from his constructionism. Active consciousness itself is the reality of the self. In his ‘Phenomenology’, Grubbe embraces the position that we obtain our idea of the meaning of causality from the experience of self-determination. The category of causality is given concrete meaning through experience in the non-Kantian sense of inner experience, the data of self-consciousness, selfdetermination, the experience of conscious agency, the exercise of will. This meaning is projected outwards, upon the phenomenal order.133 Thus apriorism is conjoined with an inner empiricism. Freedom does not appear in Grubbe’s philosophy in the dramatic form in which we Wnd it in Schelling; here, as in other respects, we Wnd the personalist themes incorporated into a calmly and neatly elaborated systematicity. Since

128 Grubbe insists on the necessity of going beyond common sense and the unphilosophical materialism to which it normally leads. 129 Grubbe, Skrifter, vi. 2–7. 130 Ibid. 8, 10–14, 75. 131 Ibid. 14; cf. 56, 60–1. 132 Ibid. 15. 133 Ibid. v. 299–303.

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Grubbe does not discuss freedom primarily in connection with the independence of the Wnite beings from God, but in connection with his analysis of selfconsciousness and self-determination, it is reasonable to deal with it in this chapter rather than in Chapter 4, although for him, as for all personalists, the epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical aspects of freedom are closely interconnected. As man becomes aware of himself as a person, as a self-conscious and selfdetermining and thence also self-active being, he Wnds himself no longer controlled by his sensual perceptions and desires but at a remove from them, capable of reXection upon them by means of the abstract generalized concepts produced by the understanding (fo¨rsta˚ndet), and of choice between diVerent grounds of determination, or motives of will. These grounds are phenomenally experienced as soliciting, not necessitating, so that the will possesses negative and positive formal freedom in the sense of being capable of at least momentarily refraining from being determined by any of them, and of choice between them (liberum arbitrium).134 Free will in this sense stands in relation to the understanding inasmuch as it selects among the sensual objects of desire which the understanding alone has classiWed and ordered as grounds of determination. It is here a matter of cooperation between the theoretical and practical aspects of man’s intelligence in a lower function, or as operating in the lower sphere of the sensual and calculable. Grubbe proceeds not only to demonstrate that this experienced freedom corresponds to reality, and thus to controvert determinism and its consistently developed form, fatalism,135 but also to reject the opposite extreme of libertas indiVerentiae or aequilibri—the latter demarcation being no less characteristic of the whole personalist movement than the former.136 At any given moment, the number as well as the strength of the grounds of determination are given through preceding factors and events. It is only within this more or less narrow range that the free will is exercised, a limitation which, however, makes its choice nonetheless decisive in respect of moral accountability and the destiny of the choosing subject. Determinism, on the other hand, normally builds on a misplaced application of the law of causality and a dogmatic-realistic understanding of the nature of human intelligence. As the willing mind is conceived as a kind of thing or a static substrate of consciousness, whether material or spiritual, the same law of mechanical causality is applied to it that is applied to the external world, with the result that what phenomenally appears as the free choice of one of the determinations is explained as in reality the causally necessary determining of the choice by the strongest of the given grounds. This position falls with the original givenness of self-consciousness as self-determination, and thus as capable of what Grubbe

134 Grubbe, Skrifter, iii. 56–65. 135 Grubbe regards Spinoza’s pantheism as expressing, like certain older forms of pantheism, the consistently developed form of determinism that is fatalism: ibid. 70–1. 136 Ibid. 67–84.

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calls ‘absolute causality’ in the directing of phenomena and events.137 The debate must end with the original givenness of this self-determination, since it is underived and unmediated and thus unarguable. But freedom is given not only in this formal exercise of will, but also in the understanding’s corresponding and preceding exercise of reXection and deliberation on the sensual data; inconsistently, the determinists have not normally denied freedom in this manifestation.138 Freedom for Grubbe thus has a theoretical as well as a practical signiWcance. The highest manifestation and exercise of freedom, however, is not this selection of grounds of sensual determination under the guidance of the understanding, but the free choice by which the subject determines itself, its will, and its action according to the idea of the good, or the moral good, by which it makes this idea ‘the leading and guiding principle’ of its whole practical life.139 In Chapter 4 we shall return to Grubbe’s distinct personalist conception of the moral good. Here it is necessary to consider it only in connection with his view of reason, through which, along with other ideas, the idea of it is given. Reason, according to Grubbe, is altogether beyond the realms of the sensory and the understanding. Having ascertained the nature and reality of selfconsciousness, from which the fact of freedom in the sense described follows, epistemology has to account for the idea of the ultimate ground of everything that is given in this consciousness, for its meaning and validity.140 Grubbe develops an alternative to Kant which is similar to Hegel’s in some respects and diVerent in others—the ones that deWne personalism. The idea of the ultimate ground, as ineradicably present in consciousness, is for Grubbe not only given through a necessary function of reason, belonging to its very nature. It is also the highest ‘perception’ of consciousness. The ‘expression of the intelligent power’ through which it is given must correspondingly be the highest: this faculty is what Grubbe terms ‘reason [fo¨rnuft] in its highest and most proper sense’.141 For Kant, Vernunft was merely the faculty of mediate logical inferences, as distinct from the immediate inferences of Verstand and the Urteilskraft. This designation of the faculty of mediate inferences with a special term is explained by the fact that it is the highest function of reason when the latter is considered, as normally in logic, ‘merely with reference to its form . . . with abstraction from its content’.142 Grubbe dismisses this classiWcatory distinction along with its ground; the diVerence between mediate and immediate inferences is not so important as to warrant it. For Grubbe, the faculties of concepts, judgement, and inference (both mediate and immediate), together constitute the understanding (fo¨rsta˚ndet).143 The error of conceiving of reason as the faculty of mediate inferences is evident, Grubbe holds, in the rationalistic systems. Since they conceive of this faculty as man’s highest, the highest ideas given in consciousness are considered to be given

137 Ibid. 74. 142 Ibid. iii. 91.

138 Ibid. 75–6. 139 Ibid. 125. 143 Ibid. iii. 37–9, 90–2; vi. 9–11.

140 Ibid. vi. 8.

141 Ibid. 9.

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as the result of its inferences, whence the fruitless attempts to prove God’s existence through logical demonstration. Such attempts must always fail, since ‘the idea of the inWnite does not arise through inferences but is immediately given in our consciousness through something entirely diVerent, namely a modiWcation of the intelligent power which is higher than the understanding in all of its functions’.144 The traditional proofs of God’s existence are in a sense expressions of reason’s necessary idea of the absolute original being, but they are incomplete expressions in that the idea is obscured by being presented as grounded in logical demonstration, and is thus demoted from the level of reason to that of the understanding.145 The concept of reason as the faculty of mediate inferences, Grubbe argues, is connected more generally to the modern tendency, strongly reinforced by the endeavour to base philosophy on the geometrical method, to misconceive and overestimate the value of argumentation by means of logical inference and of proof as based on it, of the axiom that all certain knowledge is that which is proven from its grounds. If it did not deny it, dogmatic rationalism at least did not have a suYcient grasp of the meaning of the fact that all knowledge and certitude reached through proof can only be mediate and that it must always be based on and derived from some ‘original and immediate certitude, which must constitute the Wrst link in the chain of . . . inferences, and precisely for this reason cannot be derived from any higher or prior’. All proof presupposes pure selfconsciousness, which is the only strictly immediate given. But to this there can be added as originally and immediately given and as certain knowledge also that which with regard to its possibility presupposes pure self-consciousness, yet ‘with regard to its content cannot be derived and proved’ from it or from anything else, namely the determined, concrete, and individual content of our intuitions. These can never be proved by any syllogism; the function of the understanding is not to prove this content from something else but merely to reXect upon it and draw conclusions by means of the logic based on its general, abstractive concepts.146 Logic is regulative, not constitutive. Having established this, Grubbe introduces the speculative theist version of Jacobian realism; if this is the case with regard to what is ‘Wrst and lowest in our knowledge’, beneath the understanding’s ‘mediate certainty’ based on argumentation and demonstration, could not the same obtain for ‘that which constitutes the highest in our nature’, namely what is given through reason? Could this not be another original, indemonstrable, immediate certainty, ‘even if it would not immediately follow that this certitude should in all respects be of the same nature as that of sensory perception’?147 The distinctive nature of reason is not to be found in the ‘merely formal operations of reXection, but in the very content and nature of the perceptions with which it is concerned’. Reason, properly deWned, is ‘an original, immediate, and unprovable certitude about the supersensual’. It is part of the ‘ideal tendency’ in man, a higher capacity which can never be satisWed by the sensual reality but 144 Grubbe, Skrifter, vi. 11. 147 Ibid. 95.

145 Ibid. iii. 267–70.

146 Ibid. 93–5; cf. 258–61.

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pursues something ‘higher, nobler, and more perfect’. Restating the derivation of the word ‘fo¨rnuft’ from ‘fo¨rnimma’ (to perceive), he holds that it means ‘the faculty of perception in the highest sense of the word’; it is ‘the organ of our knowledge of the supersensory’. It is the self-justifying perception of something already given in consciousness, a ‘higher, which reveals itself in the depth of our souls’, not something produced by any rational operation. In this, reason is to some extent similar to sensory perception, although it diVers in its object, and although it is given in varying degrees of strength and clarity, and sometimes merely as vague feeling. We can as little suspend or doubt it without ‘denying our own consciousness and destroy our being’, as we can ‘derive it from something else and thus in the proper sense prove that which constitutes its contents’. Logic can neither create it nor destroy it. The function of philosophy is simply to ‘show [uppvisa]’ it ‘as being immediately given’, and thus ‘ascertain its reality and clarify its meaning and content’, to bring this perceived given, by means of reXection upon it, to ‘the highest degree of purity, vividness, and clarity’.148 Obviously, Grubbe remains closer to the Romantics than does Hegel. Yet he is clearly emphatic about the correctness of Jacobi’s terminological innovation— reason instead of feeling and intuition—and despite the absence of a dialectic and the obvious distance he keeps from the early Schelling’s and Hegel’s total idealistnaturalist organicism, his further formulations on the explication of the idea as given in reason do have some aYnity with Hegel’s position. But Grubbe is more inclined to regard his view of reason as a return to Plato, and as an amendment to him. In Grubbe’s view, Plato’s notion of the ‘idea’ comes closer to the truth than Kant’s. In the latter’s theoretical philosophy, the term ‘idea’ denoted concepts of reason which, having regulative validity as necessary for the reXective unity of phenomena, do not correspond to anything in intuitional experience; because of Kant’s formalistic view of reason as the faculty of mediate inferences, his ‘ideas’ are related to and corresponding to this latter faculty alone. In Kant’s practical philosophy, the ideas were indeed constitutive. But personalism, already as developed by Grubbe, insists also on the revision of Kant’s theoretical philosophy and does not build on his practical philosophy alone.149 In Cullberg’s words, the notion of self-consciousness is transformed by Grubbe from the I-consciousness of mere formal transcendental apperception to ‘the empirical meaning of an ‘‘inner sense’’, which comprises reason in the sense of a sense for the supersensory’; activity and passivity of the mind are characteristically combined.150 As for Biberg, knowledge is a matter of a rationally explicative approximation of the ‘experientially’ given content of reason which, contrary to the gnostic closure of Hegel, is in principle interminable.151 Speculation consists in a clariWcation of the import of the presently available content of consciousness,

148 Ibid. 11–12, 19, 27, 96–9. 149 Ibid. 103–6, 221–3. 150 Cullberg, Samuel Grubbe, 206; cf. 212–13, 237–8, 253–9. 151 Grubbe, Skrifter, iii. 118; v. 24–5; vi. 163–5; Cullberg, Samuel Grubbe, 259.

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and therewith of man’s higher, ideal tendency.152 In order to obviate Fichtean and early-Schellingian misunderstandings, it is necessary to relinquish the concept of intellectual intuition, which denotes self-consciousness as pure spontaneity.153 In contradistinction to the sensory faculty, the faculty of intuition, and to the understanding, the faculty of concepts, reason is thus the faculty of ideas.154 Reason is both a higher and a wider faculty than the understanding. It can be seen in diVerent aspects with their own corresponding ideas of the supersensory, the ideas of the true, the good, and the beautiful. These aspects and ideas in turn correspond to the three principal branches of philosophy, although the speciWc ideas are all derived from one ‘basic idea’ as their ‘origin and source’, the ‘idea of the absolutely supreme and divine’.155 Reason thus has in itself diVerent higher tendencies or, as Grubbe also calls them, ‘demands’ or ‘interests’. The basic idea appears in reason’s theoretical aspect as the ‘demand’ for the original and absolute, the ultimate ground behind and beyond the sensual world. In its practical aspect it appears in ‘the moral consciousness and the immediately related religious feeling through the idea of a divine being as the highest paradigm and source of the moral good’. In its aesthetic aspect it is revealed in that beauty in nature and art, conceived ‘in its highest ideal perfection, appears to us as a kind of image or symbol of the divine given through religious feeling’. The ideas thus appear as intrinsic ‘fo¨rnuftsbehof ’ (literally, ‘needs of reason’), which, as diVerentiated, are also inseparable from the idea of the ‘original absolute being’.156 This idea in its fullness is in itself considered to be a revelation of the absolute or God.157 It is only by reXecting with equal attention on the theoretical and practical aspect that we can know the full meaning of the idea, for it is given in moral and religious consciousness with ‘certain determinations, which can never be found or proven through theoretical reXection alone’, which cannot be doubted ‘when the moral and religious feeling has reached a more advanced stage development’, and which are necessarily perceived by man to ‘stand in the closest connection with all that gives his life a true value and a higher meaning’.158 Philosophical speculation which comprehends the idea only as it appears to theoretical reXection yields results that conXict with the moral and religious consciousness. As thus conXicting, it cannot be in accord with the highest demands of reason itself, with ‘the whole of the intelligent power’. Even as it displays much acuteness, it is not only ‘an empty, cold speculation, without inner, living spirit, without warmth and feeling’, but a speculation which is misleading with regard to the nature of reality. It has always been the natural tendency of speculation, its ‘original sin’, to ‘regard itself alone, in its character of mere 152 Grubbe, Skrifter, iii. 96–114; vi. 1–29; Cullberg, Samuel Grubbe, 188, 206–7, 213–16, 259. 153 Cullberg, Samuel Grubbe, 237–8, 269. 154 Grubbe, Skrifter, vi. 12; iii. 24. 155 Ibid. iii. 7–8, 106, 113–14, 233–4. 156 Ibid. vi. 20–2. 157 Ibid. iii. 230–2. For many early personalists, as for most of the broader liberal-theological tradition, the variously described higher experience is a kind of ‘inner revelation’ of God. 158 Ibid. vi. 22, 26; cf. 113.

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theoretical reXection, as wholly suYcient and corresponding to the whole need of reason’. Thence, again, the characteristic failings of the traditional proofs of God, which could never reach the determinations of God as ‘a properly moral intelligence, and all-comprehending love and goodness, which manifests itself as the principle of a moral world-government, of Providence’.159 There is thus for Grubbe no diVerence in validity or status between the knowledge gained through theoretical and practical reason; rather, the latter is a necessary supplement of the former. Through theoretical reason, the absolute is given only as an original, eternal reality, without further determinations. It is only through reXection on the combination of the moral and religious consciousness that philosophy can add the further, personal determinations to the theoretical idea of the absolute. Only through the purity of the moral consciousness and the moral will is it at all possible to conceive of the absolute under those determinations. The denial of it as thus determined could be a result simply of the inability introspectively to ascertain the given contents of consciousness, or of the weakening of the moral sense by vice or frivolity.160 Ever since Jacobi, the idea that moral character is a precondition of knowledge was highly characteristic of personalism. Grubbe sides with rationalism against empiricism only in a very general and qualiWed sense, emphasizing merely that the content of reason is not given through the senses and that the ideas, being originally given in reason in the form of experienced feeling, stand in need of reXective clariWcation. Not just empiricism, but pre-Kantian dogmatic rationalism, Kantianism itself, and the post-Kantian rationalism of Fichte are rejected in central respects, and through the perceptual and Platonic features of his conception of reason, the absence of a dialectic, and the insistence on the untranslatability of the moral and religious consciousness into the theoretical, Grubbe also clearly diVers from Hegel. In expounding the content of the religious consciousness, Grubbe draws on both Jacobi and Schleiermacher, but also adds to them. Notwithstanding its frequent distortions by crudeness, sentimentality, and Schwa¨rmerei (sva¨rmeri) and its weakening by vice and false and superWcial rationalism, it can never be completely extinguished. The religious consciousness is structural in the spirit and self-validating. In itself, or at its Wrst stage, it is an ‘apprehension [uppfattning] of the relation of the Wnite being to the inWnite and absolute original being given through feeling’. It is the combination of humility induced by the awareness of Wnitude, sensual transitoriness, and dependence on the one hand, and on the other, elevation inspired by our possession of the idea of the absolute and our sense of our capacity by means of this possession to become united with it and thus to lift ourselves above the sensual, to belong to a supersensual world.161 Yet this feeling is diVerent from Schleiermacher’s, and closer to Hegel’s, in that it is and must reXectively be related to the other aspects of the original idea; Grubbe sometimes even conceives of it as that in which this idea in its entirety is Wrst given, thus, apart from inspiring imaginative representations of the absolute, containing in itself also the theoretical and practical (moral) elements that 159 Ibid. 82, 122.

160 Ibid. iv. 134, 157; cf. iii. 89, 262–3.

161 Ibid. 129–32; iii. 240–3.

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Schleiermacher insisted on distinguishing from it. But Grubbe insists on stronger grounds than Hegel that it loses nothing of its religious meaning in the process of emerging to full clarity through reXection,162 for also when the idea is understood as developed from the religious consciousness, the latter remains intact as one of its irreducible and in itself necessary aspects. It is only as united with the moral consciousness and the moral will, the practical orientation of man’s life in accordance with the awakened idea of the moral good and the noble, that the religious feeling appears in its full signiWcance. Grubbe does not stress in his epistemological writing that the knowledge attainable through reason is a perception of concrete, individual reality; this is rather part of his ethics, which tends to reveal new aspects of his metaphysics. This is an aspect of the central combination in the early personal idealist metaphysics of the ‘higher empiricism’ of reason (asserted against empiricism in the ordinary sense as well as against rationalism) and the distinctions of the personal plurality (defended against radical monist ‘mysticism’ and Hegelianism). It is important, Wnally, to note that Grubbe emphasizes that reason must be free to follow its own intrinsic nature, demands, and laws, independently of outer authority. While respecting the historical doctrines of the Church and insisting on the impossibility of exhaustive rational knowledge of reality—including the Hegelian rationalization of the Christian faith—Grubbe defends the validity and the limited but real reach of reason and philosophical knowledge moderately deWned. Taking account of the testimony of tradition in a comprehensive historical conspectus of thought and belief, Grubbe characteristically, in and through this mode of philosophizing, inscribes idealistic personalism as part of the modern project with its view of religion as defensible on grounds of reason and experience. The distinctive insight yielded by this personalist synthesis of tradition and modernity is that human autonomy does not mean that there is not, ‘given in the innermost of man’s consciousness, an inner authority which speculation must acknowledge as the highest or as unconditionally valid’. This ‘revelation’ is for Grubbe what gives meaning to our life and to the world as the sphere of our moral action under divine governance. The ‘ineradicable and indubitable’ certainty of the moral and religious consciousness, ‘through which it announces itself as the only thing which indicates our life’s true value and signiWcance’, legitimizes the taking up into our philosophical speculation of determinations of the absolute that are given through it alone. Their validity, although not theoretically ‘provable’ in the often misapplied modern sense, is a condition of the possibility of the harmony of man’s inner nature and faculties which that nature itself must always pursue; without them, ‘all is darkness and confusion, a meaningless illusion [bla¨ndverk] without any reality, a play of dead, blind forces, which operate with cold, unconscious necessity’.163

162 Cf. Hegel’s view of the relation between feelings and Vorstellungen on the one hand and philosophical concepts on the other; see the introduction to the Enzyklopa¨die, Werke, viii. 163 Grubbe, Skrifter, vi. 165–6.

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In Grubbe, we discern at an early stage the basic contours of what was largely to remain the personalist position with regard to the problem of knowledge. However, as we will see in the following chapters, Grubbe accepted a one-sided atemporalism in his view of the absolute, which may to some extent account for the absence also from his epistemology of the expressions of voluntarism and dynamism that were characteristic of Schelling and even to some extent of Jacobi. Since in my view, however, Grubbe cannot, because of his stronger emphasis on the independence of the Wnite beings, properly be counted among Yandell’s ‘absolute idealistic personalists’, and even less among Lavely’s ‘absolutistic personalists’, it is not surprising that in substance we do in fact Wnd in him even some of these characteristic positions, as related to the view of reality as a system of interrelated personalities. Grubbe does, for instance, insist on the dynamic quality of the substance that is consciousness.

Atterbom P. D. A. Atterbom had a temperament quite diVerent from Grubbe’s, and a correspondingly diVerent style. In his work we Wnd the emerging personalistic worldview restated by a philosopher who was also a Romantic poet. For Atterbom too, man possesses an organ of knowledge distinct from the senses as well as from the understanding. But for Atterbom, this organ is more intimately related to the individual, concrete existence of the Wnite being. Its knowledge involves the whole man; ‘man’s innermost and most authentic [egentliga] mental character [sinnesart] . . . is the expression of the freedom, which in the perceiving mind [sinnet; literally: the sense] individualizes its existence [tillvarelse]’; ‘the thinking man, also in the capacity of philosopher, is something inWnitely more than merely a reXecting and constructing being’.164 The soul is the source of thought, not its product. The organ of knowledge is an organ of experience, connected with the personal life, not merely an intellectual intuition. After Grubbe’s measured expounding of the depths of reason, Atterbom redeploys the language of faith in his own, more dynamic exposition of a similar idealistic personalism. All knowledge rests on faith. But in Atterbom, as in subsequent personalism, it is a faith immanent in reason or the perceptive mind. The higher art of thought and the higher art of experience, Atterbom says, have in common what true philosophy calls faith, the beginning as well as the consummation of knowing: Faith is the immediate life-connection [lifs-bero¨ring] of our innermost personality with the Real or the True, which it intuitively holds fast by means of a conception the awareness of which [hvars sjelfka¨nsla] incessantly rises from the depths of the mind [sinnet] to selfconsciousness . . . Faith . . . is the eternally life-giving conviction of the nature of the Uncomprehended and of the revelatory joy [uppenbarelse-lust] by means of which it

164 Atterbom, ‘Om Philosophien och hennes fo¨rha˚llande till va˚r samtid’, Svea (1828), 115, 117.

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gives to comprehension and demonstration an eternal possibility to penetrate into it [i dess Inre] ever deeper and more sharply perceptive.165

Through the act of the force of faith, ‘that, which is in us immortally personal, out of all intuition or perception [a˚ska˚dning] takes hold of and holds forth to insight [till insigt framha˚ller] that Real which is similar . . . to itself—and thus also what is the innermost in this, the eternal Personality’.166 Atterbom goes on to explicate the experience or knowledge of faith as a ‘clearsighted faith of conviction’, not a ‘faith of authority’ or a ‘faith of instinct’. For the ‘comprehension and designation’ of the ‘Concrete and Individual’ that is the original absolute objectivity, no mere theoretical activity of the soul is enough, but only the Wlling of the concept by a simultaneous experiencing of the true nature of the object through a ‘practical contact’ which is capable of perceiving the ‘eternally essential’ not merely as something ‘eternal in general’ but something ‘eternal in particular’. Its ‘howness’ must Wrst ‘of its own will have presented itself ’ before the concept can acknowledge it as a rational necessity and as rationally valid. Without ‘the actual personality-principle, through which we, acting, create’, there arises ‘as little in our knowledge as in our moral life any real character [beskaVenhet]’. ‘The concrete Reason in us which we call our Personality, experiences by means of the expression [yttring] of its whole power’ the objective life, as well as what this life is, ‘the divine Idea manifested [framtedd] in a divine Fact’. This is an experience which presupposes ‘that our personality, as far as it is capable of being the image [afbild] of the Original personality itself, is also capable of being in an immediate life-connection with all of the Reality which traces its origin from this highest Personality’. ‘Reason!’ Atterbom exclaims, ‘While in yourself you are [inneba¨r] the intuitive form of the Fact of Life, behold your Idea as the Idea of Life; and thus not merely in its schematic (or logical), but also in its factual (or historical) reality; so that the Idea of Life may in time appear as that of Personality!’167 Here we see the metaphysical aspects of personality signiWcantly conjoined with historicity. But Atterbom also characteristically developed a notion of ‘inner’, ‘spiritual’ time—as, in a diVerent form and by other means (in the context of the revived Bo¨hmean theosophy that Schelling had partly appropriated), did also some of the German speculative theists. Atterbom seems to have held that the life of personality has an inner, spiritual, yet in some sense temporal, aspect distinct from worldly history. Despite the typical concern of the age with the philosophy of history, and with developmental thought applied to the person and its ethical advancement, the idealists of personality never lost sight of the metaphysical, Platonic dimension which provided an equipoise to closed, this-worldly historicism. But at the same time the insight into the primacy of personality led some of them to try to begin to move away from the extreme opposite of pure temporalism, the idea of eternity as static timelessness. I will return to this latter 165 Atterbom, Studier till Philosophiens Historia och System, 446–7. 166 Ibid. 501–2. 167 Ibid. 316, 445–6, 453–4.

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issue in the next chapter; here, the topic is Atterbom’s view of the ‘perceiving mind’, sinnet, and it is important to keep in mind only that the historicist element to some extent entered into his view of knowledge. For Atterbom, each personality possesses an original ‘spiritual power of seeing [ande-synkraft]’, through which it perceives or experiences that which really is, ‘the Concrete, the Individual, the Factual’. This ‘power of vision [ska˚dningskraft]’ is in its essence ‘a perceptive sympathy with God and his creations’. Philosophy is speculation, but true speculation is a ‘fresh soul-vision [frisk sja¨ls-ska˚dning]’ of this kind, which ‘regards the World as the work of the free act of a personal God’.168

Geijer Similar ideas had been developed to some extent by Erik Gustaf Geijer in his earlier works, but it was in his late lectures on the philosophy of history and other late writings that his own version of personalism came into full bloom. Turning sharply against what he perceived to be the empty principle of Hegel’s pantheism, he gave a representative, indeed paradigmatic, statement of the fundamental criticism of Hegel that had developed in, and out of, the work of Jacobi and Schelling. While failing to see the possibility of disengaging concrete, historical thought as a more limited form of dialectical reason from Hegel’s allembracing metaphysic of the logical idea, Geijer, who was not only a philosopher but also a professional historian, could not only see even more clearly than Schelling the artiWcial nature of some of Hegel’s historical constructions, but also delivered a precise restatement of the theoretical criticism of that underlying metaphysic which rendered his dialectic implausible. Above all, he stated this criticism with a sharper and clearer focus on the missing factor of the person than what we Wnd in other personalists at this time. Geijer must be said to be right that, at least as articulated by Hegel, the processes of thought are not the processes of reality, that existence is other and deeper than thought. Geijer charged that ‘Absolute idealism can . . . be said to reduce everything to a commercium of thought with itself ’,169 and that, if Hegel’s teaching is taken negatively, it is a devouring of all existence; if on the other hand it is taken positively, as the doctrine of pure being, this is, as such, opposed to individual being; if . . . negativity is understood as the position emerging from negation, this becoming displays nothing but appearance [sken] and evanescent foam [fo¨rsvinnande bubblor]. For if the all-oneness is, it alone and nothing else is.170

168 Ibid. 289–91. The last is a quotation from F. J. Stahl (to whom Breckman devotes a whole chapter in his capacity of ‘Christian personalist’). 169 Geijer, Menniskans Historia, 157. 170 Ibid. 181.

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Hegelian philosophy becomes ‘merely a monologue of thought’, producing nothing but ‘passing personiWcations’. It is a ‘subjectivity without subject’; ‘ ‘‘der Weltgeist’’ always throws oV and leaves behind the forms it has gone through, as a husk and less perfect forms in the chain of an ideal necessity’:171 A certain commonality of intelligences is so evident both in concept and in experience, that it cannot be denied. Thence the temptation to derive from this commonality, which itself cannot be but a thought, indeed thought itself in its highest and purest generality, the particular intelligences, so that they are seen to proceed from this highest thought and also to lose themselves in it—It is a thought without a thinker, a will without a willing, a subject-objectivity without a subject—the pure nothing incessantly metamorphosizing itself in the forms of being, the pure nihilism craving reality.172

As we shall see, the subsequent development of personal idealism would repeat this same criticism, often in exactly the same terms; ever since Schelling, it could even be regarded as one of personalism’s deWning features. Geijer continues: since thought is its own negation, everything else, which is not thought, is nevertheless thought and the product of thought. Thus it turns out that this philosophy understands thought as something impersonal; which is also its weakness. It has indeed tried to deduce from thought’s quality of being its own opposite that which is opposite to thought itself, or nature; but the diYculty on which it runs aground is that thought may produce its other as much as it likes, but still it will never produce a Thou; which means a recognition [erka¨nnande] of thought’s absolute powerlessness, and through which the whole of the Hegelian philosophy falls.173

The diVerentiation of reality on which the speculative theists dwelt—against absolute idealism and pantheism—was mainly the one between the Wnite being and his knowledge, and the absolute and its knowledge. Philosophy, as Hegel knew, must be both realistic and idealistic and it must contain both duality and identity;174 but for them, the fundamental and distinctive personalistic duality was given in and through an analysis of reason, as they deWned it in the footsteps of Jacobi. This was not simply what Geijer here terms ‘thought’, since the characteristic feature of their view of reason was the perceptive element, even in the case of Grubbe’s ‘idea’ of the absolute. There are clearly diVerences between Geijer’s position and theirs, but they can easily be exaggerated if we focus unduly on their respective terminologies. To some extent, the impression of divergence arises simply because Biberg and Grubbe did not, like Geijer, enter into extensive, separate disquisitions on Hegel. But the emphasis on the distinction between ‘thought’ and ‘being’ or ‘reality’, which Knudson considers deWnitional of ‘typical theistic personalism’, was, as we have seen, clearly there in Jacobi, by whom Biberg and Grubbe were decisively inXuenced, and in precisely this regard. As for Jacobi, ‘the understanding’ was their ‘thought’, and sensory perception plus the perceptions of reason were their

171 Geijer, Menniskans Historia, 182–3, 204, 207. 174 Ibid. 209.

172 Ibid. 212–13.

173 Ibid 214.

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‘being’ or ‘reality’. But obviously, the opposition becomes sharper in Geijer’s trenchant formulations on Hegel. Geijer carries on, by way of a further application which Jacobi himself had not pursued, the Jacobian line of criticism—the application to Hegel and his ‘thought’ and ‘Geist’, which, if they were certainly not the ‘understanding’ as Jacobi had deWned it, were plainly not his ‘reason’ either: this pantheism ends . . . as does all pantheism, in nihilism, since the abstract thought is all and nothing, which plays with its own shadow. It is precisely in this nihilistic character of the system that we Wnd the explanation of its desire for reality; of this vehemence, with which it hypostasizes the products of its imagination to reality and unceasingly calls for ‘the concrete idea’—just like a drowning person who calls for help. Thus this philosophy swears again and again that it has to do with ‘der Geist’, ‘der konkrete Geist’, regardless of the fact that it never gets away from its abstract and impersonal categories, for the simple reason that thought cannot produce reality. Quite the opposite: this pantheistic process, which has returned more than once in philosophy, has each time showed more clearly that if one does not take one’s point of departure in personality, one will never reach it—indeed, that one will then not reach any reality.175

Against this Hegelian pantheism, Geijer too developed a version of Jacobi’s higher, perceptive reason and Atterbom’s perceptive power of the soul. Geijer used the same designation for it as Atterbom: sinnet (roughly, the perceptual mind). As in Grubbe and Atterbom, this was an even broader and, it would seem, richer faculty than Jacobi’s, explained at greater length and in more detail in the context of Geijer’s broad-based humanistic view of man and of Bildung. What Biberg’s and Grubbe’s ‘reason’ and Atterbom’s and Geijer’s ‘faculty’ (my use of the term here is inappropriate, as one of their purposes of exploring the phenomenon was to go beyond the static faculty-psychology), sinnet, have in common with Jacobi’s reason is that they break through the monistic assumptions of German idealistic pantheism. In the words of Nyblaeus, Geijer makes ‘an explicit distinction between the sensory and the supersensory world and explains that the inner mind [sinnet] gives access to the latter or has the capacity of a higher experiential knowledge’.176 A more central feature of this mind as understood by Geijer, however, may be its capacity of apprehending individual, personal reality. As in Atterbom, reason, life, and personality are united in a holistic, individualizing process.

Lotze As we have noted, the themes of speculative theism were the ones that dominated German Kathederphilosophie for a very long time, between 1830 and 1870. This was the time when the Hegelian school collapsed, with the Right more or less joining the speculative theists and the Left gradually transforming Hegelian idealism into

175 Ibid. 214–15.

176 Nyblaeus, Den WlosoWska forskningen i Sverige, ii/2. 463.

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dialectical and other materialism. In this situation, outside Kathederphilosophie, Germany proved susceptible to the Western European inXuences of empiricism, naturalism, and positivism. We have seen how Schelling commended Jacobi for granting everything to reason, only to show that it was still hopelessly inadequate to experienced reality. By 1870, strengwissenschaftlich method, narrow rationalism, mechanism, determinism, naturalism, and atheism were increasingly dominant in German culture, and to a considerable extent some of these positions had in fact developed out of Germany’s own Romanticized pantheism; they were not exclusively Western European imports. Jacobi seemed to have been proven right: they were internally related and sprang from a truncated view of reason.177 Lotze, who could be considered one of the last and most important of the speculative theists, was himself strongly inXuenced by the new development of the scientiWc-mechanistic explanation. But granting much to Enlightenment reason, as Jacobi had done, he similarly sought to show that its results were altogether unacceptable. Although his argument involved a new kind of subordination of the mechanistic system as a whole to teleological principles by means of his philosophy of value, Lotze can be said to have renewed the personalistic and theistic counter-movement in Germany by redeploying at least part of the Jacobian strategy against the renewed radical Enlightenment. Rather than formulating for the Wrst time—building on the legacies of classical theism, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Kant—a new kind of personalism, ‘typical theistic personalism’, Lotze, in the personalistic elements of his work, was very much in line with the earlier development of personalism, with regard to its view of knowledge and experience as in other respects. J. H. Muirhead characterizes Lotze’s ‘main thesis’ as the ‘separation of reality and the work of thought’: ‘Do what thought will, it fails to grasp what always must constitute the heart of reality in the individual thing. From this point of view the Hegelian system stood condemned as an attempt to deduce reality from the abstractions of logical thought.’178 This makes it clear how Lotze ties in with the work of Jacobi, the later Schelling, the earlier speculative theists, and the idealists of personality in this respect,179 but it is somewhat simplistic as a characterization of his ‘main thesis’; it says nothing about the connection of this position with Lotze’s development of Kantianism in the direction of value-philosophy, and its distinction between the world of scientiWc fact and the world of values and meaning. Lotze’s version of this distinction was diVerent from the one we Wnd in the Humean and positivistic current of modern philosophy. Joining the Platonic

177 Knudson in one place gives the alternative, Jacobian description of rationalistic determinism as developing in the opposite direction in three steps, from materialism to Spinoza to Hegel; but for Knudson as for other personalists the development from Spinoza or Hegel to materialism is quite as important: The Philosophy of Personalism, 213–14. 178 Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition, 203. 179 For Lotze’s own formulations on the Schelling–Hegel dispute and his own position with regard to it, as well as to Weisse’s position, see Metaphysik, 170–2.

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tradition by reinterpreting Plato’s forms in terms of his theory of values, Lotze denied the self-subsistent independence of the world of mechanism from the world of ends revealed in value-consciousness. Truth, that is, what science pursues, is itself, Lotze sought to show, a value. Moreover, in the world of values as a whole, existing in the conscious life of rational beings, truth is subordinate to and receives its signiWcance from the Good. Without the world of values, science in itself, as a mere registration of the world of facts, is meaningless. Lotze preserved the distinction between reason and understanding, assigning the function of apprehending the world of values to the former, and deWning it in broad terms that could perhaps be called Jacobian. But at the same time he turns against the compartmentalization of the mind typical not only of the old more or less scholastic philosophy but also of Kant. The whole of the living soul is active in the interdependent and reciprocal operations of its various elements. Jacobi had approached these insights too, and in Dilthey the Lotzean beginnings were developed in the characteristic philosophy of life of the period; among British personalists this psychology was taken up primarily by Ward. In these philosophers there is no contradiction, however, in the simultaneous insistence on distinction and unity: it is rather a question of emphasizing how one of the elements of the mind, the abstractive understanding, could, if allowed to dominate at the expense of the others, lead to distorted views of reality. Lotze signiWcantly held that although knowledge of the world of values is not ‘scientiWc’ in the same sense as knowledge of the world of fact, it is similarly revealed in experience.180 Sentiment being central to Lotze, his new psychology does in some respects approach the irrationalist side of early twentieth-century lifephilosophy; but the important aspects of the distinction between thought and the ‘heart of reality’ in Lotze, for my purposes, are the ones that are related to his speciWcally personalistic position, his understanding of personal experience. Lotze is in line with the tradition of natural theology when he declares that the philosophy of religion seeks to establish ‘how much of the content of religion may be discovered, proved, or at least justiWed by reason [vernunftma¨ssig]’. There are ‘highest questions which only the . . . special faculty of faith [das neue und eigenthu¨mliche Organ des Glaubens] is competent to answer’. Reason has a higher tendency and ‘needs’ of its own, and philosophy explores these needs and investigates the correspondence between them—the ‘natural or innate endowment [Ausstattung] of our spirit’—and religious revelation, seeking to establish whether the latter is ‘the adequate fulWlment of those religious needs . . . which our reason is compelled to cherish, but would not be able of itself to satisfy’.181 Reason, which cannot reach the highest truth by itself, ‘must be 180 See Pester, Hermann Lotze, and Piche´, ‘Hermann Lotze et la gene`se de la philosophie des valeurs’. 181 Lotze, Grundzu¨ge der Religionsphilosophie, 5–7 (there are considerable diVerences between the editions of this book; I use the one that was translated by Ladd); Mikrokosmus, iii. 546. In another passage, Lotze says that ‘every further upward Xight of religion depends’ upon our own higher tendency in the experience of the good and the beautiful: Grundzu¨ge der Religionsphilosophie, 84.

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able to understand the revealed truth at least so far as to recognize in it the satisfying and convincing conclusion of those upward-soaring trains of thought which reason itself started, led by its own needs, but was not able to bring to an end’.182 Consciousness in itself is reality; inner experience is quite as real as experience through the outer senses; an ‘immediate inner experience [unmittelbare innere Erfahrung]’, Lotze explains, ‘attests the truth of the content of religion, as directly and independently of logical mediation [Vermittelung] as perception by the senses attests the reality of external objects’. In addition, there is a more Schellingian theme: religion ‘is never a demonstrable theorem, but the conviction of its truth is a deed [That] that is to be accredited to character’.183 Revelation is not only outer, ‘some historical act of God’, but also inner, ‘continually renewed in men’s hearts [Gemu¨thern]’,184 ‘a divine or supersensible inXuence upon our interior being’, which produces intuitions ‘such as the ‘‘senses’’ can never supply, and such as constitute that religious cognition [Erkenntnis] which obtrudes itself upon us with immediate certainty’. These intuitions have in common with sense experience, however, the fact that they do not yet in themselves constitute knowledge, but require for this ‘elaboration in thought [eine denkende Bearbeitung]’. The ‘inner states’ are ‘available as data for the acquisition of truth’. Lotze lists in Schleiermacherian manner the feeling of dependence, but also directly links ethical and aesthetic ‘feelings [Gefu¨hle]’ to the inner divine intuition.185 Like Jacobi, he considers God the ‘One Being’ which is ‘the indispensable presupposition of all intelligibility in Wnite things’.186 As we saw, Knudson held that freedom was not central for Lotze. Nevertheless, it has an important place, namely the place that the early personalist movement in general characteristically assigns to it: it is not a speculative idea, but rests on experience, not least, Lotze adds, the experience of ethical self-condemnation. SigniWcantly, Lotze was Wrst sympathetic towards Schelling’s attempt at a ‘system of freedom’, as one expression of the widespread reaction against Hegel’s ‘system of necessity’ with its ‘degradation of everything peculiar and concrete’, but later became dissatisWed both with its results and the manner in which they were reached, so that in the end he found himself to stand in ‘complete contradiction’ to it.187 In relation to the idea of a necessary causal relation, freedom is for Lotze primary in all respects, although it is also compatible with causality in the sense that it is freedom itself that is held to ‘postulate’ it. Freedom cannot be proved; as

182 Lotze, Mikrokosmus, iii. 546. 183 Id. Grundzu¨ge der Religionsphilosophie, 81–2. 184 Id. Mikrokosmus, iii. 546. 185 Id. Grundzu¨ge der Religionsphilosophie, 7–8. I will return to the aesthetic component of Lotze’s view of feeling in Ch. 4. Lotze has been considered the father of the theory of Einfu¨hlung later developed by Dilthey; see Bamberger, Untersuchungen zur Entstehung des Wertproblems in der Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts. I. Lotze, 87–91; Piche´, ‘Hermann Lotze et la gene`se de la philosophie des valeurs’, 510. 186 Lotze, Mikrokosmus, iii. 545. 187 Id. Kleine Schriften, iii/2. 454–5. This was written in English; the article is entitled ‘Philosophy in the last forty years’.

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unconditioned choice between given alternatives, it is even ‘incomprehensible’. Yet the emphasis on freedom never leads to irrational voluntarism or existentialism. Freedom is neither absolute and blind nor necessarily determined by the consciousness of the alternatives of action. It is a choice between what, independently of the will, has value and what does not have value or what is good or bad, and ethical judgement is not about the will as free, but only about the will which ‘is no longer free, but has made its decision’: ‘ ‘‘Freedom’’ is simply the conditio sine qua non for the possibility of the subsequent valuation [Wertbestimmung] of the determinate ‘‘willing’’.’188 This understanding of the free human action Lotze, like earlier personalism, sets against the determinism common to absolute idealism and materialism.189 Lotze carries on Weisse’s version of the criticism not only of the—in the central personalist respect—undiVerentiating, Wnite-cum-inWnite Geist of Hegel, but especially of the confusion of form and content in his understanding of the ‘idea’. For Weisse, the Gedankenbestimmungen of Hegel’s logic shared the purely formal nature of Kant’s categories, and there was no credible transition from them to reality. Like Biberg and Grubbe, Lotze seeks the alternative in the direction of a simultaneous reappropriation and reinterpretation of the Platonic notion of the idea—and for the same reason. He cannot accept the hypostasization of the general idea as a Wxed, separate, transcendent archetype; such an idea cannot account for, and practically disregards, the concrete, given reality of historical experience. With the hiatus between Hegel’s idea and reality, Hegel’s immanent dialectic displays, according to Weisse and Lotze, a merely conceptual progression, thus forcing its general standard upon the concrete singularity of the real, which is reduced to a collection of examples of inferior worth. As Lotze further argued in his Logik and elsewhere, Hegelianism is in this sense a modern variation of Platonism which shares its basic error. But not only Hegel’s ‘idea’ perpetuates the mistaken Platonic universalism; in modern times, the concept of natural law has replaced the Platonic idea. In either form, it was impossible for Lotze to accept such universality as expressive of reality. He therefore opposed to their claim to ontological status, their Sein, an understanding of them in terms of ‘validity’, Geltung. It was this criticism, and this solution, that the epistemology of Rickert, Windelband, and Lask—as expressed, for instance, in Windelband’s distinction between the ‘nomothetic’ and the ‘idiographic’ sciences—took over.190 Concerned to establish the values as distinct from the Platonic and Hegelian idea, Lotze nevertheless signiWcantly retained the term ‘idea’ as synonymous with value, seeking, like his speculative theist predecessors, to distinguish the real idea from the abstraction of the general concept.191 188 Lotze, Grundzu¨ge der Religionsphilosophie, 66. 189 Piche´, ‘Hermann Lotze et la gene`se de la philosophie des valeurs’, 495. 190 The idea of Geltung was also inXuential on Husserl: ibid. 503 n. 2. 191 The value or meaning of the idea can, Lotze thinks, be expressed in unlimitedly varied manifestations and characteristics (Merkmale) and is ‘a controlling power in their interconnection’, since, contrary to the arbitrary abstraction of the concept, it ‘belongs essentially to the whole of the real ¨ sthetik, 18–19. order of the world’: Grundzu¨ge der A

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Mainly through Lotze, but also through Ulrici, the whole German tradition of personalistic-idealistic criticism of pantheism, one-sided Enlightenment ‘understanding’, and absolute idealism Wnally reached Britain, and it was with PringlePattison’s Hegelianism and Personality that the full philosophical force of the personalistic criticism of pantheism was felt for the Wrst time in this country. Here, its core insights were expressed with a new degree of precision. To a considerable extent they were also perceived to be new insights, Pringle-Pattison’s original contributions, and as we have seen, this perception still prevails among historians of philosophy. It is true that Pringle-Pattison adds a new application, in that he subjects the British version of absolute idealism represented by Green, and—in later books—by Bradley and Bosanquet, to the personalist criticism. He also developed further and varied some of the earlier themes. But as to the main lines of argument, both with regard to their content and their precise formulation, Pringle-Pattison largely restates what had already been said, from Jacobi to Lotze, over a period of a hundred years. The similarities with the passages I have quoted from Geijer are particularly striking. Sell cites H. F. Hallett’s characterization in his Mind obituary: because idealism is for him the end and not the beginning of the argument, Pringle-Pattison ‘is able to include the truth of realism as a subordinate moment in a more complete and profound philosophy’.192 As the leading representative in Britain of the distinctive personalist, nonHegelian union of realism and idealism, Pringle-Pattison relied on Lotze’s recent version of ‘typical theistic personalism’, but, more or less consciously, his philosophy was also a restatement of the major themes of the whole of the preLotzean development of such personalism, both on the European continent and in Britain. Coleridge had written that ‘I should have no objection to deWne reason with Jacobi . . . as an organ bearing the same relation to spiritual objects, the universal, the eternal, and the necessary, as the eye bears to material and contingent phenomena’.193 Coleridge rejected, with Schelling, Jacobi’s radical opposition of rationalistic pantheism on the one hand and the personalistic worldview of experience, faith, freedom, and a personal God on the other. Yet although it was diVerent in some respects, mainly due to his own pantheistic background, in other respects Coleridge’s distinction between reason and understanding was in line with Jacobi’s also in its broader philosophical motivation.194 In The Friend he wrote that ‘the inevitable result of all consequent reasoning in which the intellect refuses to acknowledge a higher or deeper ground than it can itself supply . . . is Pantheism’.195 Schelling’s early intellectual intuition was 192 193 194 195

Sell, Philosophical Idealism and Christian Belief, 144. Cited in Seth, English Philosophers and Schools of Philosophy, 325. Coleridge, Aids to ReXection, 153–6, and the Appendix. Cited in the introduction to Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, p. lxxii.

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reinterpreted by Coleridge as a supersensory, religious intuition, a direct consciousness of God. Reason became an organ of perception of ideas (God, freedom, immortality), a supersensory experience.196 There are further similarities between Coleridge and the German and Scandinavian personalists. His words about Christianity have a familiar ring: ‘not a Theory, nor a Speculation, but a Life. Not a Philosophy of Life, but a Life and a living Process.’ And so has his interpretation of Christianity as Jewish doctrines ‘conWrmed, enlivened, realized and brought home to the whole Being of Man, Head, Heart, and Spirit, by the truths and inXuences of the Gospel’.197 Not only does Coleridge’s defence of experiential, inner religion and his emphasis on the need for moral will against abstractive science place him in the personalist line. The characteristic personalist connection between the full, experienced and experiencing human personality and the divine personality, the ultimate reality which cannot be less than what is highest in our own experience, is clearly formulated and defended by him.198 In demonstrating that ‘typical theistic personalism’ in Britain, as in Lotze, is a continuation of the earlier personalist current rather than an innovation that supplanted ‘classical’ or mere ‘conventional’ theism, it would be reasonable to deal with C. B. Upton before Pringle-Pattison, for although Upton received an impulse from the latter’s Hegelianism and Personality and partly followed it with regard to the themes treated in this chapter, he never entered into the more detailed philosophical arguments of Pringle-Pattison but drew rather on the more general personalist current as it reached him from the other British and German sources. For this reason he also largely appears to have stated the characteristic positions with regard to the personal absolute and the personal unity-in-diversity, the subjects of my two following chapters, independently of and before Pringle-Pattison. We Wnd in outline in his Hibbert Lectures the ideas that Pringle-Pattison was to set out at length only in his later works. J. R. Illingworth too, in Personality Human and Divine, developed many of the characteristic arguments for the personality of the absolute before Pringle-Pattison, while yet drawing inspiration from the latter’s early Hegelianism and Personality. However, Upton was not at all well known, whereas Pringle-Pattison immediately established himself with Hegelianism and Personality as one of the leading British philosophers. It was Pringle-Pattison’s book that launched the personalist movement as a major force in British thought, and the quality and originality of Upton’s work are not such as to motivate dealing with him before his illustrious fellow-thinker. In Illingworth’s case there are also, as in Upton’s there are not, later works that are relevant for my purposes. For these reasons, I will turn Wrst to Pringle-Pattison’s opus as a whole.

196 Ibid. pp. lxx, xlii. 197 Coleridge, Aids to ReXection, 139, 143. Similar formulations can be found in the works of J. C. Hare; see Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore, 161–2. 198 Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore, 75.

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Pringle-Pattison By the time of Upton’s lectures, a much more detailed, extensive, and precise statement of the personalist criticism of Hegelian impersonalism, and thus in large measure, albeit indirectly, of the personalist position itself, had already been provided by Pringle-Pattison in Hegelianism and Personality. Pringle-Pattison’s take on the problem is characterized by his genetical analysis of what he perceives, in the light of Kant’s own positions, to be the unwarranted interpretation of the Kantian transcendental Ego, the mere ‘formal unity of the universe as known’, as ‘a universal or absolute self-consciousness’, ‘the one eternal divine Subject to which the world is relative’.199 To some extent, Pringle-Pattison’s interpretation of the post-Kantian development leading up to Hegel is coloured by Green’s version of absolute idealism, and, I suggest, by the Right Hegelians’ and some of the speculative theists’ interpretation in Germany. PringlePattison is aware that the position is something more than an interpretation, that it is a conscious development of Kant’s position. As an idealist, Pringle-Pattison has no problem with the idea of ‘an eternally complete self-consciousness which holds a creative relation to our own’.200 But the way in which, on his interpretation, the thinkers in question reach this idea is erroneous, and has serious consequences for their speciWc understanding of it. It is important to note that with a historically more adequate interpretation of Hegel, Pringle-Pattison’s case could only have been reinforced: it would have been possible for him to argue that in this way, the idea of an eternally complete self-consciousness which holds a creative relation to our own was precisely what the Germans could not reach, that the problems he so clearly shows the German development lead to in fact express more unambiguously than he thought a non-theistic understanding of the absolute. As he would see more clearly in the case of Bradley and Bosanquet, only personal idealism could reach and defend an understanding of the absolute as an eternally complete self-consciousness which holds a creative relation to our own. Kant’s transcendental logic, Pringle-Pattison reasons, was merely ‘a study of knowledge in abstracto’, the result of which can only be ‘abstract conditions, not concrete facts or metaphysical realities’. It reveals the conditions of actual knowledge, the categories and the unity of the pure ego, but ‘it deals itself with no actual knower, whether human or divine. It deals . . . with possible consciousness, or consciousness in general, which, so long as it remains a ‘‘general’’, is of course a pure abstraction.’ But the subsequent idealism hypostasizes this abstraction: It takes the notion of knowledge as equivalent to a real Knower; and the form of knowledge being one, it leaps to the conclusion that what we have before us is the One Subject who sustains the world, and is the real Knower in all Wnite intelligences—It is of a piece with the Scholastic Realism which hypostatised humanitas or homo as a 199 Pringle-Pattison, Hegelianism and Personality, 24, 29.

200 Ibid. 34–5.

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universal substance, of which individual men were, in a manner, the accidents. Similarly here, the notion of knowledge in general—the pure Ego—which is reached by abstraction from the individual human knower, is erected into a self-existent reality—‘an eternally complete self-consciousness’—of which the individual is an imperfect reproduction or mode.201

When the logical unity of thought in general is separated as a divine, absolute Self, Fichte Wnds it impossible to ascribe self-consciousness to the absolute thus understood as an empty principle. Only in the Wnite self, through the resistance of the non-self, does self-consciousness arise.202 In Fichte’s philosophy, the absolute ego is therefore gradually reduced simply to the absolute, that is, the absolute without ego, a metaphysical ground of the world and of the Wnite egos which alone are self-conscious. The same transformation takes place in the early Schelling’s deWnition of the absolute as ‘the indiVerence-point of subject and object— ‘‘pure identity in which nothing is distinguishable’’ ’. What we Wnd here is in point of fact a restatement of Jacobi’s criticism: Fichte described his own system as an inverted Spinozism, in which the Absolute Ego stands in place of Substance, thus conserving the rights of the self-conscious life, and justifying the name Idealism. But here it is proved by the self-development of the system that, when thought out, it falls back into Spinozism pure and simple. The Absolute Ego passes into the Absolute, and turns out to be no better than an absolute Substance from which all determinations are absent.203

This was the fate that Biberg and Grubbe had seen to be inevitable for idealism, with its new insights into self-consciousness, if it was not transformed into a proper speculative theism in the way they prescribed and to a considerable extent exempliWed. As it stands, Pringle-Pattison continues, this development is merely ‘a play of abstractions which is essentially impossible and unmeaning, but which, if taken seriously as a metaphysic, would deprive both God and man of real existence’: It is as if we took the concrete personality of the individual—which may be described in certain of its aspects as an instance of unity in multiplicity or permanence in change—and separated the unity from the multiplicity, assigning the unity to a universal or divine Self, and treating the multiplicity, or the changing ‘states of consciousness’, as the empirical self or the individual qua individual. Thinkers like Fichte and Green fully admit . . . that a real self-conscious being, in the ordinary sense of the word, comes to pass only when these two sides are united. Nevertheless it is made to appear as if this real self-consciousness were the result of activity on the part of the universal Self, as if the latter supplied itself somehow with matter in the shape of empirical states of consciousness, which it then proceeds to unify. But this is to seek to produce a reality from the union of two abstractions. Distinguishing two inseparable aspects of any concrete self, we substantiate one of them, and make it do duty for God; the other—what is left of us—we do not exactly substantiate, but we think of it as an eVect of our Wrst abstraction. But the true result of this is . . . to deprive both God and man of real existence—The empirical self is not the real self, it is not

201 Ibid. 32–3.

202 Ibid. 52–9.

203 Ibid. 61–2.

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the whole man; for half the man has been taken away to be made into a god. The empirical self is merely, so to speak, the objective side of the man’s consciousness. He is left without a self of his own to which his ‘states of consciousness’ could be object, and the divine Self—a Self identical in all men—is brought in to perform that function for him. The individual seems thus to become no more than an object of the divine Self, a series of phenomena threaded together and reviewed by it—an oYce which it performs in precisely the same fashion for any number of such so-called individuals. Such a representation, in truth, wipes out the selfhood and independence of the individual with a completeness which few systems of Pantheism can rival.204

The apophatic understanding of ‘the Absolute without further designation, as the womb out of which all things proceed’, as ‘the predicateless ground of existence in general’, to which there is but a short step in such idealism, is ‘a solution which settles everything in an easy fashion, but which seems to give up everything for which ‘‘Idealism’’ was supposed to strive’.205 Against this form of idealism, however, Hegel famously sets his conception of an identity that mediates or restores itself and is realized through diVerence. The absolute is reaYrmed as determinate subject and not as undetermined substance, but this time as a subject that is diVerentiated by means of and developed through opposites in a dialectical process. Pringle-Pattison fully agrees with what he thinks is Hegel’s understanding of ‘the self-conscious knower . . . as the ultimate fact, to which all other facts . . . are relative, and in which they Wnd their explanation’.206 He also accepts Hegel’s method insofar as it aims at systematicity of thought. However, this method is shown—partly by reference to Hegel’s earlier critic Trendelenburg207—to be in reality, despite Hegel’s intentions, ‘empirically conditioned’ at ‘every step’: The . . . dialectical opposition which is the nerve of the process is not the contradictory opposition of the logician. Mere contradiction yields nothing new,—nothing . . . which, by synthesis or fusion with the original datum, could yield a third product diVerent from either. The opposition which Hegel makes his fulcrum is contrary or real opposition; the second is not simply the negative of the Wrst, but both are real determinations of things. But if this is so, then the Wrst does not of itself strike round into its opposite. The opposite arises only for a subjective reXection which has had the advantage of acquaintance with the real world. Such a reXection, playing upon the empty abstraction, perceives its need of supplement by reference to the fuller reality from which it is an abstraction. Only in this way is the path to be traversed determined. The forward movement is in reality a progress backwards: it is a retracing of our steps to the world as we know it in the fullness of its real determinations.208

Hegel’s acceptance of ‘self-consciousness as the ultimate category of thought’, in itself correct, is not ‘reached by any ‘‘high priori road’’ ’, but is in reality ‘derived

204 205 207 208

Pringle-Pattison, Hegelianism and Personality, 67–8. Ibid. 69–70. 206 Ibid. 95. Trendelenburg was also read by Geijer, as was stressed by Norberg. Pringle-Pattison, Hegelianism and Personality, 97–8.

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from the act of his own self-conscious experience’.209 One of the few direct and explicit links between British personal idealism and Jacobi and the later Schelling is found when Pringle-Pattison quotes Schelling’s criticism of Hegel’s transition from logic to nature or deduction of the latter from the former as mere metaphors which, in Pringle-Pattison’s words, ‘in the circumstances, convey no meaning whatsoever’, but merely ‘indicate a resolute leap on Hegel’s part across ‘‘the ugly broad ditch’’ which dialectic is powerless to bridge’.210 The formulation ‘ugly broad ditch’, we should note here, is Lessing’s, and Wrst appeared in, and was made famous by, Jacobi’s conversation with Lessing on pantheism, published in the work with which Jacobi started the Pantheismusstreit. Hegel’s philosophy, Pringle-Pattison continues, belongs to ‘a whole family of systems’, of which Plato’s theory of ideas in its ‘distinctive feature’, its ‘endeavour to construct existence or life out of pure form or abstract thought’ is, according to Pringle-Pattison, ‘the type’.211 Saving modern idealism by turning it into a speculative theism would, it will be recalled, according to Biberg require not only a return to Plato, but a revision of Plato on precisely this point. Hegel, says Pringle-Pattison, is right that ‘the category of Being is the poorest and most abstract of all’. He ‘deserves all praise for the persistency with which he has attacked [the] vicious tendency of thought, and of the scholastic logic in particular, to hark back upon its Wrst abstractions’. But when this is admitted, the real point at issue remains untouched. When we say that a thing exists or possesses being, we may be saying very little about it; yet that is, on the other hand, the allimportant assertion upon which all the rest are based. When we are assured that we are dealing with a reality, we can go on from the elementary statement of its existence to a more elaborate description of its nature. But that elementary statement must be originally made in virtue of some immediate assurance, some immediate datum of experience. We must touch reality somewhere; otherwise our whole construction is in the air . . . whatever view we may take as to the precise locus and scope of such immediate certainty, no sophistry can permanently obscure our perception that the real must be given. Thought cannot make it; thought only describes what it Wnds. That there is a world at all, we know only through the immediate assurance, perception, or feeling of our own existence, and through ourselves of other persons and things . . . The existence of God must either be an immediate certainty, or it must be involved in facts of experience which do possess that certainty.212

It is thus not ‘the category ‘‘Being’’, of which we are in quest, but that reality of which all categories are only descriptions, and which itself can only be experienced, immediately known, or lived. To such a reality or factual existence there is

209 Ibid. 104. 210 Ibid. 113–14. Pringle-Pattison adds that ‘On this point, few English thinkers are likely to have much diYculty in making up their mind’, but will rather ‘condemn the attempt not so much because it has failed as because it was ever made’: ibid. This is true even of the British absolute idealists. 211 Ibid. 122. 212 Ibid. 123–6

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no logical bridge; and thoughts or categories have meaning only if we assume, as somehow given, a real world to which they refer.’213 In The Idea of God, where Pringle-Pattison developed directly and at greater length his own, personal idealist alternative, he expanded on the characteristic personalist blend of idealism and realism with which we are now familiar from the German and Scandinavian sources. There must be ‘intelligence in some larger, directer form’ than the abstractive understanding—a form ‘of which we may have hints and anticipations in our own experience’—‘if we are not to treat that which is highest as lower than ourselves, and to assimilate it to unconscious nature’.214 In this work Pringle-Pattison dwelt also on the presence of ideals in our consciousness, and what they reveal about reality, in a way that would have been readily comprehensible to Jacobi. ‘Ideals would be impossible to a self-contained Wnite entity. To frame an ideal and pursue it means the presence of the inWnite in the Wnite experience; or, from the other side, it is the mark of the Wnite being who is partaker in an inWnite life.’ Values are objectively yet ‘brokenly’ realized in man’s experience. ‘Man does not make values any more than he makes reality. The soul, in Plato’s metaphor, ‘‘feeds upon’’ truth, upon goodness, upon beauty; and these, being all inWnite in their essence, humble, as well as exalt, the Wnite subject to whom they display their features.’215 It is worth adding in this connection that although Pringle-Pattison to some extent adopted Lotze’s new language of values, which was now competing with the old language of ideals, he could not accept Lotze’s too rigid opposition of judgements of fact and judgements of value.216 There is in Pringle-Pattison a characteristic connection between the ideals and concrete experience. Knowledge for Pringle-Pattison, as for Schelling, is an abstraction if it is not a force in a concrete personality. The ideals do indeed carry us ‘beyond the ‘‘is’’ of actual achievement’, but they are also ‘the fundamental characteristic’ of experience. They are diVerent from the abstract ideals of rationalism: ‘the ideals that are true and fruitful are struck out, or become obvious, in the stress of actual experience, and are only the fundamental structure of reality coming to fuller expression.’217 Man no more weaves the ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness ‘out of nothing’ than ‘he brought himself into being’: ‘ ‘‘It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves’’; and from the same fontal Reality must be derived those ideals which are the master light of all our seeing, the element, in particular, of our moral and religious life. The presence of the Ideal is the reality of God within us.’218 The ideal as thus springing from the reality of God, and properly understood, is for Pringle-Pattison the most real thing in the world; and those ranges of our experience, such as religion, which are speciWcally concerned with the ideal, instead of being treated as a cloud-cuckooland of subjective fancy, may reasonably be accepted as the best interpreters we have of the 213 214 217 218

Pringle-Pattison, Hegelianism and Personality, 126–7. Id. The Idea of God, 339. 215 Ibid. 238–9. 216 Ibid. 56–8. Ibid. 407, 244. Pringle-Pattison cites Martineau in support of a criticism of pseudo-ideals: ibid. 53. Ibid. 246.

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true nature of reality. And certainly in no sphere of our experience is the implication of objectivity—the ‘truth-claim’, as it has been called—more insistent, one might say, more overwhelming, than just in the moral and religious life . . . the fundamental presuppositions of any experience must be accepted from the experience itself: they may be explained, but not explained away.219

True philosophy, for Pringle-Pattison, ‘is, and can be, nothing more than the critical interpretation of human experience’, it aims at the understanding of the whole of the actual, and, in Arnold’s words, ‘sees life steadily and sees it whole’; ‘apart from our actual experience, God or the Absolute is a subject waiting for predicates, an empty form waiting to be Wlled’.220 In Spinoza and, ‘as it sometimes appears’, in Hegel, ‘the Absolute is assimilated . . . to a timeless system of abstract truth’.221 Apart from the general idealist assumptions which Pringle-Pattison shared, it was in particular in the respects, relevant to the question of experience and reason, in which the British absolute idealists—and in particular Bosanquet—diVered from Hegel that he could Wnd himself in some agreement with them. Yet it is mainly in his application of the personalist criticism to them that we Wnd Pringle-Pattison’s creative development of the personalist criticism.222 Within non-abstractive experience, Pringle-Pattison writes, substance and quality, subject and predicate, phenomena and thing-in-itself or noumena, are a unity in the concrete individual, complementary and mutually explanatory.223 It is the abstractive separation of these that produce the reactions of agnosticism and positivism. In his theory of judgement and the criterion of value, Pringle-Pattison accepts many of Bradley’s and Bosanquet’s positions, especially Bradley’s theory of the degrees of truth and reality, but he objects to the ‘particular form’ in which these positions are expressed. He here shares the criticism of Henry Sturt and F. C. S. Schiller, who in other respects swerve considerably from the main line of personalism which Pringle-Pattison represents; they turned against Bradley’s ‘way of criticizing human experience not from the standpoint of human experience, but from the visionary and impracticable standpoint of an absolute experience’ (Sturt) and his ‘inhuman, incompetent and impracticable intellectualism’ (Schiller).224 The essence of Pringle-Pattison’s criticism of Bradley

219 Ibid. 252. In support of this, Pringle-Pattison could cite Bradley: ibid. 220 Ibid. 67, 108–9, 158. For Pringle-Pattison we do not, however, as for Jacobi, concretely experience God through faith or a higher reason. 221 Ibid. 339. 222 Since this was done primarily in The Idea of God, a later work, Pringle-Pattison was not, however, a pioneer of this application, as he had been in the case of Green; other British personalists had taken on the later absolute idealists before him, although in this it was certainly by him that they were inspired. 223 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 159, 162–3. 224 Ibid. 225–6 (the Wrst quote is from Sturt’s preface to Personal Idealism, p. viii; the second from Schiller’s ‘Axioms as Postulates’: ibid. 127; both quotes are slightly changed).

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is that his principle of coherence and inclusiveness, of non-contradiction and harmony, ‘taken by itself ’, is a mere empty, abstract formula. In itself it ‘gives no guidance as to the mode in which the harmony is realized’; and ‘leaves us . . . at the mercy of analogies which . . . may be quite misleading’: it is an inversion of the true philosophic method to try to deWne the Absolute on the basis of the empty principle, and from that deWnition to reason down to the various phases of our actual experience, and to ‘condemn’ its most characteristic features, root and branch, as ‘irrational appearances’ and ‘illusion’. The only possible result of such a procedure is exempliWed in Mr. Bradley’s actual conclusion, namely, that in the Absolute everything is somehow reconciled, but inasmuch as we know not how, none of the predicates drawn even from our highest experiences are applicable in this ultimate reference. ‘The Absolute’, he says, ‘is not personal, nor is it moral, nor is it beautiful or true’—a cluster of negations which, though technically true, in the sense intended, are practically more false than would have been the corresponding aYrmations.225

Characteristically, Pringle-Pattison, in calling in this connection for an application to concrete experiential material of the principle of coherence which gives to the latter the character of the former, does not consider the possibility of dissociating a concrete, historical, dialectical reason from Hegel’s metaphysics, a reason which could dissolve the reiWed abstractions of Bradley’s analysis which lead him to his strange results. Although he points to and supplements what is missing in the various forms of absolute idealism, he is himself too limited to Aristotelian logic and the stark opposition between experience and abstraction. Although some of Pringle-Pattison’s criticism applies also to Bosanquet,226 the latter diVers from Bradley in important respects, and Pringle-Pattison can cite him in support of his criticism. They agree on a process of philosophizing where mere abstractive rationality can do only limited service: We are limited, in fact, to the immanent criticism of more or less in our actual experience. The perfect or absolute is something which we feel after, whose characters we divine in the light of the best we know, taking, as Professor Bosanquet says . . . ‘the general direction of our higher experiences as a clue to the direction in which perfection has to be sought’. That is to say . . . that we do not argue . . . from the bare idea of a systematic whole, but from the amount of system and the kind of system which we are able to point to as realized in experience. From that we argue to more of the same kind, or at least on the same general lines, although it may be on an ampler and diviner scale . . . 227

Upton and Illingworth Lotze’s ‘spiritual realism’ had already replaced Hegelianism in Germany when the latter was introduced in Britain, C. B. Upton points out—and in theology, Ritschl, Herrmann, and others again accepted freedom of will. This change

225 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 230–1.

226 Ibid. 337–8.

227 Ibid. 232.

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on the continent had now found its British counterpart in ‘the present determined opposition’ to Anglo-Hegelianism from the Seths and others. The ‘ideal-realism’ of Lotze, ‘which is now so inXuential in Germany . . . bids fair to be the dominant philosophy in this country and America in the course of a decade or two’.228 After Pringle-Pattison’s Hegelianism and Personality, the themes of personalist epistemology were varied, with a stronger emphasis on religious experience, by a considerable number of minor British personal idealists, among whom I have chosen for inclusion here Upton, J. R. Illingworth, and C. C. J. Webb. The Wrst instance of this we Wnd in Upton’s Bases of Religious Belief, his Hibbert Lectures published in 1893. Here the worldview of personalism is expressed in simpler and more straightforward terms. While he drew on Lotze and Pringle-Pattison, there is in point of fact nothing speciWcally Lotzean or Pringle-Pattisonian in Upton’s view of knowledge; nor are his formulations dependent exclusively on his teacher Martineau. They are rather, for the most part, very general ones of the kind that could be found in any representative speculative theist. Together with one-sided rationalism, irrationalist, Romantic insistence on the suYciency of feeling is also characteristically rejected by Upton. It leads to mysticism—but the truth of mysticism is merely that God’s inner revelation to the soul is ‘not wholly a matter of inference from the states of the human consciousness, but is also to a certain degree a matter of immediate feeling, of direct apprehension of the InWnite by the Wnite spirit’. The philosopher’s task is ‘to explicitly disengage and unfold . . . the contents of . . . ‘‘God-consciousness’’ ’. In the ‘positive aspects’ of his own self-consciousness man Wnds ‘a valid clue to the essential nature of that InWnite Self-consciousness, or Perfect Personality’. Upton agrees with Hegel that reason and knowledge can reach ‘genuine and progressive’ insight into reality, and shares the notion—which he identiWes as Aristotelian—that knowledge of a part or a developmental stage of an organism ‘implies a knowledge of the whole’; but he adds the typical caveat that, ‘when the Hegelians jump from this . . . to the wholly diVerent doctrine that the relations constitute the reality of the thing, they perform a very questionable feat of intellectual gymnastics’.229 Reinforcing the focus on the person of Christ with the personalist criticism of impersonalism, Upton argues that the ‘supreme immanent principle of Love is . . . no merely abstract quality in which all good spirits share, but is a living concrete reality whose actuating presence in the soul carries with it a sense of personal relationship between the human spirit and the Eternal of so real and intimate a character, that the intimacy of Wnite souls with each other is but the Wnite reXex and image of this fundamental divine experience’.230 228 Upton, The Bases of Religious Belief, 213, 279. 229 Ibid. 32, 35, 61, 200, 297, 299–300. 230 Ibid. 362. A good understanding of both the similarities and the diVerences between the personalist and the orthodox Christian criticism of pantheism can be gained by comparing passages like this one in the early personalists with C. S. Lewis’s formulations in the eleventh chapter of his Miracles.

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J. R. Illingworth’s Personality Human and Divine was the next major personalist work in the wake of Hegelianism and Personality. It is eloquent of the swift breakthrough and wide reception of the personalist criticism that this work was the Bampton Lectures for 1894, the year after Upton’s Hibbert Lectures. All early personalists without exception accepted, often explicitly against the pretensions of Hegelianism, that God or the absolute must remain in many respects a mystery to the Wnite mind. In that sense they can be said to have accepted a degree of apophaticism. But this was not the same as agnosticism. For most personalists, God was somehow known in experience as immanent in man, and at the same time experienced as transcendent in his diVerence and distinctiveness even, as it were, within that immanence. Illingworth is the Wrst of our personalists who was primarily a theologian, albeit obviously a markedly philosophical one, and this identity to some extent coloured his view of these issues. For him, as for some of the speculative theist theologians in Germany, Christian revelation constrained abstract speculation. Revelation and the dogma that necessarily followed from it, as well as the historical fact of the Incarnation, were the points of departure of his philosophy. The concrete particularity of Christ’s historical personality is prior to, and controls and restrains, abstract speculation on the nature of God.231 The ‘order of development from life to thought, from fact to explanation’, Illingworth argues, is best exhibited ‘in the process by which man has come to recognize what we call his personality, all that is potentially or actually contained within himself ’;232 ‘the advent of Christianity created a new epoch both in the development and the recognition of human personality’; ‘The fact of the unique life came Wrst, the new personality; and then the gradual explanation of the fact, in the doctrine of the person of Christ’. The early Christians, Illingworth continues, ‘began by feeling a new life within them, due, as they believed, to their being in spiritual contact with the living person of their Lord . . . Then they went on, according to their capacity and the necessities of the time, to give a reason for the hope that was in them’;233 ‘Theology was no conscious invention, some of whose results have in the course of time become intuitive, but an attempt to unfold the signiWcance of an already existing intuition or instinct’: ‘It is not, it never has been, a merely intellectual thing; for it is the outcome of our entire personality acting as a whole. Our reason, our aVections, our actions, all alike, feel about for contact with some supreme reality; and when the mind, speaking for its companion faculties, names that reality a Person, it is giving voice also to the inarticulate conviction of the heart and will . . .’234 Finding not only Christian theology but all human thought to have arisen ‘in meditation upon a fact of experience’, and reacting ‘upon the fact which it

231 Illingworth, Reason and Revelation, 129; Hoskins, The Doctrine of the Trinity, 21, 320. 232 Illingworth, Personality Human and Divine, 6. 233 Ibid. 8–9. 234 Ibid. 76, 80.

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explained, illuminating, intensifying, realizing the signiWcance of that fact’,235 Illingworth also expresses his position in more general philosophical terms, common to the broader current of emerging personalism to which he belongs. He states, for instance, that ‘Man lives Wrst, and thinks afterwards . . . his reason . . . can only act upon experience, that is upon something which has already been lived through’; ‘no system of philosophy, no intellectual explanation of things, can ever become adequate or Wnal’. With the speculative theists, he supplemented these views with a regard for rational thought higher not only than Jacobi’s, but even than Schelling’s.236 In Personality Human and Divine, Illingworth argues that man cannot ‘transcend his personality, he cannot get outside of himself. All his knowledge is personal knowledge, and is qualiWed and coloured by the fact’:237 Personality is . . . the gateway through which all knowledge must inevitably pass. Matter, force, energy, ideas, time, space, law, freedom, cause, and the like, are absolutely meaningless phrases except in the light of our personal experience. They represent diVerent departments of that experience, which may be isolated for the purposes of special study . . . But when we come to discuss their ultimate relations to ourselves and to one another, or, in other words, to philosophize about them, we must remember that they are only known to us in the last resort, through the categories of our own personality, and can never be understood exhaustively till we know all that our personality implies. It follows that philosophy and science are, in the strict sense of the word, precisely as anthropomorphic as theology, since they are alike limited by the conditions of human personality, and controlled by the forms of thought which human personality provides . . . In all cases the experience in question must be critically tested; but in none is it invalidated by the mere fact that it is personal.238

The ‘anthropomorphism’ of this passage is inspired by Schiller’s The Riddles of the Sphinx, which had been published in 1891. It is important to understand, however, that this book was written before Schiller became a pragmatist. Already from the quoted passage, it is obvious why Illingworth could not follow Schiller on the path he entered only with his contribution to Sturt’s collection of essays. Illingworth develops his themes further: personality is the inevitable and necessary starting-point of all human thought. For we cannot by any conceivable means get out of it, or behind it, or beyond it, or account for it, or imagine the method of its derivation from anything else. For, strictly speaking, we have no knowledge of anything else from which it can have been derived. If we are told that it is the product of pure reason, or unconscious will, or mere matter or blind force, the answer is obvious—that we know of no such things. For, when spoken of in this way, reason and will and matter and force are only abstractions, and abstractions from my personal experience; that is to say, they are parts of myself, separated from their context and then supposed to exist in the outer world . . . I cannot in any way conceive a living and complex whole, like myself, to be derived from anything outside me which can only be known and named because it resembles one of my elements; when the element in question must be

235 Ibid. 11. 236 Ibid. 3–5. 237 Ibid. 24. 238 Ibid. 25–6. Illingworth here refers to similar insights in Martineau’s A Study of Religion.

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artiWcially isolated and, so to speak, killed in the process, before the resemblance can be established. Abstractions must be less real than the totality from which they are taken, and cannot thus be made levers for displacing their own fulcrum. Personality, therefore, is ultimately a parte ante.239

It all reads like a summary of Bowne’s personalism. 239 Illingworth, Personality Human and Divine, 41–3. The similarities between Illingworth’s and Bowne’s positions are obvious also in their respective views of the validity of reason, and are explained by their common origin in Lotze rather than by inXuence of Bowne on Illingworth: ibid. 100–1. Illingworth’s views on freedom and necessity are largely restatements of Lotze’s, and bear resemblances to Schelling’s: ibid. 104–7. His view on personal experience and reXection were repeated in his later books with little variation; see e.g. Divine Immanence, 57, 62–4.

3 The personal absolute This chapter will investigate the origins of the personalist endeavour to conceive of the absolute as the personal God of theism, and vice versa. I will look at its ‘interpretation of ultimate reality as being itself personal in character and of such a kind as to allow for the dependent reality of Wnite persons’, and show that this interpretation, and the ‘retransformation’ of the concept of the absolute into the concept of God, that Copleston speaks of, was undertaken long before the British and American personal idealists.1 As we saw in Yandell’s deWnition, a personalist holds that ‘Wnite persons depend for their existence and continuance on God, who is the Supreme Person, having intelligence and volition’. This supreme person is ‘ontologically ultimate’. Among Knudson’s more precise formulations of the characteristics of personalism in what he considers to be the strict, American sense, the following fall within the Welds of personalist thought covered in the present chapter. Personalism ‘holds that reality is concrete and individual. It thus leans toward pluralism and natural realism . . . in the interest of a more distinct and clearly deWned conception of the InWnite’. But personalism also ‘stresses the unity of the world and the world-ground. In this respect it leans toward monism and absolutism’. It also holds that ‘matter is phenomenal’, regards the material world as ‘the ceaseless product of the divine energizing’, and ‘holds to the complete ideality of space and time’. Finally, since the basic antinomies are resolved in personal experience, where ‘a union of personal identity with change, of conscious unity with multiplicity of experience, and of freedom or self-control with uniformity or necessity’ is given as real, we have, in conceiving of ‘ultimate reality as personal . . . the only adequate answer . . . to the fundamental questions of speculative thought’.2 If, as Knudson holds, the ingredient positions of personalist metaphysics are, like those of personalist epistemology, not in themselves original, an exception should perhaps be made for the last mentioned. Most personalists accepted pantheism in a limited sense, and from Schelling onward they were at one in their rejection of a literalistic understanding of the Bible accounts of God and creation. Against the deists of Enlightenment rationalism, all early personalists insisted on divine immanence in some form, especially as manifest in human moral consciousness. This, however, did not mean 1 I will, however, show why Copleston’s description is also misleading: what the personalists achieved was in reality a new independent synthesis of the concepts of the absolute and of God. 2 Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 178–9.

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that the dimension of transcendence vis-a`-vis the world, the distinction within the whole between transcendence and immanence, or even between God and creation in one sense, was denied, and that God must exclusively be identiWed with the immanent order of reality. The latter position is an aspect of pantheism in the sense in which the early personalists typically reject it. It was precisely their personalism that necessitated the complementarity of immanence and transcendence. Knudson, Lavely, and Yandell, with negligible diVerences of terminology, all distinguish between ‘theistic personalism’ and ‘absolute idealistic personalism’, but the deWnitions of the latter, and the instances they identify, are, as I argued, problematic. Since they consider Hegel to be an absolute idealistic personalist, the meaning they attach to the distinction is quite clear. If Hegel’s philosophy is a personalism, it is obviously distinct from theistic personalism. Yet it is doubtful whether it is at all correct so to label Hegel’s system. British absolute idealists like Green and Edward Caird, and the American Royce, show greater similarities with theistic personalism, but are still far from it in that they really accept only one absolute, and highly abstract, person: the personal absolute is the only person. In Bostro¨m, on the other hand, we Wnd perhaps the most striking example of a philosopher who insists equally on absolutism and theistic personalism. But also more typical theistic personalists like Pringle-Pattison and Illingworth retained the concept of the absolute and insisted that it was susceptible to reconciliation with the concept of the personal God. There are thus more lines of demarcation to be drawn between diVerent philosophies on the scale from absolute idealism to strict personalism, and in this chapter we will see why this is of the Wrst importance for the historical understanding of personalism. This eVort to personalize the absolute was inspired by the ‘Biblical religious motifs of the dominant Western theological tradition’, that Lavely, on the most general level, pointed to as shaping personalism along with the Greek metaphysical motifs. The absolute idealists’ concept of the absolute had strong aYnities with the latter, which were to some extent classical counterparts of the Spinozistic motif of the hen kai pan, the one and all. The Church Fathers and the medieval scholastics did not consider God to be personal in the same sense as most modern personalists. There was, as Webb pointed out, no clear conception of the personality of God, merely of personality in God, in the sense in which the term personality was used in the formulation of Trinitarian and Christological dogma.3 God was not a person, but three persons. Of course, there were obvious avant la lettre personal traits of the Old Testament God, traits of the kind that

3 ‘[T]he personality of God (as distinct from the acknowledgment of persons in God) is aYrmed by no Christian creed or confession of faith which has not so far departed from the normal type as to abandon the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity’: Webb, God and Personality, 101–2; ch. 3, passim. The distinction was taken up by Knudson in The Doctrine of God. Hadot argues, with the Russian orthodox theologian Bulgakov, that the patristic Trinitology is ‘foncie`rement impersonnaliste’, in that it sees the hypostaseis/personae as manifestations of an undetermined essence, or takes its point of departure in the hypostasis of the Father but identiWes it with this essence: ‘De Tertullien a` Boe`ce. Le de´veloppement de la notion de personne dans les controverses the´ologiques’, 131.

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deWne the modern concept and that we describe with the modern term person. Although these were not linked to the concept and the term, they were certainly present also in the thought of the Fathers and the schoolmen. But an apophatic tendency inXuenced by some Greek metaphysical motifs was present not only in the early Christian Platonists but also in medieval philosophy, which obviated philosophico-theological explorations of the ‘personal’ aspect of God in this sense. Already in Philo the Godhead was apophatically considered ultimately to be beyond the reach of human thought and categories, and thus without humanly intelligible attributes. With the advent of Christ, the impersonal Godhead receded. There were tendencies towards the understanding of an impersonally conceived ‘Father’ of which Christ was the ‘person’, but after hundreds of years the Christian Fathers settled, with the help of Aristotelian categories, on the idea that God existed as three persons or hypostaseis of the one, shared divine nature, but the meaning of the term person here used was not the modern one. Throughout the Middle Ages the relation between the Greek metaphysical understanding of the one and all, and the God who existed as three persons of one nature, was left somewhat unclear, in the sense that the tripersonal existence of God was not easy to identify with the Greek conception of the absolute, and that there was a disinclination towards such identiWcation because of the need to separate God and his creation. The strong Neo-Platonic inXuence and lingering radical apophaticism facilitated the acceptance of the idea of an underlying impersonal Godhead, which could more readily be identiWed with the one or all. Alternatively, or in combination with this, the divine essence tended, in extreme conceptual realism, to become distinguished from and elevated above the existent persons as a similar impersonal Godhead. Only when, in the course of the Middle Ages, the person, via Boethius’ and others’ deWnitions,4 came to acquire more of the modern meaning—and ultimately, in one usage, simply the sense of ‘a human being’—with sometimes only a faint echo of the classical and Trinitarian meanings, was there a connection with some of the pre-terminological ‘personal’ dimensions of the Old Testament God which Greek philosophy could not fully express. Those among the so-called ‘social Trinitarians’ who claim that the modern meaning of the term person was a creation of the Greek Fathers may be right, in the sense that the Fathers in some cases tended to perceive God the Father in accordance with the preterminological, ‘personal’ Old Testament view, and that this in some cases and to some extent inXuenced their Trinitology. But their interpretation of the meaning and use of the term person at this early stage is not quite convincing.5 It is clear that there were strong anticipations of the modern conceptual meaning of the term person in antiquity and among the Fathers (and not only the Greek but quite as much in Augustine). But it is only the gradual transformation and 4 Boethius’ famous deWnition is the following: persona est rationalis naturae individua substantia (person is an individual substance of a rational nature). 5 See Zizioulas, Being as Communion, ch. 1; cf. Coakley, ‘ ‘‘Persons’’ in the ‘‘Social’’ Doctrine of the Trinity’.

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development of the concept through the Middle Ages, and in the course of modernity, that made possible the kind of personalistic theology which accepts the personality of God, and for which this personality has a meaning that is diVerent from the one found in patristic and scholastic thought. Jacobi turned not only against Spinozistic and idealistic pantheism, but against rationalism as such: the Greeks too were unable to reach an adequate idea of God. His somewhat exaggerated aversion to rationalism in philosophy and theology no doubt stemmed from his correct perception that it could never by itself reach a full concept of divine personality, either in or of God, and in the full modern sense—even if he was not himself aware of the newness of this concept. The reason why this question achieved such prominence at the time of Jacobi has in my view to be sought through a broader cultural analysis of the development of the thinking about individual human personality and its value and centrality throughout the development of the modern period. A new emphasis on personality in man led to a new emphasis on personality in a similar sense in God.6 In a way, it would seem as if humanism was thus the precondition for the development of theism understood as the notion of God as a person in the nonTrinitarian sense, as well as for a new emphasis on and interpretation of the meaning of the persons of the Trinity. With modern Unitarianism, there was no longer a question of personality in God, but of the personality of God, of God as a person. Developments in modern philosophy, including the abandonment of Aristotelianism, as well as in modern theology paved the way for the personalistic reconceiving of the metaphysical hen kai pan. The understanding of the absolute in terms of the modern conception of the subject strongly reinforced this historical tendency; but it was achieved by Hegel in a manner which foreclosed the ascribing to it of personal traits, thus being merely a revised version of an impersonal absolute. As adopted by the personalists, however, modern subjectivity as applied to the absolute really did reinforce the conception of it in terms of personality. Early personalism marks a culmination of this whole historical tendency. What emerged was a concept of the personal absolute in the sense of the absolute as a person.7 Yet this personalism also turned out to require to some extent a defence of traditional transcendence that opposed the radical immanentization of God in modern pantheism and post-Kantian idealism. Many personalist theologians also retained the Trinity, preferably with the modern ‘social’ interpretation, and considered the Incarnation the principal, concretely given fact or evidence of the personal nature of reality. These positions coexisted, in a way that was not always explicitly discussed, with the acceptance of the new identiWcation of God 6 Webb points to some other important, more general contributing factors: God and Personality, 63–4. diGiovanni demonstrates the decisive inXuence on Jacobi of the Enlightenment and early Romantic interest in individual self-cultivation. 7 A history of the development of the concept, leading up to Jacobi, the later J. G. Fichte, Krause, and Schelling, was produced in the heyday of speculative theism in Germany: J. W. Hanne’s Die Idee der absoluten Perso¨nlichkeit, i–ii (1861–2).

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as a person with the absolute in a sense which had been changed in important respects by modern idealism, but which also developed many of the Greek speculative beginnings.8 When the thinkers I describe as the early personalists turned against modern pantheism and impersonalism, they also in fact tended to reject the often only ambiguously revised adoption of Greek metaphysics by the Church Fathers and the schoolmen. The nature of the modern innovations must not be lost from view if we want to reach an adequate understanding of the nature of the modern opposition of theism and pantheism. If the traditional view of the Godhead tended in one respect and in a certain sense towards impersonalism, it was at least transcendent. Pantheism and monistic mysticism were strong presences in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, but although their modern development presupposed and drew on the earlier ones, their prominence in the nineteenth century and their more radical immanentism were due to distinctly modern intellectual developments and changes in moral and other sensibilities. When the personalists turned against the impersonal pantheism of the absolute idealists, they saw that this pantheism was in some cases identical with the new naturalism. The ‘pantheistic mode of conception’ which, as the Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie explained, Schleiermacher distinguished from personalism and its ‘idea of a personal Godhead’, did not attribute to the universe, as personalism did, ‘a distinctive consciousness’. Schleiermacher’s formulation is vague and reveals the degree to which he was himself—although considered by Flewelling to be a precursor of personalism—a typical pantheist. For the theistic personalists, the ‘distinctive consciousness’ was attributed to an absolute which was also the personal God, in some respects still clearly transcendent and independent of the created universe. For Jacobi, reason as such implied personality, and the early personalists insisted in a characteristic manner that values and the rational and moral order are one with God as person. In their assertion that there is no higher impersonal order above God, classical scholastic solutions were related to the distinct modern understanding of the personal absolute and deployed against new forms of pantheism. Thus the God of personalism, while moral and rational in the same sense, was distinctly more free, active, and willing than the Aristotelian actus purus into which the scholastic God tended to turn. In close connection with the epistemological considerations, personalism thus developed also out of the philosophical defence of God as a person in a modern sense. Beginning with the theistic personalism and the criticism of pantheism, Enlightenment rationalism, and absolute idealism formulated by Jacobi and Schelling, early personalism reinterpreted the whole tradition of metaphysics in the West that had developed from the Greeks and had yielded the ‘God of the philosophers’ as well as the modern version of such metaphysics that reached the absolute through the new understanding of subjectivity. It reinterpreted it 8 Drews subdivides ‘True Theism’, one of his two main sections on speculative theism, into ‘Trinitarian Theism’ and ‘Unitarian Theism’; the latter is introduced by a discussion of Jacobi.

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in terms of a supreme category of personality that went beyond any mere self-thinking thought and even pure self-consciousness. Not least important in this was the use of a new and more pronounced, ‘personalized’ analogy. The continuous identity of personalism can be recognized from an early stage, not least by the fact that the characteristic end-product was this concept of the personal absolute, understood in the strict sense—more precisely, the absolute as a person— that excludes the claims of Hegelianism to represent it.

JAC OB I The abstract metaphysics of Spinoza, and the kind of intellectual intuition to which it is related, contained for Jacobi the ingredients of an impersonalistic and pantheistic worldview which, having passed through the subjective idealist phase, remained in its essential impersonalistic aspects the same in the early Schelling’s system of identity. Materialism and idealism are twin doctrines, according to Jacobi, and only seemingly opposites. Leibniz and Berkeley avoided materialism by denying extended substance. But when Kant denied our knowledge of thinking substance as well, this had the consequence, contrary to his intentions, of reinstating the Spinozistic metaphysic in a new form. Without a real and knowable substantial mind in which cognition originates, its operations and its content are again, Jacobi thought, referred exclusively to the extended world, now understood as mere appearance along with the subject itself.9 If, according to Jacobi, the old form could be characterized as a ‘Material-Idealismus’, the new could be called an ‘Ideal-Materialismus’.10 According to Jacobi, it was in reality reason’s real content which inspired, motivated, and explained the construction of Kant’s philosophy. But since Kant did not accept that reason had any immediate access to or knowledge of transcendence but was conceived merely as the organ of its ideas, the understanding was conWned to operating on a world of appearances. This negative accommodation obviated the conXict between the reason and the understanding, but, as Jacobi saw it, only at the price of precluding knowledge. Rather than saving faith, the system, Jacobi held, was intended to serve empirical science, that is, the understanding’s operation on the objects of the senses, and so were the systems of Kant’s successors, even when they went beyond his conclusion regarding the self ’s construction of its knowledge and held that the self in fact created all of reality. Hence the ideal materialism of Fichte. Fichte sought to depict the whole of reality as corresponding strictly to the a priori logical requirements of the understanding. In such a system there was of course no place for a transcendent and personal God apprehended by a higher reason. God must be identiWed with

9 Jacobi, Werke, iii. 345–54, 429–33; diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 157–61. 10 Jacobi, Werke, iii. 433.

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the order of the world, which in turn had to be understood in deterministic terms. The absolute ego and the non-ego replaced Spinoza’s dual substances, but no matter how much the subject’s striving was described as a realization of moral freedom, in practice, Jacobi thought, it was a ‘materialism without matter’.11 It was but a small step to Schelling’s system of identity and to his philosophy of nature for which the system of identity provided a base.12 The two ‘main avenues, materialism and idealism, the attempt to explain everything exclusively from a self-determining matter, or exclusively from a self-determining intelligence [have] the same goal: their opposing courses are not divergent at all, but bring them gradually nearer to each other, until they Wnally touch and interpenetrate.’ Jacobi could not yet study the transformation of absolute idealism into materialism; what he observed was the transformation of materialism—in the form of Spinoza’s system—into absolute idealism. A materialism which consistently develops its speculative metaphysics must ultimately turn into idealism, for ‘apart from dualism, there is only egoism, as beginning or as end’.13 SigniWcantly, this development at the same time preserved that other aspect of Spinoza’s system, the abstractionism which, according to Jacobi, was incapable of establishing the possibility of individual existents and which, instead, threatened them in the very process of seeking to justify common-sense experience, or, in Fichte, to establish the ground of the sense of necessity in sense experience. In Jacobi’s view, already Kant’s a priori judgements jeopardized the possibility of concretely determinate existents, and thus promoted the renewal of the very same dogmatic metaphysics that he had tried to refute.14 For Jacobi, the attempt to demonstrate a priori what knowledge is possible was hopeless. Kant sought to deepen philosophically the Enlightenment values of the individual and of autonomy, just as Goethe sought to do so imaginatively. For Jacobi, however, Kant could never reach a proper personalistic position, and Goethe’s worldview was one of many Romanticized versions of naturalistic pantheism.15 And although Fichte conceived of his work as providing a conceptual supplement of Jacobi’s analysis of consciousness, and both Fichte’s and Schelling’s accounts of the origins of consciousness built partly on Jacobi’s, Jacobi rejected it all. Taking Spinoza’s rationalism further still, Fichte did not make the enterprise any more viable, since its subjectivity was no less abstract than Spinoza’s substance. The similarities with Enlightenment rationalism aside, Jacobi showed that the new inverted Spinozism which absolutized constructive subjectivity had roots in the same medieval esotericism as original Spinozism. This tradition, which was still alive in Jacobi’s days, not least in Pietist circles, already contained not only a generally impersonal and/or theogonic mysticism; it could also be characterized as a ‘solipsistic mysticism’, identifying the ego with the all. SigniWcantly, Lessing,

11 Ibid. 12. 12 diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 158. 14 diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 157.

13 Jacobi, Werke, iii. 10–11; cf. 432 n. 15 Ibid. 38.

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the origin of the pantheism controversy, had alluded to this teaching. In this tradition, analogy between man and God, the idea of man being created in God’s image, had been transformed into or replaced by the identiWcation of man with God—deus sive ego, as it were. Jacobi was well aware of some of the earlier criticism of Spinoza; Timm shows that a work by J. G. Wachter from 1699, Der Spinozismus im Ju¨denthumb, oder die von dem heutigen Ju¨denthumb und dessen Geheimen Kabbala Vergo¨tterte Welt, is important for understanding Jacobi’s ‘polemical uniWcation’ of all philosophy from Lessing to Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift.16 Jacobi preserved the distinction between the creator and the created subject or the Wnite individual person, but denied the validity of the philosophical idea of an inWnitude and absoluteness of God without concrete, individual determinations (without ‘a distinct, individual reality of its own’, ‘the reality . . . which can only be expressed in the determined particular [im bestimmten Einzelnen]’), the idea he regarded as the product of rational metaphysical abstraction and/or spurious vision.17 God stands in relation to us as a ‘Thou’, as an individual person, and must be Wnite in the sense of being individually and concretely determinate and in the sense of allowing for diVerentiation and distinction.18 Ordinary language, narrative, and metaphor better describe the experience of the relation with the ‘Thou’ that is God than metaphysical concepts. Jacobi uses in a more general form an argument that some personalists were to restrict to the instance of Christ: Where strong personality appears [hervortritt], there the orientation [Richtung] in and through it towards the supersensible and the conviction of God are most decisively expressed. Socrates, Christ, Fe´nelon, prove to me with their personality the God to whom I pray, he is to me as creator of these personalities more elevated than as originator [Urheber] of the starry sky according to laws of inner necessity to which in his work he is himself subjected. The God of the Bible is more elevated than the God who is merely an absolute, regardless of how much one may decorate it.19

One aspect of the newness of Jacobi’s theism can be seen in the similarities between his criticism of the traditional, demonstrative forms of theism and that of Hegel.20 Both denied the possibility of dogmatic metaphysics’s demonstration 16 Timm, Gott und die Freiheit, 15–17, 138, 156, 158–9, 186; cf. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 645–52. In his introduction to his edition of Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit, Scholz discusses as a background C. WolV’s criticism of Spinoza. 17 Jacobi, Werke, iv/1. 62, 88. According to Bollnow, Jacobi failed to develop fully his idea of the spiritual world as a concrete reality, as ‘a whole of concrete forms’: Die Lebensphilosophie F. H. Jacobis, 139. But Jacobi certainly turned against the ‘formless’ God of his opponents: Aus F. H. Jacobi’s Nachlaß, ii. 100. 18 Jacobi, Werke, iv/1. p. xlii. On God’s individuality, God as an ‘individual spiritual person’, see e.g. Aus F. H. Jacobi’s Nachlaß, ii. 100; Bollnow, Die Lebensphilosophie F. H. Jacobis, 122. 19 Jacobi, Werke, iv/1. pp. xxiii–xxiv. 20 The degree to which Jacobi’s conceptions were in reality secularized, and his concept of God and of man’s relation to God were therefore also new ones, despite the fact that he was himself unaware of this, has been stressed above all by Bollnow. But while Bollnow is certainly right that traditional Christianity’s spirituality of personal relation to God may have been deeper and some dimensions of it were lost by Jacobi, he tends to miss the newness and in some respects the deepening of the meaning of personality in Jacobi’s thought. Die Lebensphilosophie F. H. Jacobis, 102–8.

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of God since this involved a derivation from some ground apart from God. Both considered the demonstrative ascription of attributes to God as failing to reach anything but the abstract, highly indeterminate God of deism. Yet just as the God Jacobi perceived through his Vernunftanschauung was diVerent from what the Romantic poets, the early Schelling, and Schleiermacher perceived through their intellectual intuitions, Jacobi’s and Hegel’s respective concrete Gods were still very diVerent too—so much so, in fact, that Jacobi would never accept Hegel’s God as God at all. Personal experience revealed to Jacobi a God who, although in important respects newly conceived like Hegel’s, retained the orthodox separateness and transcendence that it was Hegel’s primary concern to deny.21 In Jacobi’s God personality meant something quite diVerent from what it did in Hegel’s God. Jacobi’s God was clearly a God of personality and life, which no mere rationalism could ever reach.22 Hegel thought it was a God of arbitrary voluntarism.23 If so, it was only with speculative theism that personalism restored the classical synthesis of rationality and divine will: in the face of rationalistic impersonalism, it may Wrst have been drawn towards the opposite extreme. But when Jacobi speaks, in connection with God, of reason as inconceivable without personality and will, he at least emphasizes that will is to be ‘taken in the higher sense [im ho¨hern Sinne]’.24 Boethius’ and other older deWnitions of personality held that personality implies rationality. Jacobi insisted, against the impersonal reason of the rationalistic pantheists and the transcendental and absolute idealists, that rationality implies personality. He made this a central argument for the personality of God. For Jacobi it is our personal experience of freedom and providence that is indicative of their presence in the ground of the world; it is our experience as persons, our experience of personality in ourselves as unity of consciousness and self-identiWcation as an ‘I’, as freedom, intelligence, and will, that is indicative of the personality of God: If reason can only exist in personality [in Person], and if the world is to have a rational [vernu¨nftig] originator [Urheber], all-mover [Allbeweger], and governor, then this being [Wesen] must be a personal being. Such a being can only be conceived in the picture of human rationality and personality; to him must be ascribed the qualities which I recognize as the highest in man: love, self-consciousness, reason, free will.25

And: ‘There is no reason [Vernunft] except in personality [in Person], so since there is reason, there is a God and not merely a godhead [a divine, ein Go¨ttliches]’.26

21 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 30, 33. 22 See e.g. Jacobi, Werke, ii. 108; iii. 240. 23 See Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche, 109, 116. 24 Aus F. H. Jacobi’s Nachlaß, ii. 100. Jacobi here also signiWcantly says that reason also includes Verstand in a higher sense. 25 Jacobi, Werke, iv/1. pp. xlv–xlvi. 26 Ibid. pp. xxiv–xxv; cf. 32–3; iv/2. 76.

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For Jacobi, personality arises through a conscious distinction from the world of things, through ‘the ability [das Vermo¨gen] . . . extensively and intensively to distinguish oneself from other things’.27 It is this deWning relatedness of the distinct in general that Jacobi pioneeringly described in terms of an I–Thou relationship. Although he also applies it to things, the terminology was distinctly personalistic and certainly applied to the relations to other persons, not least to God: ‘without a divine Thou there can be no human I, and the converse [ohne go¨ttliches Du sey kein menschliches Ich, und umgekehrt]’.28 Although, as a philosopher, Jacobi tends to think in terms of an all-inclusive reality, he resists, as we have seen, the concept of the absolute, and the identiWcation of God with or the reduction of God to it—the God who is merely an absolute. Consequently he does not try to reconceive it in terms of his personalism. Rather he insists on the term God and tries to keep to a more strictly theistic concept. The rethinking of the absolute was left to those idealists who followed his personalistic lead. For Jacobi himself, the givenness of the reality of personal self-identity, and thus of diVerentiation and distinction within the totality of existence, was of paramount importance. He did not explore the questions of the relation of the distinct God to the all-inclusive unitary whole—the hen kai pan, as Lessing, Schelling, Jacobi himself, and others regularly called it29—which comprised man and the world as well. Yet the thrust of his thinking is clear. For his theistic purposes, he could in fact draw on one characteristic feature of the otherwise often problematic Greek metaphysicians which distinguished them from the Romantics. Plato, he points out, did not assign the highest place to the inWnite—in fact, it holds for him the lowest. By the inWnite, Plato (in the Philebus) understands merely the undetermined (das Unbestimmte). Instead, measure is the highest and the Wrst: it ‘unites the Wnite with the inWnite and through [it] alone real things are brought to light.’ It is something ‘determined in and through itself, an ungenerated determining [in und durch sich selbst bestimmtes, unerzeugtes Bestimmendes]’. Against the undetermined inWnite Plato sets ‘the eternal, the Sole True and Real, through which all things are and are known’. The Wnite ‘stands between the inWnite and the eternal, the true and the untrue, being and non-being’. For Jacobi, Plato really presupposes a ‘God, who is a spirit, a consciously deliberating [besonnenes] personal being, as the author of all things, through the perfection of his will ’.30 Jacobi thus refused to accept what he considered the typical pantheistic conclusions of rationalism with regard to the world and the whole or all that is God. In the light of his experience-based personalism, he sought to uphold within the unity of a philosophical conception of reality what he saw as the crucial dualisms that pantheism threatened to obliterate, both in its Enlightenment and its Romantic form: cause and eVect, creator and creation, being and nothingness,

27 Jacobi, Werke, ii. 264; iv/1. 57. 28 Ibid. iv/1. p. xlii. 29 See e.g. ibid. i. 236; ii. 119; iv/1. 55, 89; diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 202. 30 Jacobi, Werke, i. 247 and n.

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the unconditioned and the conditioned, necessity and freedom, reason and unreason, good and evil, the natural and the supernatural, providence and blind fate.31 For all of the Romantic elements in his thinking, the separateness of God and, more generally, distinction, diVerentiation, the upholding of dualisms in all Welds of thought and life, were essential for Jacobi. The insistence on the transcendent personal God also served Jacobi as a way of aYrming the reality and partial independence of Wnite persons and things.32 In Spinoza, the latter’s autonomy was denied as they were reduced to modes of the one inWnite substance. For Jacobi, a ‘realist’ perception of the reality of the Wnite created world was the only alternative to the nihilism that in his view was the product of Spinoza’s philosophy. As we have seen, however, this realism held not only for external reality, but also for the human self and God. Certitude of self, of the partial autonomy of the self as created, Wnite personality, and of this personal self ’s relation to God, stemmed from direct, immediate inner experience and intuition. Transcendence alone, and transcendence conceived in personal, theistic terms, could guarantee the real independence and autonomy of the Wnite.33 Turning against Fichte’s God, the Moral World-Order, and the early Schelling’s God, Nature, Jacobi could praise Kant for his defence of the personality of God.34 Yet as he found it necessary in the face of pantheism to defend Christian anthropomorphism, he went much further than Kant: ‘Christianity is essentially anthropomorphistic, it alone teaches a God who creates the world with knowledge and will; heathendom is cosmotheistic.’35 Jacobi answers the objections of those—like Herder—who could only accept the ‘non-personal [Nichtperso¨nliche] God’ of ‘the poetic philosophy . . . which would prefer to be suspended in the midst between theism and Spinozism, and which has found many adherents among us’, partly in the manner of a classical analogist. Although it is true that God’s reason is not human reason and God’s will not human will, these critics proceed to stretch this true proposition ‘to the extermination [Vertilgung] of the root of all rational thinking and acting, of the principle of all intelligence, that is, of personal being [des perso¨nlichen Daseyns]’. At the same time, they are reluctant consistently to aYrm, as did Spinoza, that ‘the highest cause of things can be no intelligence’: What am I to understand by an intelligence which has nothing at all in it of all that I understand by a rational being? Simply nothing is what I can understand by that; for not only all similarity, but also all possible analogy is abolished [aufgehoben] through the clearing away of personal being, so that no shadow or gleam of a being, not even so much as is required for a chimera, remains, but only a word without meaning, a mere empty sound.36 31 Ibid. iii. 393–5. 32 Although Jacobi’s God was ‘above and outside’, the new concrete personal and relational qualities of this God removed him from the God of the deists. 33 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 26–7. 34 Jacobi, Werke, iii. 340–4; iv/1. p. xxiv. 35 Ibid. iv/1. pp. xlviii–xlix; cf. iii. 422–3; i. 251; Jacobi an Fichte, 46. Jacobi even speaks of Anthropotheismus : Aus F. H. Jacobi’s Nachlaß, ii. 99. 36 Id. Werke, iv/2. 78–9.

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If the personality of God is denied, the result, Jacobi thinks, will be that man will elevate his own personality to the position of God and worship himself.37 Jacobi, of course, sees God as spiritual and not corporeal, and his freedom, reason, and will as unlike those of man. But in other respects God for him seems to be a person just like you and I, entering into relationships with others in love. ‘My philosophy’, Jacobi writes, ‘asks who is God, not what is he? All what belongs to nature.’38 Here the analogy is much closer than in Aquinas, and the focus on personality is new and diVerent. Jacobi turns not only against the argument that ‘while . . . God . . . cannot be corporeal, he therefore cannot have individuality and intelligence either’,39 but also against the argument that the ascription of personality to God is an illegitimate projection of Wnite human qualities onto the divine. God is the highest personality, the supreme being, complete in himself, self-suYcient and self-existent, with full consciousness and intelligence. Personality is constituted by ‘unity of self-consciousness, and every being who is conscious of its identity, a lasting I, existing in itself and knowing of itself, is a person’. But whereas due to the Xowing (Xiessend) nature of his consciousness man may doubt his own personality, the ‘true identity’ of the subject, it is not possible to doubt the personality of God once we have ascribed conscious identity to him. If we do not want to relinquish everything conceivable we must perforce acknowledge that ‘the highest intelligence’ also possesses the ‘highest degree of personality’.40 It is therefore not true that man’s personality is ascertainable while God’s is not, that God is less personal than man. The opposite is the case. This, I think, was a signal development in the thinking about the personality of God. In a letter to J. C. Lavater from 1787, Jacobi says that he cannot understand what being and reality is if not person, and Wnds it especially diYcult to understand what God would be if not person. What a God would it be, who could not say to himself ‘I am who I am [Ich bin, der ich bin]!’ Having thus connected his modern concept of personality to the biblical passage, he simply varies the terminology accordingly when he says that the ‘Iness [Ichheit] of Wnite beings is only lent [geliehen] to them, taken from another, a broken ray (ein gebrochener Stral) of the transcendental light, which alone is the living one’.41 It is meaningless, Jacobi insisted, to call an absolute without knowledge, wisdom, and goodness rational; in reality it was nothing but blind fate.42 An absolute of the early Schelling’s kind could not be rational since it denied the essential characteristic of reason, namely providence. With the new emphasis on and insight into the nature of our own personal experience, the traditional cosmological argument for the existence of God was transformed by Jacobi. God as person is the single, individual, spiritual, conscious, rational, willing,

37 Jacobi, Werke, iii. 49. 38 Ibid. iv/1. p. xxiv. 39 Ibid. iv/2. 157. 40 Ibid. 76–9. 41 Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s auserlesener Briefwechsel, i. 436. 42 Id. Werke, ii. 50–1.

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free, self-active, and loving creator, lawgiver, and ruler of the world and nature. Keeping to theistic and philosophical tradition, Jacobi held that what is more complete cannot have evolved from the less complete, as the later Schelling argued with regard not only to the world, but to the personality of God. The world as it exists could never, as pantheisms of various kinds taught, gradually develop from the unconscious or the Ungrund or chaos, nor could the material cosmos be closed and self-suYcient.43 What is now manifest and existing must have been there in the source, in the originating power behind the universe. Neither the mechanism without purpose which Jacobi sees as the maximum attainable by rationalistic speculation, nor the closed immanence of the kind that the early Schelling’s absolute represents, could engender the world and life as we experience them. The experience of the personal God is constitutive of our own personhood, while at the same time the personhood of this experienced God can be properly conceived only under the form of experienced human personhood. When Jacobi argues against Aristotle and Spinoza that intelligence cannot exist apart from personality, it is after having adopted a more concretely subjective and individual concept of personality than that which the term had normally signiWed, sometimes even in his own usage. We Wnd in Jacobi, I think, the beginning of the new personalistic restoration of classical theistic analogical thinking. ‘In creating man, God theomorphized’, Jacobi writes; ‘Man must therefore necessarily anthropomorphize’.44 But in Jacobi, this no longer refers merely to a general quality of rationality present in God and bestowed on man; for, as we have seen, Vernunft is identical with personality—and personality is more than it was in Boethius’ time.45 Jacobi was not himself aware of the degree of novelty of the conception of the personality of God that he defended.46 There is a lack of historical self-understanding involved when Jacobi thinks he is simply espousing the traditional theistic position. But it is not only in retrospect that the shift in meaning is obvious enough. It was evident also to those of Jacobi’s contemporaries who themselves deviated in other and more fundamental respects from the traditional theist position. Both Lessing, the rationalistic pantheist, and Herder, the Romantic pantheist, immediately perceived that Jacobi’s anthropomorphic idea of the personality of God was a philosophical and theological innovation. After having studied the historical deWnitions of the term personal, Herder dismissed it as arbitrary and illegitimate, an anthropomorphic Wnitization of the absolute. Personality is Wnite, particular, related. Faced with the personalist challenge, this heterodox pantheist not only insisted on keeping to the traditional political and juridical meanings of the term, but even reverted to ‘defending’ the orthodox Christian formula of persons in God: the unity of the persons had never, Herder observed, been conceived as in itself personal.47

43 Ibid. iv/1. 32–3; ii. 118–19. 44 Ibid. iii. 418. 45 For the relation between Vernunft and analogy in Jacobi, see Baum, Vernunft und Erkenntnis, ch. 11. 46 Jacobi, Werke, iv/2. 77. 47 Timm, Gott und die Freiheit, 338–9.

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If Jacobi started the personalistic reaction and set in motion the personalist counter-current by initiating the Pantheismusstreit, in Germany the second deWning moment of the drawn-out conXict between personalistic theists and impersonalistic pantheists of various kinds was the installation of Schelling at Berlin. Schelling was long perceived as the paradigmatic Romantic pantheist, and the Wrst version of absolute idealism was the one developed by him. Later it was Hegel’s more rationalistic variety that came to be perceived as typical. Hegel’s project of a rational translation of the feelings and representations of the religious consciousness into philosophy was from the beginning perceived by his traditional Christian opponents as a heterodox enterprise, whose ambition to safeguard religion in a rational form in reality insidiously undermined its essential truths. Hegel reinterpreted the ‘positive’ content of Christianity as the movement of the development of consciousness in which the distinction between the human and the divine as understood both by Christian orthodoxy and the new personalists disappeared. He rejected the Trinity understood in terms of ‘abstract’ personality, but accepted it as the expression of ‘concrete’ personality, as personality constituted and determined by mutual relationship. But since the ‘stages’ of the life of the Trinity is for Hegel a metaphor for the processes of the notoriously vague Geist which are comprehended by philosophy alone, they are inseparable from the human development of consciousness, the relational constitution of human concrete personality. Christianity is merely the representational expression of the development of consciousness in which the human and the divine, the Wnite and the inWnite, interpenetrate and ultimately become one. Yet since the result of the process is described in terms of unity-in-diVerence and the preservation of autonomous subjectivity, the interpretations of the Hegelian Right still remained possible. Defending himself, Hegel denied in his later work, such as the second edition of the Enzyklopa¨die, the lectures on the philosophy of religion, and articles in the Jahrbu¨cher fu¨r wissenschaftliche Kritik, that his system implied atheism or the deiWcation of man. Whether he merely sought to erect a new, theistic fac¸ade in order to placate the Prussian authorities or not is a much-debated question. Yet he did stress the elements of his work that nominally converged with orthodoxy, and thus facilitated—indeed contributed to and endorsed—the Right Hegelian interpretation that in some respects came close to the positions of the speculative theists. Parts of Hegel’s idealism were indeed readily compatible with the latter’s. Elements of Hegelianism were clearly often taken up by and dovetailed with personalism. Early personalism in its speculative theist form was deWnitely, in many respects, part of the broader modern idealistic movement of which Hegel is regarded by many as the leading representative. Still, the similarities with regard to the themes of consciousness and personality are often deceptive. Typically, despite Hegel’s emphasis on the concrete universal, the speculative theists conceived of the unity-in-diVerence of God and man diVerently, precisely because their central focus and their highest category was

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that of the person deWned in a way that was incongruent with Hegel’s: it was not the latter’s abstract personality, but neither was it concrete personality as he understood it. Nor was religious consciousness reducible for them to a representation of something diVerently comprehended by philosophy. Although much of the personalistic criticism of Hegel had been prepared by Jacobi, he did not live long enough to apply his arguments against the last great Wgure who came to epitomize the pantheism which he had from the beginning sought to expose as untenable. The criticism of Hegel was left to Schelling. His position was diVerent in important respects from Jacobi’s, but as to the central personalistic arguments it was quite as often in his form that they were to return in the further development of the worldview of personalism. One of the most characteristic divergences between Jacobi and Schelling— including the later Schelling—is in fact found precisely in their views of pantheism. Schelling held that Jacobi unjustly rejected his system as pantheism in a crude sense. In accordance with his earlier philosophy, he still denied in his later development that it was possible to reach knowledge of the highest things without passing through the lower, that is, through nature.48 Retaining elements of the idealistic view of reason and of his Romantic philosophy of nature almost to the end, Schelling sought to assimilate Jacobi’s new insights into a revised version of pantheism. As we have seen, he objected to what he saw as Jacobi’s simplistic rejection of reason as of itself ineluctably leading to the nihilistic consequences of scientism. Thus he also refused to accept that the pantheism to which we are led by reason necessarily implies mechanism and determinism. Freedom was the central concern of the later Schelling, and he sought to show, against Spinoza, that pantheism was not incompatible with it.49 He insisted on the ground– consequent view of the relation between God and the world, never made clear in principle by Spinoza, and thus rejected the cause–eVect view that Jacobi had considered characteristic of theism. But Schelling sought to bring the ground– consequent view to support the understanding of the possibility of the freedom of distinct Wnite beings within a whole that is God.50 The problem with Spinoza was not his pantheism, but his abstract mechanism and determinism: ‘He treats the will, too, as a thing, and then very naturally proves that in its working it must in every case be determined by another thing, which in turn is determined by another, and so forth endlessly. Hence the lifelessness of his system.’51 Reality is deed, not just idea. Schelling sought to develop further the new Romantic organicism to which he had himself made such a decisive contribution, so that it could incorporate the new positions regarding personality and freedom:

48 A central formulation of Schelling’s critique of Jacobi is the one in Zur Geschichte der neueren Philosophie from 1833–4. 49 With his own, diVerent deWnition of freedom, Spinoza too of course thought that his system was compatible with it. 50 Schelling seems Wrst to have introduced the term God for the absolute in Philosophie und Religion (1804). 51 Schelling, Werke, vii. 349.

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‘The particular [einzelne] organ, like the eye, is possible only in the whole of an organism; nevertheless it has a life of its own, indeed a kind of freedom, which it manifestly proves through the disease to which it is susceptible.’52 Jacobi had never understood the organic, living view of nature. Schelling now defended a pantheism of life and spirit, of the free, dynamic, will-directed life of the distinct parts or beings within the whole, and of the whole itself—a pantheism of a living God: ‘God is not a god of the dead but of the living. It is incomprehensible how an all-perfect being could rejoice in even the most perfect machine possible.’53 The essential feature of this new pantheism is that its free, dynamic life is the life of persons—both on the level of man and of God. In viewing pantheism as congruent with the personal God, Schelling took an important step towards the personalization of the absolute. It is in the Freiheitsschrift of 1809 that Schelling claims to have established the Wrst distinct, philosophical conception of the divine personality. While not disowning his earlier systematic concept of ‘indifference’ as the absolute, he notes that if this concept is taken abstractly, the whole is distorted, and it then also follows that this system cancels [aufhebe] the personality of the Supreme Being. Until now we have remained silent regarding this oft-heard accusation as well as many others, but we believe that in this treatise we have presented the Wrst clear conception of it. In the Non-Ground [Ungrund] or the indiVerence [IndiVerenz] there is indeed no personality; but is then the point of origin the whole? Now we challenge those who so readily made that accusation to present us from their positions with even the slightest thing that is intelligible about this concept. Everywhere we Wnd instead that they hold that the personality of God is incomprehensible and can in no way be made intelligible, in which they are quite right, inasmuch as they regard those abstract systems in which all personality is in principle impossible as the only ones in accordance with reason, which is presumably also the cause of their ascribing the same view to everyone who does not despise science and reason. We, on the contrary, are of the opinion that a clear insight of reason must be possible particularly into the highest conceptions, since it is only thereby that they can become truly ours, be taken up in ourselves and be eternally founded.54

Another way of describing what took place is to say that Schelling moved decisively in the direction of the new conception of the personal absolute. It could be argued, I think, that on the most general level, this ‘Wrst’ conception of divine personality was a new conception not because of the speciWc details of Schelling’s thought, but because of the whole changed problematic that was determined by the importance and meaning now ascribed to personality. The question of whether the category of personality is applicable to God or only to the limited human being could hardly have become as urgent as it did in early personalism had it simply accepted the orthodox Trinitarian meanings, even considering the opposition of the new impersonal systems of pantheism and absolute idealism.

52 Schelling, Werke, vii. 346.

53 Ibid. 346–7.

54 Ibid. 412.

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In this passage are plainly reXected, however, both the features which Schelling’s version of this conception shared with the versions of later personalists, and the ones which distinguish it from them. On the one hand, there is the insistence on the possibility of reaching such a philosophical conception, a ‘clear insight of reason’, and the rejection of abstraction as what stands in the way of it. On the other hand, there is the retention of the earlier view of the indiVerence, as well as of the concept of the Non-Ground, now understood as the ‘point of origin’; that is, the personality of God is not originally given in transcendent completeness but developed from this point and emerging as a product. This notion of the development of God, in which Man plays a central role, can be found in the oldest sources of the Western esoteric tradition. German Romantic idealism merely continued the tradition and added further secular humanist elements to it. Normally it was expressed in impersonal terms, as a development from primal unity, through diVerentiation, to restored unity on a higher level.55 The terminology, and prominence, of personality were, however, distinctive of the later versions of Schelling’s kind. The entire history and cultural development of humanity was included and interpreted according to his complex vision in the fragmentary work on the Weltalter and in the posthumously published lectures on the philosophies of mythology and revelation, where Schelling makes his own special objections to the understanding of Indian religion in impersonalistic terms and stresses its theistic elements.56 Despite the incomplete character of the later Schelling’s theism, through this emphasis on personality, it not only maintained continuity with Jacobi’s criticism, but was brought close to that levelled against the same abstract idealism by more orthodox Christian theologians. In an early letter, Schelling had written to Hegel that ‘[t]here is no personal God’, that ‘We go farther than the ideal of a personal being.’57 For all the continuities that mark Schelling’s thought, a radical change took place on this point. And the essential insight in his move beyond absolute idealism was the concrete experienced meaning of freedom and the personal reality of man in relation to a living, personal God. But Schelling is everywhere at pains to explain that this could not be the traditional God of Christian theism.58 When he writes that ‘God must become Man in order that man may be brought back to God’, since ‘only Personality can make whole what is personal’,59 and when he discusses anthropomorphism, it is a question of a speciWcally German, pantheistic-idealistic form of personality that gradually develops in interplay with a mystic element of nature. In Bo¨hme, by whom Schelling was inspired, there seems to have been a development away from a traditional understanding of distinct persons in the Trinity towards the view of the whole of the Godhead as personal, and the persons 55 The many Romantic versions of this basic scheme, in Germany and beyond, were traced by Abrams in Natural Supernaturalism. 56 See Sedlar, India in the Mind of Germany; cf. Copleston, Religion and the One, 268–9. 57 Cited in Reardon, Religion in the Age of Romanticism, 92, 95. 58 See e.g. Schelling, System der Weltalter, 191–6. 59 Id. Werke, vii. 380.

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of the Trinity as powers or moments in this personal whole or developing into the divine personality, which is then conceived as a result of their interaction; at the same time, the heterodox notion that God is personal only in Christ also seems to appear in his works.60 It is this kind of Bo¨hmean, Trinitarian speculation which appears also in Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift and later works. Whether this conception is regarded as one of personality in God or personality of God, it always retained an impersonal element. It was clearly not the personalist understanding which agreed with traditional, orthodox theism in insisting on original transcendent completeness. It was a version of the emergent God of the esoteric tradition who—or rather, which—develops from an implicit Alpha to an explicit Omega: ‘as Alpha he is not what he is as Omega.’61 This is not the place to explore the esoteric complexities of Schelling’s view of this personal God. It was only the general suggestions of the personality of God and man, not the details of his later system, that were of importance for the development of personalism. The ‘limitation’ of the personal God through the ‘Ground’ within him, the view of God’s personality, ‘the highest personality’, as the ‘living unity’ of the ‘ideal principle’ and the ‘Ground’,62 and the teachings on the ‘development’ and individuation of God through the processes of the world, were mostly rejected by the speculative theists. And so were the new elements of Romantic irrationalism that were added by Schelling himself. It is important to observe, however, that the notion of the development of God in nature, in man, and in history was conceived in a diVerent way from how it had been seen by Hegel. Schelling regards spirit as never capable of attaining selftransparency and absolute rationality, and history does not end in achieved (re)union. From his System des transcendentalen Idealismus (1800) onwards, Schelling adopted another view of the working of reason in history, or rather, of God’s relation to the world. The dialectical advance of spirit was replaced by a drama, an interplay of freedom and necessity, a work of art that could never be wholly transparent even to its author: if the playwright were to exist independently of his drama, we would be merely the actors who act out what he has written. If he does not exist independently of us, but reveals and discloses himself successively only, through the play of our freedom itself, so that without this freedom not even he himself would be, then we are co-authors of the whole, and have ourselves invented the particular roles that we play.—The ultimate ground of the harmony of freedom and the law-bound [das Gesetzma¨ßige] can thus never become completely objective, if the manifestation [Erscheinung] of freedom shall remain [bestehen].63

Although this view still bore the hallmark of what was perceived by later personalists as the problematic immanentism of Romanticism, and although in this respect the similarity with Hegel remained in Schelling’s later work, it also contained

60 Brown, The Later Philosophy of Schelling, 63. The Bo¨hmean ideas were transmitted to Schelling partly by Baader. 61 Schelling, Werke, viii. 81. 62 Ibid. vii. 395. 63 Ibid. iii. 602; Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 122.

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seminal notions of the distinctly dramatic view of the relation between the Wnite beings and the personal absolute that was to become characteristic of fully developed personalism. The core of the teaching of this later work is found in Schelling’s new appreciation of the nature of freedom: ‘if freedom is a capacity for evil it must have a root that is independent of God.’64 Schelling could not be faulted for explaining away the reality of evil. Most personal idealists would not accept that, as Schelling averred, the new tenets regarding the Ground of God, and the kind of limitation of God that it implied,65 were necessary for the personal concept of God. Nevertheless, when Schelling held that ‘So long as a real duality in God is not recognized, and a limiting, negating power is not opposed to the aYrming, expanding one: so long there will be denial of a personal God’; that ‘All consciousness is concentration, collectedness, comprehension, uniting, of itself ’; and that ‘This negating power of a being, returning upon itself, is the true power of personality in it, the power of selfhood, of egoity [Egoita¨t]’;66 then the inevitable general question in the context of the rethinking of the absolute in personal terms had at least again been raised. For this was the question of the relation between personality and ‘limits’. ‘All existence’, Schelling held, ‘must be conditioned in order that it may be actual, that is, personal, existence.’67 Idealism, which really consists in the denial and non-acknowledgement of [the] negating primordial force, is the universal system of our times. Without this force, God is that empty inWnite that modern philosophy has put in its stead. Modern philosophy names God the most unlimited being (ens illimitatissimum), without thinking that the impossibility of any limit outside of God cannot sublimate that there may be something in God through which God cuts itself oV from itself, in a way making itself Wnite (to an object) for itself. Being inWnite is for itself not a perfection. It is rather the marker of that which is imperfect. The perfected is precisely that which is in itself full, concluded, Wnished.68

The Wnal sentences of this passage are of course perfectly in accord with Jacobi’s view, and perhaps Schelling does not always do full justice to the new elements of Jacobi’s position when he dismisses it as ‘bare’ theism. The question of limits, and the problematization of the ‘bad’ inWnite—a concept which already the Greeks, in their own way and for their own reasons, had turned against—from the perspective of the new emphasis on personality were to become central in all subsequent personalism. Regardless of Schelling’s theosophy, the idea that existence has somehow to be limited in order to be personal could often be recognized as fundamental. But if such limitation could easily be accepted on the level of man or the Wnite being, the remaining question was how it was to be understood on

64 Schelling, Werke, vii. 354. 65 Even if it was not superior to the developed, personal God, even if it was God itself, the Ground was a prior moment of God, God as unconscious and undeveloped, and thus it excluded eternal, transcendent perfection. 66 Schelling, Werke, viii. 73–4. 67 Ibid. vii. 399. 68 Id. The Ages of the World, 7; cf. 93–4; Werke, ix. 218–20.

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the level of God, or the Godhead that was the absolute. Schelling summarized his own view thus: God’s existence, too, could not be personal if it were not conditioned, except that he has the conditioning factor within himself and not outside himself. He cannot set aside the condition, for if he did he would have to set aside himself; he can only subdue it through love and subordinate it to him for his gloriWcation. In God, too, there would be a depth of darkness if he did not make the condition his own and unite himself to it as one and as absolute personality.69

What came to be perceived as the problematic tendencies in the later Schelling were always intermixed with many seeds of the coming worldview of personalism. There was, most importantly, the recognition of a higher degree of transcendence and independence of God in relation to the world, of God’s being in himself and for himself. Schelling moved increasingly towards ‘panentheism’, combining transcendence with necessary immanent manifestation.70 He sought to work out a conception of divine personality radically diVerent from Hegel’s God, who, according to Schelling, can ‘never celebrate the Sabbath because He is never free from the process of development’.71 Yet it is doubtful whether he ever reached a conception of God as transcendentally complete, and thus connected his new ideas with a restatement of a cardinal tenet of classical theism. In a critical analysis of the later Schelling’s concept of God, which meticulously scrutinizes all the steps in its development, Helmut Groos long ago questioned such claims and pointed to the elements of theosophical Romantic pantheism that undermined transcendental completeness until the end.72 But Groos was a theologian who wrote from the neo-Wdeistic and anti-idealistic position of the 1920s, and he would certainly have rejected most other philosophical concepts of God as well. Although he of course goes further than Jacobi, much of what he says echoes the latter’s stance vis-a`-vis Schelling. Nevertheless, the important thing about Schelling in this context is that his personalism led him to insist at least more strongly on transcendent completeness against Hegel, and that the way in which he still did compromise that completeness was diVerent from Hegel’s. Although they normally relinquished the speciWc elements of Romantic theosophy that determined Schelling’s endeavours, the project itself was to prove decisive for subsequent personalists. Insisting on transcendent completeness against Hegel in the name of personality, they insisted equally, in the name of personality, on immanent relatedness. Personalism combined in a unique way the transcendence and immanence of God by means of the crucial category of personality. The understanding of personality not only gave the combination a distinctive character; it was also what made the combination necessary.

69 Schelling, Werke, vii. 399. 70 Although Krause’s term panentheism accurately describes some fundamental aspects of the position of the speculative theists, it seems not to have been used by many of them. 71 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 57. 72 Groos, Der deutsche Idealismus und das Christentum.

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Schelling’s development of the theme of the relation of God to the world and to Wnite persons was made possible by the way in which he conceived the transcendence of God, or rather, by the merely partial nature of his transcendence. Despite the lingering Romantic immanentism of his suggestions in this Weld, as disentangled from their Bo¨hmean, theosophical setting in Schelling himself and in some of the German speculative theists, they seem to have established a whole new paradigm of thinking about God and his relation to man in terms of personal life, in terms of the dynamic life of personality. Schelling’s idea of God’s life, of God’s life as a story, a life history which God and man shared, was incompatible with central aspects of the rational metaphysics of traditional natural theology as well as of the line of post-Kantian idealism that culminated in Hegel. But it was to prove abundantly fruitful, even when separated from the underlying motives in Schelling which explained it in terms of a purpose of creation that was necessary for God’s own perfection. As we will see, rather than sacriWcing it, the subsequent personalists redeWned God’s transcendent completeness—and retained the immanent, dramatic relations. A philosophy of Wrst principles, like the modern foundationalisms of Descartes and Fichte, was rejected by the later Schelling. What he now tried to articulate was a movement of dynamic progression, a becoming, a life. Neither its origins nor its destiny could be captured in Wxed, universal concepts. Since it was not a sequence of propositions, a starting point in a supreme proposition was meaningless.73 With this view, the attempt to reinterpret the ground–consequent position becomes problematic. The discovery of the limits of rationality was for Schelling a discovery of the free, dynamic, living nature of reality and of God: ‘In the divine reason [Verstand] there is a system, but God himself is not a system but a life.’74 This new view of the life history of God and the living relationship between man and God also required a new understanding of God’s relation to time. The perfect unity, the empty inWnite, and the passive eternity of the God of traditional metaphysics and—mutatis mutandis—of idealism had to be replaced by a new, active understanding of God: ‘The currently accepted doctrine of God is that he is without any beginning. Scripture, on the contrary, says that God is the beginning and the end. A being which is without beginning in all aspects we cannot but conceive of as the eternal immobility [Unbeweglichkeit], the purest inactivity [Wirkungslosigkeit].’ Rather, ‘The beginning in him is eternal beginning, that is, one that was beginning from all eternity, and still is and also never ceases to be beginning.’75 It is not really true to say that God is eternal, rather ‘he is himself his eternity’;76 ‘True eternity is not that which excludes all time, but that which contains time (eternal time) itself as subjected to itself ’.77 Brown tries to express this diYcult position thus: ‘God’s eternal life processes consist of ontological

73 74 76 77

Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 175, 194. Schelling, Werke, vii. 399. 75 Ibid. viii. 225. Ibid. 237; cf. Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 195. Schelling, Werke, viii. 260.

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relations that form the archetype of time . . . God’s eternity is a life process and thus involves opposition and conquest, just as do all life processes.’78 When Schelling thus restates the scholastic doctrine of the unity of God’s essence and his being, and holds that abstract attributes, such as—in addition to eternity—goodness, activity, consciousness, willing, and being itself, must be denied as attributes and that God must be described as being himself all of these things and nothing else apart from them, it is part of the description of the aspect of God that in his system is ‘absolute’ freedom: ‘According to his highest self God is not a necessarily real being, but the eternal freedom to be.’ Ultimately, this aspect takes us beyond God, and indeed, straight back to the impersonal, mystic concept of ‘the supreme simplicity [Einfalt]’ which is ‘not God so much as what is Godhead in God himself and thus above God, as already some ancients spoke of a ¨ bergottheit]’.79 Although Schelling now seeks to supplement Supergodhead [U this aspect of God by the concretely existing, living, personal aspect, it enters into the constitution of that somehow ‘limited’ and concretely determined nature of the personal God. Through the concept of absolute freedom, the classical positions as placed in the new framework of Schelling’s later philosophy are thus connected to the question of the status of personality in relation to abstract essence and abstract attributes. This later became the more general question of the primacy of personality, apart from Schelling’s own formulations on distinctions within God. As we will see, the question whether there was any objective, impersonal essence or universal order at all, of any kind, to which God as a person, and, in another sense, Wnite persons, were subjected, was to become a central point at issue between personal and absolute idealists. Ultimately, it was to become identical with the question of the identity or separation of God and the absolute. Although Schelling’s thinking about the divine attributes was linked both to various lingering impersonalist notions and to a radical concept of freedom as supreme, he thus did begin to reassert the view of God as possessing his attributes ‘substantially’, against the view of them as genera or abstract essences existing in an impersonal order above or beyond God. But again, it is characteristic of Schelling’s theogonic Romanticism that along with traditional theism he rejects Jacobi’s personal God too, since for Schelling, if God is already perfect, creation could only detract from his perfection.80 It was impossible for Schelling to unite the dynamic view of the life of God and the theistic idea of God’s original perfection even in Jacobi’s personalistic form. The life history had to be a becoming of God himself. In combination with the teachings of the freedomaspect in God as ‘Supergodhead’ and of the nature in God, or the Bo¨hmean Ground—even if this is a Ground in God, or in the complex of forces that is Schelling’s God—this clearly makes Schelling’s version of the personal absolute less strict than those of later personalists. Retained by some of the German speculative theists, this kind of position was among the Wrst to be rejected by the Swedish idealists of personality and the British personal idealists. 78 Brown, The Later Philosophy of Schelling, 220–1. 80 Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 210.

79 Schelling, Werke, viii. 236–8.

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S P E C U L AT I V E T H E I S M In the gradual development of the concept of the personal absolute, there were quite as many overlappings as in the case of epistemology between Jacobi’s and Schelling’s theisms, as well as between both Jacobi’s and Schelling’s theisms and those of the speculative theists and the British personal idealists and the American personalists. Mainly through the too superWcial view of what he considers to be ‘typical theistic personalism’, Knudson misses the great continuities throughout the nineteenth century in the transformation of logical rationalism into personal rationalism and absolute idealism into personal idealism which he ascribes to Lotze alone. Jacobi was not a mere typical theist in a ‘general and more or less self-evident’ sense. He was the Wrst defender of the more distinctly personalistic theism that Feuerbach attacked from the positions of his Left Hegelian pantheism. This was a defence of a theism which was in many respects of a new kind. The ‘self-evidence’ of the meaning of Jacobi’s personalism that Knudson speaks of is, I suggest, an evidence brought about by Jacobi himself and by his immediate successors. If his arguments seem familiar, it can only be because of the depth of the inXuence on modern thought of the personalistic movement they inaugurated. Jacobi and Schelling were the most prominent Wgures in the early development of personalism, but it is important to remember that at this stage also less philosophical, more or less orthodox Christian theologians made contributions, theologians who were indeed closer to what Knudson calls ‘classical’ or ‘traditional’ theism. Breckman shows how broad and deep the current actually was that opposed Hegel’s ‘panlogical system and its apparent negation of the personal God’. All the various opponents sought to ‘recover the ‘‘living’’, ‘‘free’’, ‘‘actual’’, ‘‘personal’’ God’. They all insisted on ‘the primacy of the person as a separate, discrete spiritual being’, they all ‘rejected all attempts to reduce the human being to an immanent order of society, politics, or history’. They defended ‘a belief that God and Christ are the archetypes of human personhood’, and they ‘rejected all eVorts to reconceptualize the divine as an immanent presence in the world’. Hegelians were ‘put on the defensive, because Hegel’s philosophy of religion and history appeared . . . as an extreme expression of the abstract universalism inaugurated by the enlightened language of Kant’s critical philosophy’. Breckman is perhaps not clear enough about the newness of the concept of personality that some of the ‘Christian personalists’ defended, although he does mention that the ideas of personhood and individuality were Christian and Romantic. Yet on the whole, the description captures well what the alliance had in common.81 I. H. Fichte and Weisse identiWed the key factors of the new personalism— reality ¼ individualizing power ¼ personality ¼ freedom ¼ will—and made personalized analogy on the basis of the idea of the imago dei central in their 81 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 14–15, 42.

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systems: personality in man as well as in God is unity of conscious will. The polemic against the view that personality, understood in a distinctly modern sense, was something which was a property of man alone and which, projected onto God, would constitute a limitation of the kind that implied a kind of degradation, was central to the new personalism. We have seen how the argument was set forth by Jacobi that, on the contrary, personality in the full sense exists only in God. Breckman points out that while Weisse remained more strongly indebted to Hegel, Fichte was inspired by ‘his father’s idea of the ‘‘I’’ as the highest expression of the Absolute, the ‘‘I’’ as a self-positing unity of will and action’, while at the same time completing his father’s late development away from identity-philosophy, with its unclear understanding of the relationship between the Wnite and inWnite subject, towards ‘a more fully personalist and transcendent conception of the nature of God’, declaring ‘human subjectivity to be a loan from God’. The ‘loan’ idea, as will be remembered, was expressed by Jacobi in the letter to Lavater. The argument that it was not a limitation of God to ascribe the ‘human’ category of personality to him, but that it was instead human personality that was not personal in the full sense, and that in truth full personality could be ascribed to God alone, was to be stated in its best-known form by Lotze, and it was in this form that it was to reach Britain and America. But before Lotze this Jacobian position had been restated also by the earlier speculative theists. They were quick to emphasize, Breckman reports, ‘that human personality is not identical to that of God, because the personality of God comprises absolutely self-identical Being, or absolute unity of consciousness, and complete freedom requires this divine unity of self, for absolute personality experiences no limiting condition upon its will’.82 But at the same time, I. H. Fichte, citing Jacobi, accepted the inevitability of analogical anthropomorphism in the description of the personal absolute.83 But again, the reason why this problematic became acute was not only the fact of the opposition from new pantheistic systems. It was also that one had come more naturally to conceive of the personality of God and to adopt the view of God as the absolute, with some of the meanings of this word that had been added by the new idealism; and that the concept of personality was now a diVerent, more modern one. Because of the diVerences between them with regard to certain Hegelian positions, Weisse and Fichte debated extensively the relation between the concept of the absolute and the concept of personality. Despite various departures from him, they were both inXuenced in their personalization of the absolute by the later Schelling, and received some of his work with enthusiasm. Especially, his preface to a translation of a work by Victor Cousin which appeared in 1834, in which Schelling held that ‘the true God is not the mere general being, but himself also something particular [besonderes] or empirical’, was well received by both of 82 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 51–2. 83 Fichte, Sa¨tze zur Vorschule der Theologie, 87–8 and n.; cf. Die theistische Weltanschauung und ihre Berechtigung, 186–7.

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the leading speculative theists. But already Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift had shaped their basic outlook.84 Rather than unnecessarily citing the abundant evidence for the development of the idea of the ‘personal absolute’ in the German speculative theists, I turn again, however, to the simultaneous development of these ideas, along partly diVerent lines, by the idealists of personality in Sweden.

Biberg Perceiving an unbroken connection between the negative philosophy of the early Schelling and the Romantic elements in his later, imperfectly theistic positive philosophy, the Swedish idealists of personality, beginning with Biberg, preWgured the criticism of all leading subsequent personalists against the kind of theogonic, developmental view of God that Schelling embraced. Indeed, they set out to free philosophy from the whole of the German pantheistic mindset. Among the diVerences between the German speculative theists and the Swedish idealists of personality, not least the stronger historical orientation of the latter and the importance for them of a restatement of the Platonic tradition stand out. Schelling too, at the stage of his career that preceded the Freiheitsschrift, had suddenly introduced a version of the Platonic theory of forms, or ideas, into his constantly changing system. But signiWcantly, this was in the book entitled Bruno and, along with Schleiermacher’s version, it was a paradigm of the Romantic, pantheistic reinterpretation of Plato.85 Biberg was not unaVected by the modern philosophical development—quite the opposite: the assimilation of its partial truths was essential to his project. But what seems to me to make him a distinguished Wgure in the general cultural and philosophical climate of the early nineteenth century is not least the way in which he managed to see through the typical Romantic distortions and reinterpretations of the philosophical tradition, and which allowed him to dismiss Schelling’s ‘Platonism’ in the strongest terms, not from the position of orthodox Christianity, but from that of a Wrmer historical grasp of the meaning of Platonism itself. In the lectures on the ‘Introduction to Ethics’ of 1817, he states that ‘in vain the Schellingian system embellishes itself with the feathers of Plato; for this system has a completely diVerent construendum than Plato and a diametrically opposed interest to look after [bevaka]’.86 As previously discussed, Biberg believes that philosophy must return to and reappropriate important aspects of Plato’s philosophy if it is to be capable of

84 Fuhrmans, Schellings letzte Philosophie, 78–9. For Fichte on Schelling’s merits and weaknesses, see Vermischte Schriften, i. 107–13, and on Schelling’s friendly response to Fichte’s early work, ibid. 57. 85 I.e. the further reinterpretation beyond the Neo-Platonic one. Jacobi paid attention to Bruno as a typical pantheist. 86 Cited in Nyblaeus, Den WlosoWska forskningen i Sverige, iii/2. 63. If Biberg is inXuenced by other Platonists beyond Plato himself, it is rather R. Cudworth than any of the contemporary ones.

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‘transcending pantheism and establishing a speculative theism’.87 As a prototheist, Plato is a necessary guide showing the way out of pantheism. By means of a renewal and revision of the Platonic theory of ideas, Biberg reasserted a philosophical concept of transcendence, a new, non-Hegelian concept of the concrete absolute, and thence reached the insight about the absolute as personal. In Nyblaeus’s words: ‘If Schellingian pantheism were to be transcended, it would have to be on the way taken by Plato, or by correcting and developing further the Platonic theory of ideas and applying to it the teaching on self-consciousness of recent philosophy.’88 Plato’s importance lies on the one hand in his explanation of the necessity of ‘God’s’ independence of the sensual world, on the other in the fact that he has at least started to move towards the understanding of what was for Biberg the conditions of this independence, namely the original, complete, ideal, and concrete determinations.89 Biberg rejects Aristotle’s situating of the forms as substances outside of reason. They cannot be reached by means of abstraction from perceived things. For Biberg, the forms are real only within divine reason. As for the Christian Platonists, the forms constitute the system of the living thoughts of God, an ideal system which is paradigmatic of the phenomenal manifestation and which is also communicated to human reason. As for the determinations of this independent reality, Plato realized the necessity of the forms as the essences and archetypes of things, but for Biberg it is not enough to understand the forms merely as those of abstract logical generality: In the divine reason the ideas [ide´erna] are not, as they are for man, merely generic concepts or units, in and through which the individuals of a certain genus are collectively described [sammanfattas], but they are the pure essence of things and in reality constitutive, that is, completely determined or concrete. The ideal world can therefore be conceived as a world for itself or to be existing independently of the sensual, without the need of being completed by the latter. This is all the more obvious as true reality is only to be found in the idea [ide´en], and all reality there is in the sensual is derived from the idea.90

Scholastic exemplarism, identifying the ideas with the substantive unity and simplicity of the nature of God, clearly pointed to their being a concrete reality and no mere abstractions. But Biberg implies that there is also a diversity in the unity in God which is more than that of the Trinity. With some Middle Platonists and with Neo-Platonism, he holds that the concretely and individually determined variety must be given also in the purely qualitative, essential and actual reality of the intelligible world—which latter is not for Biberg, as for Plotinus, distinct as a second hypostasis from a Wrst hypostasis which is an impersonal One. But if this is rendered by Nyblaeus as what Biberg holds to be the true understanding even of the intentions of Plato himself, there can be no doubt that Biberg also found Plato inadequate with regard to the concrete determinations of the ideas. For Plato had ‘not indicated any distinctive mark by which the ideas as pure and necessary 87 Nyblaeus, Den filosofiska forskningen i Sverige, iii/2. 20. 90 Ibid. 68.

88 Ibid. 55.

89 Ibid. 65.

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concepts of reason can be distinguished from merely abstract concepts’. Thus it could indeed look as if the ideas ‘were merely empirical concepts, derived from sensual reality through abstraction and reXection, or. . . nothing but general forms that took their content from the sensual’. If this were Plato’s meaning, it would, according to Biberg, be possible to reduce the sum of his teaching to the proposition that the generic concepts constitute at once the certain and necessary knowledge and the unchangeable or true being, whereas the changing particular objects or the individual things do not possess any authentic esse. But such an interpretation—in medieval terms: universals post rem in our minds, and ante rem as mere empty forms in God’s mind—cannot explain or allow any derivation of the sensual world from the ideal. Because of this apparent meaning, in Aristotle, Plato’s ideas were ‘degraded [nedsjo¨nko]’ from ‘the status of supersensual principles which constituted an independent, ideal world . . . to being merely natural principles or, in other words, nothing more than the sensual stripped of its changing garb’. The inability to explain the sensual world through itself, however—through the universal in re—forced Aristotle to acknowledge ‘that the unity of matter and form given in the world presupposed a purely non-sensory principle, a form free of all matter, which, in order to be conceived as independent, must be individually determined’. For this reason, Aristotle too Wnally conWrmed what Biberg, despite its failings, regards as the essence or the basic thought of the Platonic worldview, namely ‘that the sensory world points beyond itself to a purely ideal reality, a divine reason, which must be conceived to be not an empty unity or a unity in and of a plurality of abstract forms, but a system of living thoughts, of concrete concepts of reason or ideas’.91 What in our minds are abstract universals is in God’s mind a diVerentiated concrete reality. And if we bracket our abstractions, in reality the sensory world itself points to that higher source of its own shadowy concreteness. If, in his attack on abstractionist rationalism and its pantheistic and impersonalistic consequences, Jacobi had started with Spinoza and had pointed only en passant to preparations for this development in Greek philosophy, and if Spinoza and modern idealistic pantheism had remained the main reference for the later Schelling and the German speculative theists, Biberg thus goes all the way back to Plato to correct what he perceived to be a fundamental abstractionist, generalist mistake in the Western philosophical tradition. Yet it is very much the problematic outlined by Jacobi and Schelling that guides Biberg in these eVorts. Biberg’s analysis of Plato and Aristotle is, as I have indicated, linked to the modern thematic of self-consciousness. Reason as well as its original, concrete, variegated content are both shown to be inseparable from self-consciousness, in man as well as in God. In this way the conclusions of the analysis of Plato and Aristotle are brought to bear on our understanding of the fundamental principle of modern idealism, so that the latter’s tendency to abstraction and emptiness has to be abandoned in favour of a self-consciousness that is concretely determined. Hence Biberg’s view of God as ‘a purely spiritual, rational, and personal being which is independent in relation to the sensual world’ and who has a ‘concrete, 91 Ibid. 68–71, 82.

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ideal content’.92 The basic mistake of pantheism, Biberg contends, lies in the confusion of logical ground, formal ground, or ground of knowledge on the one hand and metaphysical ground or real ground on the other, the distinction insisted upon by Aristotle: As a consequence of this confusion pantheism believes itself to have found in the logically highest, in the general, abstract, and undetermined, to which it ascends via negationis or by abstraction from the particular and singular, what is in reality the highest, the absolute. Herein pantheism overlooks on the one hand that the general and abstract is a concept of relation, which cannot be thought otherwise than in relation to the particular, concrete, and on the other that it is quite as unreasonable to seek to derive the concrete manifold of rich content that is given in the world from an undetermined unity as to seek to derive something from nothing.93

Hegel, for all his ambiguous and sometimes contradictory passages, was well aware of this, yet at least inasmuch as his logic can derive neither contingency nor the ideal determinations of a metaphysics of Biberg’s kind, the personalists, although sometimes failing to do him full justice, seem to be right in concertedly insisting that his system both fails to account for concrete reality and tends to do violence to it. Although Biberg found the basic outlines of the criticism of German idealism in Jacobi, he held that Jacobi had ‘stopped halfway’ in his endeavour to work out a new, speculative theism. Such theism, therefore, had yet to be consistently and positively developed.94 And Biberg’s contribution of applying the revised Platonic theory of ideas to the new understanding of self-consciousness plainly took speculative theism, and emergent personalism, in another direction than Schelling’s. The rejection of an abstract and ‘incomplete’ God who needs the world to become fully real was now becoming a fundamental principle in the emerging personalist philosophy—a principle which, however, in no way excluded the insight of the ‘dramatic’ relations between the personal God and the Wnite persons as revealing the meaning and value of all life and existence. Behind them there awaited the searcher after truth no higher, trans-personal or transexistent reality as the Wnal goal. And the related criticism of an absolute which, as a bare simplicity or empty unity, cannot explain the world as given in our experience was now being more precisely stated and incorporated as no less fundamental. Gradually, the insight was growing that the only alternative was God strictly conceived as both absolute and personal.

Grubbe Through extensive interpretations of the ideas given in reason, Grubbe reached results similar to those of Biberg with regard to the positive attributes, the concrete determinations, of what he called ‘the absolute original being’. In this we clearly discern the main theme of his philosophy, the compatibility of Platonism, 92 Nyblaeus, Den filosofiska forskningen i Sverige, iii/2. 52. 94 Biberg, Samlade skrifter, i. 347–8.

93 Ibid. 63.

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Christian theism, and the essential insights into the nature of self-consciousness of modern transcendental philosophy—as mutually modiWed and adjusted in the characteristic personalist synthesis. Developing Jacobi’s criticism of Spinoza, yet far from Schelling’s existentialism, Grubbe, along traditional lines, blames pantheism in general for not being able to indicate ‘any ground in the essence of the absolute substance itself for why it should be or develop according to the whole of the manifold of particular modiWcations, forms, and phenomena, which together make up the universe’, and for not even explaining the ‘possibility of all these modiWcations of itself ’. Pantheism has tried to conceive in diVerent ways of the relation of the unity of the absolute to the plurality of the determinations of its manifestation, but it has never succeeded in explaining the latter genetically and so demonstrating its necessary ground in the nature of the absolute.95 The bare simplicity and empty unity cannot produce plurality; what is in the conclusion or consequent must be there in the premiss or the ground. In the parts of his work to which Nyblaeus gives the names ‘Phenomenology’ and ‘Ontology’,96 Grubbe analyses at length the phenomenality of space and time and its implications, thereby, in addition to the more direct refutations undertaken elsewhere in the same works, indirectly refuting all possible kinds of naturalism and materialism.97 I. H. Fichte was to put much emphasis on what he considered the ‘correction’ and transformation of Kant’s analysis in this regard. In several places he explained his view of space and time as ‘objective phenomena’, as the original mode of operation of spiritual reality, man’s as well as God’s, providing through extension and duration contact with real appearances or appearances of the real. Bowne too made much of this kind of ‘phenomenality’: if objective, external space and time are not only inconceivable but impossible, there can be no ‘matter’—as understood by the naturalists and materialists—out there, Xoating about in them. In some cases, the phenomenality was formulated in a way which could lead to implications of a kind that was seen as problematic by other personalists. For Grubbe, it implied the fundamental negative determinations of the absolute: that it is not in space and not in time. Bostro¨m especially stressed the conclusions that space and time thus exist exclusively for the Wnite being, that these phenomena arise for him precisely because of his Wnitude, and that what he perceives in the phenomenal world is precisely the same system of personalities in the mind of God that God himself perceives, but as spatio-temporally (and otherwise) distorted by his Wnitude. Although the latter implications were to some extent drawn already by Grubbe, he did not philosophically elaborate them, but kept to the establishment of the negative and positive determinations of the absolute itself. I. H. Fichte, however, held that the changeless, purely time- and spaceless God is a mere negative concept, even an obscure (dunkel) limit-concept, which is not fully

95 Grubbe, Skrifter, vi. 192–3. 96 See Introduction, n. 32. 97 Grubbe, Skrifter, v. passim; vi. 53–75.

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thinkable.98 For him, spiritual reality is supra-temporal and supra-spatial in the sense that it is not subordinate to time and space, does not arise and perish in them, but itself posits and Wlls them. In this sense they are real indeed, and God and Wnite beings in them. With the exception of some later personalists with whom I will not deal, most personalists who were uncomfortable with the pure space- and timelessness of God accepted that the absolute must at least in one aspect or one sense, as it were, be space- and timeless. Of course, as Grubbe himself points out, conceiving of the absolute as the ultimate ground of everything is to conceive of it as the ultimate ground of both ourselves and the phenomenal world as given in our experience, and thus also of the necessary spatio-temporal form under which it is given in that experience: something in the absolute must account for why it has this form.99 As for the positive determinations of the absolute, those that can be ascertained by means of theoretical reason alone, as deWned by Grubbe, are absolute substantiality (being, reality), and absolute self-consciousness and self-determination (ideality, being-for-itself). All other ‘theoretical attributes’ (as Bostro¨m would later call them) are merely special expressions, consequences, or applications of these. The Wrst implies absolute unity, unity sensu eminentissimo, the absence of shifting determinations as well as opposition to anything external. The absolute is thus the only absolute being, and in this sense ens realissimum. It also implies that the absolute is that which is through itself sensu eminentissimo, that whose being is not through anything else, or with another term, its aseity.100 Schelling, it may be recalled, used the term aseity as an example of the ‘meagre subtlety’ of ‘abstract idealists’, which ‘stands in the sharpest contrast to the force of life and the fullness of reality’. Its presence, along with other similar scholasticisms, in Grubbe would seem to be evidence of the distance personalism had already gone—indeed, while Schelling was still developing his own later worldview—from Schelling’s Romantic, vital realism. Yet in reality it is rather a matter of the earlier personalistic impulses, including those of Schelling, being reinserted into the framework of systematic philosophizing; the assimilable Schellingian elements were very much preserved, and allowed to modify the new idealistic system in the characteristic personalist manner. Moreover, Grubbe’s prose is perfectly limpid, and evinces an aspect of the neo-humanist inspiration obscured in the German idealists’ new abstruseness and foreign to the lingering schoolphilosophy of the preceding century. The second positive determination of the absolute, the relative version of which is shared by the Wnite subject, its absolute self-consciousness and selfdetermination, or as Grubbe also says, its life, is the determination that is denied by the two principal philosophies against which personalism turns, namely pantheism and naturalism—or more exactly, with regard to pantheism, pantheism in the forms which conceive of the original reality only as an eternal, unchanging substantiality in accordance with the Wrst determination. Grubbe 98 Fichte, Vermischte Schriften, i. 19. 99 Grubbe, Skrifter, vi. 74. 100 Ibid. 82–3, 87.

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points to the existence of this latter position—in the Orient, as well as in the Eleatics and Spinoza—and analyses it in the typical personalist fashion.101 But signiWcantly, he surmises that impersonalistic pantheism—opposed to the spiritualism, the presence of which Grubbe also recognizes in India, which accepts the absolute original being as a ‘supersensual and intelligent being’ elevated above nature and which is thus monotheistic—has become increasingly dominant in more recent historical periods, and that it was thus not originally dominant in the Orient.102 With regard to Spinoza, the main question, Grubbe Wnds, is whether ‘only a Wnite being can be conceived as a properly living, intelligent being’, and whether ‘the absolute substance, if it were understood and conceived as proper intelligence, would thereby necessarily lose the character of an inWnite and absolute being’.103 There is nothing, Grubbe argues, in the general concept of self-consciousness that necessarily implies the conditions of Wnitude, such as the succession of temporal moments. And Inasmuch as it is the pure self-consciousness that is the root or ground of all intelligence and all personality, since it is through the identity of the pure self-consciousness that during all of the successive moments of my life I have knowledge of myself as the same person, we can, in this sense, say that the absolute original being, when it is conceived under the character of self-consciousness, is also conceived as an intelligent, personal being in the highest sense of that word.104

The reason why Spinoza could not reach this conclusion was that he had not made suYciently clear the notion of self-consciousness and thus the true nature of intelligence. His thought was ‘one-sidedly realistic’, directed preponderantly towards the real, not giving enough and adequate attention to the ideal.105 We might say that the modern concept of subjectivity was not yet developed to the degree that would allow him to take advantage of it in his metaphysics in the way that was possible from Grubbe’s historical vantage-point.106 Again, it is the concept of personality in this context which distinguishes Grubbe’s analysis from Hegel’s. But Grubbe’s atemporal concept of the personal absolute places him rather closer to the more rigorous absolutist emphasis of his student Bostro¨m than to his colleagues Atterbom and Geijer. Crucially, however, this does not place him in Knudson’s, Lavely’s, and Yandell’s category of ‘absolute idealistic personalism’ or ‘absolutistic personalism’. The latter are distinct from personal idealism proper by allowing strictly or ultimately only one person, the personal absolute. For both Grubbe and Bostro¨m, it is fundamental that the Wnite persons are real and partly distinct and independent,

101 Ibid. 87, 89–91, 188–94. 102 Ibid. i. 63–4. 103 Ibid. vi. 92. 104 Ibid. 97–8. 105 Ibid. 98. 106 Although they are historically accurate, Jacobi’s acute perception not only of the impersonalist parallelism but of the impersonalist convergence of materialism and a certain kind of idealism is not fully retained in Grubbe’s remarks on Spinoza. But it was largely the incorporation of Jacobi’s insights that made Grubbe and other early personalists certain their idealism was of a new and diVerent, antinihilistic kind.

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and their systems thus belong rather to personal idealism proper as deWned by these American scholars. The limitations of human personality, such as passivity (manifested as sensual intuition, feeling, and desire), and acts of reXection and free will conceived as separate functions in distinct temporal moments, cannot be ascribed to Grubbe’s absolute. All that is given in and with the consciousness of the personal absolute must be conceived as ‘given at once, as in one single act of self-consciousness and self-determination’.107 Employing some of the language of the German philosophy of nature, the phenomena of nature constitute for Grubbe nothing but force, life and activity in various modiWcations and on diVerent levels of development (of course, there is for Grubbe really no ‘nothing but’ about this). The same holds, in a higher sense, for the world of intelligence, with the diVerence that the latter is conscious. The ‘dynamic view’ includes both worlds (Grubbe here nods to Leibniz’s dynamic view of substance).108 This being the case, despite its nonspatiality and non-temporality, the ultimate ground of these worlds cannot be conceived as ‘a dead, static existence without inner force and life’. This is where the typical divergence from the main trajectory of German idealism occurs: it must be ‘a living being’, an ‘original life, of which all other life is but an imperfect image and derived expression’, a ‘self-conscious life, an intelligence in the highest sense of this word’, an ‘absolute, self-determining force’—self-consciousness in reality comprising both self-intuition and self-determination, since, understood in the highest sense, these are inseparable.109 The idea of the absolute original being as absolute intelligence thus now becomes the necessary, highest meaning of the idea of absolute substance. It was the absence of this idea which forced Spinoza to ‘deprive the absolute substance of the character of intelligence’, and which is ‘the ground of the dead, hard, abstract qualities, through which [his system] so peculiarly distinguishes itself, especially from Plato’s and Leibnitz’s systems’.110 As we saw in the last chapter, however, these determinations of the absolute are not enough for the satisfaction of reason. It is only in combination with the idea of the absolute as given in the moral and religious consciousness that reason can attain the full comprehension of the absolute, and add the remaining determinations that are at all accessible to it. Also in religious feeling, the idea of the absolute is Wrst given merely as the idea of an original, eternal, self-existing reality, which is the source of everything. As for the more speciWc determinations, these are originally perceived by religious feeling as something ‘unknown, mysterious, and unfathomable which man can divine and in which he has faith, but cannot really comprehend’. This is what gives rise to the attempts of the aesthetic imagination to produce sensory images of it. But only in combination with the moral consciousness, and in proportion to 107 Grubbe, Skrifter, vi. 99. 108 Ibid. 106–8; iii. 11. 109 Ibid. vi. 108–10. This latter insight, also as developed with regard to the Wnite subject, is indeed partly derived from Leibniz, although Grubbe holds that he did not correctly develop it in his monadology. 110 Ibid. 111.

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its growth and its determination of the will, does the idea of the original being, with which the moral consciousness in the same proportion seeks to unite itself, begin ‘to be considered as the ground of the idea given in human consciousness of the moral good’. The latter is now perceived to be an expression or revelation in human consciousness of the absolute or of its ‘holy and divine will’. For the idea of the absolute moral good ‘expresses . . . the idea of a highest or absolutely perfect with regard to will and action’.111 To regard the absolute as ‘the paradigm and source of the moral good is thus the same as to regard it under the character of a will’, and a will cannot be conceived otherwise than ‘as within an intelligence or in a being conscious of itself ’.112 Thereby not only the vague apprehension in religious feeling but the clear determinations reached by theoretical reason are supplemented by the further determinations necessary for the full concept of God as the personal absolute. The idea of the absolute acquires ‘the character of an inWnite moral intelligence’, a ‘holy, divine will’, and ‘a living personal God’.113 Grubbe signiWcantly rejects as the principal error of recent philosophy the view that the moral and religious determinations thus reached are valid merely on the level of moral and religious consciousness itself, and not on the level of philosophical speculation. Abstractive, rationalist, purely theoretical speculation is in itself misleading. As Jacobi insisted, it must ultimately end with the notions of meaningless unconscious necessity and blind, dead mechanism.114 Against Kant and Fichte, Grubbe insists that God ‘must be regarded primarily as the ultimate basis and source of the idea of moral good’, and ‘only as a consequence of this as also, in relation to the successive development of phenomena, the principle of moral world-government’ and its progressive realization of this idea. God’s will is not separate from and subordinate to any higher moral law; it is in its essence one with the law and by its own nature cannot be opposed to it. It is from the fact of the unity of God’s will and the highest moral law that our sense of the holiness of the moral law—apprehended by or communicated to us—as an expression of God’s will, as well as our sense of moral obligation in its pure and full sense, arise. The law is not an arbitrary positive law, based merely on God’s favour, but ‘necessarily given in and with God’s own eternal and unchangeable nature’.115 We will return to this in the next chapter; here, it is of importance to establish its relevance for Grubbe’s understanding of the determinations of the personal absolute. Grubbe concludes that while the personal Godhead is thus the principium essendi of the moral good, the idea of the moral good as given in our reason is the principium cognoscendi of the idea of the Godhead.116 Reason has now reached the limit of its ability to ascertain the determinations of the absolute. Further determinations, such as the theological qualities of omnipotence, omniscience, and holiness, are for Grubbe merely special applications of the ones already

111 Ibid. 132–3, 137, 235, 238–9. 112 Ibid. iii. 235. 113 Ibid. vi. 137, 163; cf. iii. 247, 261–2. 114 Ibid. iii. 265–6. 115 Ibid. 132, 229, 247–8, 132, 235–6. 116 Ibid. 257.

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reached, with reference to the relation of the absolute to the universe. Yet Grubbe repeatedly insists, in the un-Hegelian, personalist manner, that although both the determinations attained and their applications are necessary and valid for reason, the absolute is really in its inner nature and possibility ‘incomprehensible and unfathomable’; the Wnite being can attain no ‘fully speciWc and clear knowledge’ of it, that is, no Hegelian absolute knowledge. The theological qualities are ‘formed after a rather imperfect analogy with the qualities of the Wnite intelligence’.117 One important personalistic position which reason supports, however, without its relation to the general determinations being clearly explained, is that ‘individuality must ultimately have its ground in the absolute original being, which is the ultimate ground of everything’. In the consciousness of absolute intelligence, the idea of the universe must, as ‘containing the distinct [sa¨rskilda] beings, who together constitute the universe, be considered a totality, a conspectus [sammanfattning] of an undeterminable quantity of distinct concepts or ideas’.118 Despite some diVerences, with regard to the central theme of the analysis of the determinations of the absolute, which is shown ultimately to lead to the view of the absolute as personal, Grubbe is in accord with Biberg. The personal absolute is seen by both as the only tenable alternative not only to Spinozistic, Hegelian, and early Schellingian pantheism, but, more strictly understood, also to the semitheism of the later Schelling.

Atterbom Turning from Grubbe’s precise, elaborate, and comparatively technical expression of the position reached by emergent personalism in the mid-Wrst half of the nineteenth century to Atterbom’s version, produced not only at the same time but in the same place, is, as we have already seen in the last chapter, to encounter a fascinatingly diVerent mode of apprehending and communicating the new personalism. And to this mode corresponds also some real philosophical diVerences. As a typical Romantic poet, Atterbom is still strongly attracted to the later Schelling’s philosophy.119 With regard both to style and substance, his own poetical talents and his lingering Schellingianism inXuence his statement of the worldview of personalism. Yet Atterbom too was motivated by the desire to transcend not only German idealistic and earlier pantheism in general but also the Xawed theism of Schelling’s philosophy of freedom. In opposition to Schelling, he sought to establish that ‘God is an Original Personality [Urpersonlighet], who, in order to exist, does not need any other world—nothing but the fulness of his own being ([which is] independent of any kind of world)’. Atterbom insists that the German followers of the later Schelling, the speculative theists, have not yet advanced very far in their 117 Grubbe, Skrifter, vi. 162–4; cf. 45. 118 Ibid. 172, 201. 119 Atterbom, Studier till Philosophiens Historia och System, 248–81.

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attempts to go beyond Schelling and develop a strict philosophical theism.120 Yet even as he explicitly seeks to avoid the pantheistic pitfalls of the philosophy of freedom, he endeavours to establish his own position as a free rendering of its ‘spirit and inner consistency’. The concept of theism is still struggling in the later Schelling in ‘considerable mists’; ‘The diYculties are nowhere near being suYciently solved which . . . arise partly with regard to the relation on which it bases the personality of God, partly with regard to the element of Change, which must in some way necessarily be conceived in a personal God.’ The latter element must be reconciled ‘with the Unchangeable, which must also in some way be conceived in the same God; for if the latter is given up, God is made into a being which does not immediately, in the beginning (as it is seen from the human perspective), possess the whole of his perfection, but only gradually and with time develops himself to it—and is thus an imperfect being’.121 ‘God as God’, Atterbom writes, ‘is something far more lively, far more interior and intimate [innerligare], than the mere ‘‘Absolute’’ as such.’ He is ‘God proper only in so far as he is himself Individuum, Ego, Person’. Although he holds that the Trinity of persons, ‘[t]he centre of the theological concept of God’, is ‘likewise the centre of the philosophical concept’,122 Atterbom seems very much concerned to establish not merely personality in God but the personality of God. He insists that the absolute must not be understood as ‘a mere thought or law of thought’, an ‘ideal form without content’, an ‘empty logical formula’, an ‘a priori proposition which is dead in itself, out of which life and reality, with all their plurality, must then— . . . in the brain of the philosopher—be spun out as a posterius’.123 In a mere ‘abstract world-law for the existence of phenomena’ no ‘original ground of Reality can be contained: still less the original ground of Goodness and Holiness’.124 The most accurate understanding of one of the key concepts of the new idealism, the subject, is, Atterbom held, that it is that which gives itself its determinations, that it is at once identical with them and independent of them. He immediately asserts, however, that such a self-willing and self-conscious subject ‘we call Person’.125 Finite lives are a manifold of particular expressions and a conspectus of ‘the All-life, the universe’, and they can be ‘conceptually reconciled’ with this One, which is inherent in the manifold, ‘only if this One is a Subject, which has in the manifold its Predicates, and which subsists [besta˚r] independently of them, since they have been given . . . to itself by itself ’. It is not necessary to ascertain the exact meaning which these concepts have for Atterbom, 120 Ibid. 283, 507. 121 Ibid. 246–8. 122 Ibid. 281–2. 123 Atterbom, ‘Om Katolicism och Ultraism’ (‘On Catholicism and Ultraism’), Svensk LitteraturTidning (1824), 111. 124 Atterbom, ‘Om Philosophien och hennes fo¨rha˚llande till va˚r samtid’ (‘On Philosophy and its Relation to Our Time’), Svea (1828), 118. 125 Atterbom expands: ‘Each person-life (person-lif) can go through countless possible states, can perform countless possible acts, can transform itself in the most decided manner in the determinations that it gives itself in relation to itself and its world; but it always remains, with regard to the identity of its personality, unchangeably the same.’ Studier till Philosophiens Historia och System, 286.

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set as they are within a general formulation of the personalist position much vaguer than that of Grubbe. Our concern here is merely to discern how the distinct personalistic themes emerge from within late Schellingian semi-theism. An idealistic pantheism, which holds that the universe is the ‘all-ness [allheten] of the determinations for which God is the subject’, is characteristically turned in the direction of theism if God is ‘in the beings and the things, but is not these beings and things’, if ‘he is what he is (the self-subsisting Subject) also apart from [utom] them’. If a subject freely constituted by self-determination is personal, ‘it is clear’, Atterbom writes, ‘that also the Unity of the Universe—and this above all—can only be a personal Unity, a personal God’. Hereby at least all static, quantitative connotations of the hen kai pan seem necessarily to have to be relinquished. Things and Wnite beings are held together ‘with all their changes, actions, events’ as an indissoluble ‘living Whole’ in God precisely because of God’s independence or partial transcendence. For this reason, it is so little the case that personalism excludes philosophic systematicity that ‘Life is only a system, and its conceptual apprehension, Science, can only be (or become) systematic, because God is personal ’.126 Yet it is plain that God’s transcendence is here still little more than the pure subjectivity that is somehow free to give itself determinations which are those of the universe alone. Atterbom clearly rejects the developmental theogony of Schelling, and is in other formulations advancing, in his view of the personal absolute, on the way towards supplementing or specifying this self-determining subjectivity by the further elements that were stressed by other personalists, such as dynamic agency, volitional causality, and force or energy. It is therefore somewhat surprising that he still remains too close to Schelling, and to general idealistic immanentism, even to follow Biberg all of the way in his insistence on the original, concrete determinations of the personal absolute as partly transcendent.

Geijer Geijer, developing further the criticism of the understanding of the non-sensual world in generalistic or abstract terms, is praised by Nyblaeus, in line with the overall thematic of his history of Swedish philosophy, for insisting that ‘nonsensual reality, in order to be independent and without need of something else to complete it, must be fully determined or concrete, and that, for this reason, our original perception of the supersensual reality must be a concrete perception’. The demand ‘that the absolute must be conceived as having an ideal or non-sensual, concrete determinateness, in which man in his true being is included as a moment’ is incompatible with the Schellingian position—and this may be regarded as a continuous theme in Schelling’s philosophy, not wholly transcended even with the theistic changes in its later versions—regarding the absolute unity, 126 Atterbom, Studier till Philosophiens Historia och System, 286–7.

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or ‘indiVerence’, of reason and nature, where reason is the general form and nature the individual content. For ‘if the multifarious content of the absolute is sensual and thus bound to time and space, it follows that an individual nonsensual reality cannot be admitted. The non-sensual can then—in accordance with the pantheistic way of thinking—only be the abstract unity in the sensual world.’127 The early Geijer criticizes the ‘abstract idealism’ of Schelling’s early system, and holds that the absolute being cannot be merely the point of indiVerence for nature and intelligence. Such an empty or undetermined unity is, of course, not a ‘true being’ at all. Since Geijer insists that it must instead be ‘fully determined . . . unity of the general . . . and the particular’, it is, according to Nyblaeus, obvious that Geijer ‘has stated the demand of an original concreteness of the absolute and has thus broken with Schelling’s teaching on the relation between unity (the abstract) and multiplicity (the concrete determinateness) . . . according to which the unity is the only original and substantial and all multiplicity is bound to genesis, movement, and process and is thus only secondary’.128 Again, it is not just that the personality of the absolute can only be established by abandoning this position; not even the idealistic worldview as such can be saved without this move. Developing the Jacobian theme, all the idealists of personality insist that mainstream German idealism, by separating a mere abstract, empty principle from the phenomenal manifold, implies a naturalistic and realistic position. By stating the demand of original determinations, Geijer also obviously broke with Hegel’s unsatisfactory solution. But already in the same early period Geijer had also largely transcended Schelling’s system of freedom, at least with regard to the concept of God. Geijer agrees with Schelling that ‘the unity of the general and the particular can only be thought in an organic way, and that God must thus be an organic whole or such a whole where, alongside the whole, the part also has its own independent life and is in this way the whole in the smallest measure’.129 But by determining the concept of organism ‘without including therein the concept of development’, Schelling’s system of freedom too is superseded. Nyblaeus sees here a radical step in the direction of the Bostro¨mian position. With his understanding of organicity, Geijer has ‘pointed to the only way by which philosophy can be developed to rational idealism and—with the transcendence of pantheism—a speculative theism can be established’.130 There is still a strong pantheistic element in this position; but the primordial completeness of God, the whole of the organism which, as God, also transcends the phenomenal reality of man, could now be asserted against the self-realizing, historical God of the Germans. The diVerence is underscored in that the deWnition of the category of personality in this version of

127 Nyblaeus, Den WlosoWska forskningen i Sverige, ii/1. 464, 468. 129 Ibid. 467; Geijer, Samlade skrifter, i/5. 256. 130 Nyblaeus, Den WlosoWska forskningen i Sverige, ii/1. 467.

128 Ibid. 466–7.

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the organic system also precludes the developmental interpretations.131 Although the early Geijer tends to accept one of the Bo¨hmean ideas, that God is a person only in Christ, he insists that God is person ‘of eternity and (although the perfect revelation of this truth takes place at a certain point in time) has not . . . become it’. At the same time, however, Geijer is reluctant to regard the Trinity merely as ‘a threefold revelation of the Godhead’: there are ‘not . . . three persons in one Godhead [gudom], but one single personal God; who, however, is triune in that he has revealed himself in a threefold way [pa˚ treggehanda sa¨tt]’. He Wnds ‘the expression three persons in the Godhead useless, insofar as it is taken in the ordinary human sense of three distinct beings, with distinct will and reason’.132 Geijer’s view of organism in non-naturalistic and non-developmental terms deWnes an important stage in the development of personalism, between German pantheism and biological evolutionism and distinct from both. Organism, Nyblaeus summarizes, ‘is deWned merely as an independent whole of independent moments’. God being an organic whole thus means for Geijer that the plurality in the divine being is co-original with the oneness, and that this plurality should not be conceived merely as diVerent forms or determinations, in which one and the same unity manifests itself, but as an expression of independent beings, by which the unity is determined, or which are included as moments in the organism of the absolute. And if we Wnally take into consideration that Geijer explains that the personality is the highest of all organisms, and that God must thus be a personal being, it must be his meaning that the independent beings, who constitute the moments of the organism of the absolute, are also in themselves personalities.133

It was only in Geijer’s later development, however, that the diVerence that the deeper understanding of personality makes was explained with that rare expressive force which earned him the position as the exemplar and paragon of Swedish philosophy of personality. The divergence in the understanding of the category of personality from that of Hegel is then made crystal clear, as in the following central passage: thought [in Hegel] is not personality, but at most a personiWcation; or, in other words, it is the impersonal ‘absolute’. . . which in its endless self-objectiWcation is at the same time an unceasing self-personiWcation of intelligences, thus not one, that is, one personality, but an all-personality, which in the eternal shifting [va¨xlingen] of kindling and extinguishing [sig ta¨ndande och slocknande] personalities reXects itself. It is, says Hegel, a general person, or the personal as such, a movement of the absolute to reXect itself in perishable intelligences: ‘der Weltgeist.’ This is the true intellectual pantheism. But it remains a strange teaching: whence this whole process of the self-objectiWcation of the absolute and of personiWcations in which it unceasingly seeks itself, when it is still doomed never thereby to Wnd itself, but

131 A criticism of Schelling’s incomplete personal concept of God in the Freiheitsschrift is found in Geijer, Samlade skrifter, i/5. 335–8. 132 Ibid. 284, 319, 356; cf. 325–9. 133 Nyblaeus, Den WlosoWska forskningen i Sverige, ii/1. 467; cf. Geijer: ‘the highest in all organism is precisely personality’: Samlade skrifter, i/5. 356.

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only to produce perishable persons. One ends up in a dilemma: either this absolute is itself a self, and would then not seem to need to seek itself or to become itself, but would rather be in eternal bliss; or, if it is not thus a self, how could it ever be possible for it to manifest itself as such? This latter case, however, is what the Hegelian school assumes: the absolute is not a self, but the perishable persons constitute its self, and with such a manifestation or personiWcation the absolute enjoys itself from eternity to eternity. But in reality, neither does the absolute in this way go anywhere [kommer . . . ha¨rigenom ur sta¨llet], nor can the perishable manifestations be persons; as the absolute is not a person, it cannot manifest as a result what it does not imply as a principle, namely personality, and therefore, with all personiWcations, its end reaches no further than its beginning.134

This, however, does not mean that Geijer rejects the concept of the absolute even as it was developed by pantheist philosophy. Against Jacobi, and in a development of Schelling’s criticism, Geijer explains that philosophy should not, and indeed cannot, exclude pantheism, but has merely to supersede it. It is a matter of ‘conquering pantheism within pantheism itself ’. Later in the same book he continues: ‘every attempt . . . that starts by excluding pantheism, is only self-deception. For pantheism has its home in reason itself.’ And still later: ‘pantheism is a necessary moment in all philosophy.’135 Geijer at this last place embarks upon a disquisition on the diVerent kinds of pantheism, as do Biberg, Grubbe, and Bostro¨m in their corresponding texts—and as indeed Hegel himself does in the Wnal chapter of the Enzyklopa¨die and in his lectures on the philosophy of religion: rather than disowning pantheism, Hegel insists that the accusations that pantheism implies atheism rest on a misunderstanding of the nature of pantheism, that the latter is not a simple identiWcation of everything in the world with God.136 The personalists continue along Hegel’s line, but they go further. Geijer explains that ‘pantheism is the purgatory, through which the person is forced to raise and clarify itself in an ever truer sense’.137 The import of these elucidations is that the concept of the absolute cannot be discarded but has to be redeWned in terms of theism and personalism, that is, as itself ultimately personal and as containing within itself a plurality of persons. Geijer repeatedly insists that the Left or Young Hegelian interpretation was the one that drew out the real implications of Hegel’s system. Hegel’s Rechtsphilosophie lent itself as a support to some conservatives, but the ultimate metaphysical basis of Hegel’s system pointed rather to the radicals’ new immanentism in which the metaphysical and religious understanding and defence of the Wnite person in relation to God as person, and constituted through this relation, was lost. But from the later Geijer’s liberal perspective, both the conservative and the radical Hegel threatened the individual person. And the reason for this, in

134 Geijer, Menniskans historia, 212–13. 135 Ibid. 171–2, 178, 192. 136 Hegel, Werke, x. 378–94; xvi. 92–101; cf. Vorlesungen, i. 266–77, 379–81. 137 Geijer, Samlade skrifter, i/5. 144. Zeltner writes of the similar position of the later Schelling that ‘Der urspru¨ngliche pantheistische Ansatz ist nicht aufgegeben, aber er ist u¨berho¨ht durch die Lehre von der Perso¨nlichkeit Gottes’: Schelling, 250. The Swedish philosophers went further than Schelling too in this same direction.

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both Hegels, was the rejection of the Christian personalism which Geijer rightly saw as in some respects a new, emerging worldview.

Lotze In Jacobi, the later Schelling, and the speculative theists, the personalistic elements in ‘classical’ or ‘traditional’ theism had already been strongly modiWed and developed, as they were conjoined with various distinctly new and modern ideas. Long before Lotze, what Knudson calls ‘typical theistic personalism’, as distinct from classical or traditional theism, had thereby been developed. Lotze, whom Knudson considers the source and origin of ‘typical theistic personalism’, was certainly the main inXuence on its later development, the one who gave the impulse to its Xourishing towards the end of the nineteenth century and during the Wrst decades of the twentieth. Nor is there any doubt that he contributed some new elements of his own. Yet in substance, these contributions must be regarded as further developments of the ‘typical theistic personalism’ already Wrmly entrenched, with almost all of its characteristic features, in the Wrst half of the nineteenth century. Before Lotze, not only his teacher Weisse but many others had been steadily developing in their theistic metaphysics the kind of arguments he uses about the nature of the absolute. Thus they turned primarily against the ‘empty principle’ of modern pantheistic idealism, seeking support in the concrete experience, moral and other, of the individual, for the understanding of the absolute in terms of personality as free subjectivity, and of a personal Godhead with constitutive, concrete determinations. Lotze certainly does make his own distinctive contributions, but it is basically along this same line that he continues. Lotze takes over the familiar criticism of the pantheism of Spinoza and of Schelling’s identity-philosophy, which, when consistently carried out, is ‘wont by preference to weaken . . . the spiritual element [das geistige Element] of the Absolute’ and ‘announce this element as ‘‘a reason that is in itself unconscious’’ ’, that rises to consciousness only in ‘individual peaks [einzelnen Ho¨hepunkten], the individual spiritual beings’. With all the speculative theists, Lotze argues that consciousness is original and can never arise out of the unconscious. Sharpening this argument, in a variation of Jacobi’s position with regard to reason, Lotze holds that spirit can never be impersonal. Experiences or states of consciousness are possible only for a personal spirit, ‘a deWnite, self-identical and separate spiritual subject’. Without ‘the personal unity of the spirit [die perso¨nliche Einheit des Geistes]’, Lotze argues, all ‘consecutiveness’ (Auseinanderfolge) and ‘coherency according to law’ (gesetzlicher Zusammenhang) between the states would be impossible.138 Departing from transcendental idealism and carrying further the late Schellingian project, Lotze holds that personality is as fundamental and original as consciousness. 138 Lotze, Grundzu¨ge der Religionsphilosophie, 27–8, 30–1, 61.

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In line with the emerging personalist tradition, Lotze also characteristically denies that God or the personal absolute is subordinate to any kind of higher impersonal order, whether rational/conceptual, moral, or other. Lotze’s formulations here develop in some respects solutions to classical problems in scholastic philosophy. But as related to the category of the person, they combine these solutions with insights that were present in the earlier speculative theists and which belong distinctly to the new kind of more pronounced personalistic theism. God’s unity cannot be understood in a numerical sense: It does not intend to aYrm that God is in fact only one, while by way of imagination there might possibly be beside him still others of his own kind; it means rather that God is an only [einzig] God; that is to say, there is no superior general concept [u¨bergeordneten AllgemeinbegriV] of God, of such sort that all the predicates which might belong to the actual God as an example of this concept would ensue from it just as much conditioned and prescribed as in the case of every Wnite creature, from whose concept of species ensues the space [Spielraum] within which its properties and their reciprocal combination can vary.139

God must himself be ‘the prime reason [Grund] for the opposition of the possible and the impossible having any signiWcance at all in the world of actual existence’. Lotze seeks to transcend the modern polarization between the radical nominalist and voluntarist position according to which God’s omnipotence is not only absolute but irrational, on the one hand, and Leibniz’s reassertion of the supremacy of the eternal truths on the other. It is not that the distinction between the possible and the impossible does not exist or that it is wholly arbitrary due to the arbitrariness of God’s will. But laws do not exist apart from the things or minds they ‘govern’; there are no self-existent truths apart from God. The result of Lotze’s investigation of the metaphysical attributes or predicates of God is that ‘If all the predicates of ‘‘unconditionedness [Unbedingtheit]’’ are to be valid for the highest being, then one condition of this validity lies precisely in the addition of a last formal predicate—namely, that of personal existence [der perso¨nlichen Existenz]’.140 The eternal truths do not limit God’s unconditionedness. God is ‘that concrete Being [dasjenige konkrete Wesen] to whom ‘‘unconditionedness’’ in respect to his conduct belongs’. To make ‘the empty concept of unconditionedness itself the subject or the principle of the world’ is, ‘fundamentally considered’, just the same mistake that is made when we content ourselves with the abstract expressions, the ‘One’, the ‘Existent’, the ‘Absolute’, etc., and suppose that by them we have expressed the supreme principle, instead of designating by name or representing that which, because it possesses in virtue of its own concrete nature [durch seine konkrete Natur] the alleged predicates, deserves to be acknowledged as the real principle of the world.141

139 Ibid. 31–2.

140 Ibid. 34, 37, 53–4.

141 Ibid. 55–6.

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As the actual form of God’s activity, the eternal truths spring directly from his nature. Omnipotence is ‘an expression for the eYcacy in action [die tha¨tige Wirksamkeit]’ of God’s predicates, ‘and therefore of that concrete nature of God in which all reality is comprehended [der konkreten Natur Gottes, in der alle Wirklichkeit befasst ist]’.142 Modern theists often insist that God, in order to be a person, must be sharply distinguished from the eternal, impersonal truths. The Augustinian and Thomistic position that Lotze develops may have been facilitated by the concept of personality in rather than of God and by the diVerent meaning of the term person in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Yet it also corresponds with the notion of God as the absolute, which is determinative for Lotze’s position. What is important here is that the traditional position assumes a diVerent meaning in the context of Lotze’s personalistic worldview as a whole; the idea of the personality of God, in the new sense including the concrete reality and the concrete subjective experience of the unitary Godhead, determines Lotze’s solution in a way that is distinctly new. Lotze holds that God can be personal in the modern sense while at the same time absolute and one with the eternal truths. In the Middle Ages, the kinds of arguments that Lotze sets forth were directed, on the one hand, against the subordination of God as demiurge to the rational order of the ideas in Plato, and, on the other, against God’s subordination to the obscure, occult fate which also appeared in the Hellenic worldview as a supreme principle. Yet, owing not least to the Trinitarian dogma and to a lingering apophaticism, even in the natural theology of Aquinas, they were not yet connected to a modern concept of personality or to the concept of the personality of God. With the rise of modern pantheism the issues again became urgent, as Jacobi had clearly perceived. The classical Trinitarian personalism, personality in God, was questioned and transformed by what claimed to be truer, more philosophical interpretations. Rational orders in new versions were reasserted above God. Even fatalism returned in the new, irrational varieties of Romanticism. The mystic Ground and nature in Schelling’s theism too seemed to be a limitation of God. The representatives of the new theistic personalism thus had many reasons similar to those of Augustine and Aquinas to restate, and develop further, the classical theistic arguments within the framework of their new philosophy. With regard to the referent of the term or concept of personality, Lotze writes that ‘ ‘‘self-consciousness’’ or ‘‘personality’’ obviously does not consist in subsuming ourselves together with all others under one and the same general concept: but in our distinguishing ourselves from all others within this general concept’. The reference of the concept of the ‘individual’ is, as Hegel was aware, precisely that which can never be captured by the concept in question. Between the ‘I’ and the ‘Thou’ there ‘must already exist a distinction that is absolutely clear, immediately given [unmittelbar gegebener], and in need of no deduction at all [gar keiner Deduktion bedu¨rftiger]’. The distinction is through concrete experience, through feeling.143 This applies also when the concept of personality

142 Lotze, Grundzu¨ge der Religionsphilosophie, 57.

143 Ibid. 40.

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is used to describe the concrete and active divine nature. As will be remembered, Biberg sought a solution of the problem of the abstract or formal rationalism by reinterpreting Plato’s ideas as concrete determinations of the absolute as partly transcendent; Lotze’s solution was to interpret the universality of the Platonic ideas in terms of ‘validity’ and as having exclusive reference to singular phenomena as the only real existents. But the diVerence becomes less obvious when Lotze too, as we have seen, insists on God’s being and nature as no less concrete than the phenomena to which reference is made in Lotze’s general discussion of ideas and values. Impersonalists, and some untypical personalists, argue that an I is inconceivable apart from the distinction from a non-I, from which follows that there can be no I of God, no personal God, without conditioning by a non-I which is not God, and hence no personal God without limitation.144 Schelling’s position, as we have seen, was that the limitation was in God, part of God, as the undeveloped, unconscious nature or the unconditioned Ground. The ‘unlimited’ God in the general sense of what Hegel called the ‘bad’ inWnite, Jacobi and Schelling had both in their own ways denied, albeit on diVerent grounds. As we shall see more clearly in the next chapter, the social, I–Thou argument of personality was developed in the distinct personalist, non-Fichtean and non-Hegelian sense by Geijer, after some beginnings in Jacobi. Yet these thinkers did not explain precisely how this view of personality, applied to God, was congruent with the concept of the absolute. Lotze’s alternative is reached by means of a closer investigation of the concept of personality. He sets out explicitly to reconcile the social dimension of personality with the absoluteness of God. It is meaningless, he argues, to hold that the concepts of the I and the non-I are conceivable exclusively in their relation to each other, or to conceive of the identity or content of the concepts of the I and the non-I as given exhaustively through their relation to each other. Were this the case, both concepts would in fact be without content, and it would be pointless even to ask which was the I and which the non-I. In reality, ‘the being which is destined to take the part of the I when the contrast has arisen, must have the ground of this determination in that nature which it had previous to the contrast, although before the existence of the contrast it is not yet entitled to the predicate which it has to acquire in that contrast’.145 It is thus not the case that ‘personality is to be found exclusively where, in ideation or presentation [vorstellend], self-consciousness sets itself as I in opposition to the non-I’. Not only is the nature suYcient for selfhood which becomes an I with the contrast, but it is ‘suYcient even before the appearance of the contrast’. Immediate experience in feeling contains the ‘primary basis of personality [den Urgrund der Perso¨nlichkeit]’ and the identity of self-existence, a ‘direct sense of self [unmittelbaren Selbstgefu¨hls]’, which is itself the precondition of the awareness of the contrast 144 Id. Mikrokosmus, iii. 565–6. 145 Ibid. 566–7. Lotze debated at some length these issues of the I–Thou relationship with Ulrici; see the review in Kleine Schriften, iii. 1.

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and its unicity. It cannot be produced but merely clariWed, and intensiWed in value, through the subsequent distinctions and contrasts through which selfconsciousness is developed as an objectiWcation of the I: ‘the I is thinkable [denkbar] only in relation to the non-I, but . . . it may be experienced [erlebbar] previous to and out of every such relation, and . . . to this is due the possibility of its subsequently becoming thinkable in that relation.’146 Lotze dismisses the accounts of self-existence as arising through a blind outgoing activity met by the resistance of the non-I as based on ‘ill-chosen analogies’ in which ‘everything is arbitrary’. A more plausible version of the argument holds that the awareness of self-existence, the development of personality, even while self-existence and personality belong by nature to a being independently of external conditions and relations, can be achieved as full selfpossession and ‘truly and completely’ only by means of the ‘cooperation . . . and . . . educative inXuences [die Mitwirkung . . . und . . . erziehenden EinXu¨sse]’ of the latter. This version suggests that ‘such development would be possible even for God only under similar conditions’. This, Lotze thinks, cannot be refuted by the argument that only Wnite beings, but not God, who, ‘as a self-cognizant Idea, eternally unchangeable, always possesses its whole content simultaneously in undivided unity [unabla¨ssig in ungetheilter Einheit zusammenbesitze]’, stand in need of such external impulses.147 This argument would, in point of historical fact, signify a reversal to a pre-Schellingian and pre-Jacobian, rational God of the philosophers, the God of Aristotle, of Spinoza, or of the absolute idealists, that is, the kind of God whose personality in a full modern sense had never been asserted, and had indeed been proclaimed impossible by Jacobi and Schelling. Defending the personality of God in this new sense, Lotze instead acknowledges the force of the external stimuli argument in the modiWed, not ‘productive’ but merely ‘developmental’, form. The reference to God as always possessing his whole content simultaneously ‘grazes the truth’, yet in this form, Lotze argues, bringing in his analysis of God’s non-subordination to a higher order of truths, it ‘would equate the being of God with an eternal truth, albeit a truth not merely valid but also conscious of itself ’. And here the connection between this analysis and Lotze’s personalism is direct and explicit: we have a direct feeling of the wide diVerence there is between this personiWcation of a thought and living personality; not only do we Wnd art tedious when it expects us to admire allegorical statues of Justice or Love, but even speculation rouses our opposition forthwith, when it oVers to us some self-cognizant Principle of Identity [Satz der Identita¨t], or some self-conscious Idea of Good, as completely expressing personality. Either of these are obviously lacking in an essential condition of all true reality: in the capacity of suVering. Every idea by which in reproductive cognition [in unserem nachbildenden Erkennen] we seek to exhaust the nature of some being, is and remains nothing more than the statement of a thought-formula [Denkformel] by which we Wx, as an aid to reXection, the inner connection between the living activities of the real [den lebendigen Tha¨tigkeiten des Realen]; the real thing itself is that which applies this idea to itself, which 146 Lotze, Mikrokosmus, iii. 567–8.

147 Ibid. 568–70.

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feels contradiction to it as disturbance of itself, and wills and attempts its realization as its own endeavour. Only this core which is indissoluble into thoughts, whose meaning and signiWcance we experience [erleben] only in the immediate self-experience of our spiritual existence [in der unmittelbaren Selbsterfahrung unseres geistigen Daseins] and which we always misunderstand when we try to construe it out of something, is the living subject of personality [das lebendige Subject der Perso¨nlichkeit], which latter therefore can never belong to any unchangeably valid truth, but only to that which changes, suVers, and reacts [dem vera¨nderlich Leidenden und Zuru¨ckwirkenden].148

What Lotze expresses here are some of the cardinal themes of the emerging personalist worldview, essential elements of the new concept of the personality of God. Schelling had introduced the changing God. Acknowledging Schelling’s criticism of the impersonal absolute of rational systematic idealism, and recognizing his eVorts to work out, in philosophical terms, a more dynamic, personal view of God, the speculative theists nevertheless sought to transcend Schelling’s own speciWc results. Schelling had introduced the idea only in an imperfect form. A main concern of the speculative theists had been to overcome the elements of relativism in the later Schelling’s view of God, where God’s personality was only a developing part of the whole that was based in the mystical Ungrund and also comprised nature, and not the whole of God or the absolute, or the single ultimate principle itself. They had sought to amend Schelling’s concept by reasserting theistic completeness and redeWning the concept of the absolute as compatible with that of personality. Some of them clearly sensed that the dynamic element of change must not be lost in that amendment; in them we thus Wnd the endeavour to combine primordial completeness with change. This is where we Wnd the continuity between the speculative theists and Lotze, who takes further steps, at least in comparison with his German predecessors, in the same development of the concept of the personal absolute, in the simultaneous retention and revision, in personalistic terms, of the idealist concept of the absolute. In contradistinction to Jacobi and Schelling, Lotze is unwilling to admit limitation at all, and accepts the inWnity of God. Having accepted that personality can only belong to ‘that which changes, suVers, and reacts’, he thus nevertheless maintains that ‘the transference of the conditions of Wnite personality to the personality of the InWnite’—the common criticism of the concept of the personal God—is ‘not justiWed’.149 He dismisses the Left Hegelians’ objections to the personality of the inWnite and to anthropomorphism as ‘superWcial’.150 The inWnite being ‘comprehends in itself all that is Wnite and is the ground of its nature and reality’, and not only its personality, which is part of its independent nature, but also its ‘life’ and its ‘active eYcacy [Wirksamkeit]’ have no need of external stimuli. Having rejected the idea of God as a mere ‘unchangeably valid truth’ or a ‘personiWcation of a thought’, a ‘self-cognizant Principle of Identity’, a 148 Ibid. 570. 149 Renouvier, of course, considered Lotze’s concept of ‘l’inWni actuel’ contradictory; see Wentscher, Hermann Lotze, 342–3. 150 Lotze, Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie seit Kant, 73.

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‘self-conscious idea of Good’, Lotze holds that the inWnite being, ‘not bound by any obligation to agree in any way with that which is not itself ’, must ‘with perfect self-suYciency possess in its own nature the causes of every step forward in the development of its life [jeden Entwickelungsschritt seines Lebens]’.151 Lifedevelopment is thus a constitutive element of personality, but ‘With the removal of [the] limits of Wnitude no producing condition of personality is removed which is not compensated for by the self-suYciency of the InWnite, but that which is only approximately possible [anna¨hernd mo¨glich] for the Wnite mind, the conditioning of its life by itself, takes place without limit in God, and no contrast of an external world is necessary for him.’152 Schelling, of course, denied that the ‘contrast’ was with an ‘external world’. But Lotze’s denial of Wnitude as such, and his different view of a life-development in God, signify speculative theism’s more deWnite attainment of a dynamized version of primordial transcendent completeness. Because of its Wnitude and its position as a part of the whole, the Wnite being requires external impulses for its life-development, but there can be nothing in the inWnite being, the whole or absolute understood as personal in the new sense, that corresponds to that requirement. The impulses that the inner life of the Wnite being receives come from an external world which is part of a whole that, even as such, has always been in movement in the way which makes possible such stimuli. Here Lotze thinks that a mere ‘brief consideration’ will dispose of all static views of the absolute and suYces to establish the dynamism of the whole that is a primary requirement for the concept of the personal absolute, or what Lotze calls ‘the personal existence of the inWnite’.153 Whatever our theory of the cosmos may be, Lotze writes, it ‘must somehow and somewhere recognize the actual movement itself as an originally given reality [die geschehende Bewegung selbst als urspru¨nglich gegebene Wirklichkeit], and can never succeed in producing it from stillness’. Characterizing ‘the inner life of the personal God, the current of his thoughts, his feelings, and his will, as everlasting and without beginning, as having never known rest, and having never been roused to movement from some state of quiescence’, places no greater demands on the imagination than materialism or pantheism, which can never explain the ‘given cosmic course’ without the assumption of either ‘an eternal causeless movement of the world-substance’, or of ‘deWnite initial movements [Anfangsbewegungen] of the countless world-elements, movements which have to be simply recognized and accepted [schlechthin anzuerkennender]’. It will be necessary for all parties Wnally to accept that ‘the splitting up of reality into a quiescent being and a movement which subsequently takes hold of it is one of those Wctions which . . . betray their total inadmissibility as soon as we attempt to rise above the reciprocal connection of cosmic particulars to the Wrst beginnings [den ersten Anfa¨ngen] of the whole’.154 The personal absolute is thus not just 151 Lotze, Mikrokosmus, iii. 571–2. 152 Ibid. 572. By his retention of the diVerence of analogy Lotze counteracts the impression of the broadly patripassian implications of the application to God of his deWnition of personality. 153 Ibid. 572–3. 154 Ibid.

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concrete, but dynamic in its own movement and in its causality—only such a further personalized absolute could, in Lotze’s view, account for the changing manifold of our experientially given world. In a historically interesting passage, Lotze says that ‘The course of development of philosophic thought has put us in the position of being obliged to show that the conditions of personality which we Wnd in the Wnite, are not lacking to the inWnite’. Lotze does not, however, explicitly discuss the newness of the kind of concept of the personal inWnite to the development of which he is contributing. His interests are preponderantly philosophical, not theological. Yet, as in the case of some personalist theologians who seem themselves unaware that the concept of the personal God they defended was in fact a new one, it is of course possible that a philosopher like Lotze too may still to some extent think that it is mainly a question of defending a more traditional theistic view of God, which had perchance in the past been too vague, against the challenges of the impersonalistic pantheism of absolute idealism as well as the latter’s transformation into impersonalistic naturalism. To the extent that the new pantheism drastically reinterpreted the meaning of the old notion of personality in God, the traditional view was of course defended by the new personalists. But already the focus on the conditions of personality in Wnite beings implies a distinctly modern, subject- and individual-oriented view of personality, and the novelty of the whole enterprise becomes obvious when Lotze immediately proceeds to complain that this task allotted to him (and other speculative theists) by history strangely reverses ‘the natural concatenation of the matter’. For Lotze takes the radical step of denying, without relinquishing the modern view of personality, that what is perceived as ‘the conditions of personality . . . which we Wnd in the Wnite’ are really such conditions: ‘the characteristics peculiar to the Wnite are not producing conditions of self-existence [Fu¨rsichseins], but obstacles to its unconditioned development, although we are accustomed, unjustiWably, to deduce from these characteristics its capacity of personal existence [seine Befa¨higung zu perso¨nlichem Dasein].’155 The Wnite being as a constituent part of the whole, as subject to an order of reality and to laws not established by itself, and dependent on external stimuli for the awakening of its personal life and development, is never fully transparent to itself, can never be brought to full reXective self-conscious knowledge, and thus seems to be dependent upon a non-I. In a signiWcant move, Lotze, having adopted the modern notion of personality as subjective, individual self-determination, which was a product of the development of humanism and part of a description of human personality, even denies that it is properly or fully applicable to man. Since ‘Selfhood, the essence of all personality [Selbstheit, das Wesen aller Perso¨nlichkeit]’, is a self-existence given in immediate experience and is thus not dependent on the inXuence of a non-ego, and since not even self-consciousness as reXective knowledge is in principle or per deWnition dependent on relation to a distinct, alien, ‘substantially opposed [substantiell . . . gegenu¨berstehend]’ non-I, personality is for Lotze

155 Ibid. 572–4.

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not the product of man’s condition of Wnitude. And the reason why the Wnite being requires external inXuences from the whole for the development of its personal consciousness is not that it needs ‘the contrast with something alien [einem Fremden] in order to have self-existence’, but simply that ‘in this respect, as in every other, it does not contain in itself the conditions of its existence’, that is, the reason is to be found in ‘the nature of the Wnite mind as such’.156 The analysis of the implications of Wnitude demonstrates for Lotze ‘how far personality is from being developed in us to the extent which its notion admits and requires’. Lotze holds instead that the concept of personality which he accepts is really applicable only to God, who had never been described by orthodox theology as personal in this sense. Personality ‘can be perfect only in the inWnite being which, in surveying all its states or actions, never Wnds any content of that which it suVers or any law of its working, the meaning and origin of which are not transparently plain to it, and capable of being explained by reference to its own nature’. But this surveying and Wnding is part of a dynamic movement of personal life. Possessing in itself the conditions of its existence, and without the limitations of Wnite beings, the self-existence of the inWnite being, including its life-development, ‘maintains itself within itself in eternal, beginningless inner movement’.157 The ‘natural concatenation of the matter’, which history had in his view reversed, is, for Lotze, to show that ‘of the full personality which is possible only for the inWnite a feeble reXection [ein schwacher Abglanz] is given also to the Wnite’: ‘In point of fact we have little ground for speaking of the personality of Wnite beings; it is an ideal, which, like all that is ideal, belongs unconditionally only to the inWnite, but like all that is good appertains to us only conditionally and hence imperfectly.’158 Lotze here goes so far that he in fact almost undermines the possibility of the characteristic I–Thou relationship between man, or the Wnite being, and God, or the personal absolute, that, as we will see in the next chapter, was being developed in the new personalism. And it is doubtful whether, even if Lotze has seen the natural concatenation of the matter, this could have been seen without a rather distinct modern Western historical concatenation of intellectual, moral, and cultural developments. But by arguing that ‘Perfect personality is in God only’, that ‘to all Wnite minds there is allotted but a pale copy [eine schwache Nachahmung] thereof ’, and that ‘the Wniteness of the Wnite is not a producing condition of this personality, but a limiting hindrance of its development’,159 Lotze certainly contributed decisively to the development and the establishment of the new concept of the inWnite being as personal in the modern sense, to the concept of the personal absolute.

156 Lotze, Mikrokosmus, iii. 574–6. Lotze writes that ‘we must guard ourselves against seeking in the alien nature of the external world, in the fact that it is non-I, the source of the strength with which it calls out the development of the I’: ibid. 571. 157 Ibid. 574, 576. 158 Ibid. 573, 575. 159 Ibid. 576.

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To establish this concept had been the main thrust of the work of the speculative theists, and in the part of Lotze’s philosophy that is relevant in connection with personalism, we Wnd quite as much a summary and conclusion of this work as a new departure. In Germany historians of philosophy are much more respectful towards Lotze than towards the earlier speculative theists, but this is due to other aspects of his philosophy; except for Ritschl and other theologians of his school, the side of his work on which I am focusing soon tended to be dismissed along with the work of those predecessors.160 It was taken much more seriously in Britain and America. In these countries it was precisely Lotze’s speciWcally theistic-personalistic formulations that were seized upon by Pringle-Pattison, Bowne, and all of the others among the most important personalists.

B R I T I S H P E R S O NA L I D E A L I S M Carrying on the project of Lotze and speculative theism, Pringle-Pattison and the other personalists in his line in Britain, instead of rejecting the concept of the absolute, sought to save it from impersonalistic pantheism. But so fully had the concept of the personal absolute already been developed at this time, and so firmly had it been established, that it was sometimes thought that the systems of impersonalistic pantheism in reality even threatened the idea of absoluteness itself. Thoroughly immersed in the mainstream German idealist, Spinozistic, Bo¨hmean, Renaissance, and Neo-Platonic world of esoteric ideas, and familiar with the debates about the hen kai pan and Jacobi’s and the later Schelling’s works, Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria (1817), had partly defended Spinoza against Jacobi: Spinozism was not implicitly atheism.161 But throughout, Coleridge is unwilling to relinquish the idea of the personality of God, and his wrestling with pantheism led him steadily on to an ever clearer defence of theism, and, it would seem, ever closer to Jacobi. Gradually, he came to see the materialistic implications of the combination of an abstract spiritual principle and nature in Schelling’s transcendental idealism.162 Coleridge could not accept an absolute prior to self-consciousness, a self-less identity or indiVerence, which left no place for the personal God of his faith, ‘a Spirit to whom self-consciousness is essential, a Being ‘‘in whom supreme reason and a most holy will are one with an inWnite power’’ ’.163 His late criticism of Spinoza, his reconsideration of ‘anthropomorphitism’, his coining of the term ‘persone¨ity’ in order to facilitate the conceiving of personality and inWnity and absoluteness together in God (while refusing to 160 See e.g. Bamberger, Untersuchungen zur Entstehung des Wertproblems in der Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts. i. Lotze, 35 n. 1. 161 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, i. 245, n. to p. 99; ii. 112–13. 162 Biographia Literaria, i. p. lxxii (introduction by Shawcross). 163 Ibid. pp. lxix–lxx (introduction by Shawcross), cited from Confession of Faith.

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accept any abstract or esoteric impersonal unity beyond the Trinity from which it has evolved), and thus to emphasize the diVerence between human and divine personality, all bespeak his personalistic leanings.164 Aids to ReXection (1825) in fact presents paradigmatic modern personalist reasoning, pointing towards the concept of the personal absolute. The criticism of pantheism and Bo¨hme’s nature-God is further developed, and he now speaks of ‘a God inWnite, yet personal!’, of personal relations with God, of the errors of a simple identiWcation of God with everything and the necessity of a qualiWed understanding of divine omnipresence, of will as the ground of all being, of ‘the forced amalgamation of the Patriarchal tradition with the incongruous Scheme of Pantheism’, and of the ‘Mechanico-corpuscular Philosophy’ with its twins, ‘Materialism . . . and Idealism, rightlier named Subjective Idolism’.165 He complains about an ‘increasing unwillingness to contemplate the Supreme Being in his personal Attributes: and thence a Distaste to all the peculiar Doctrines of the Christian Faith, the Trinity, the Incarnation . . . Redemption . . . estranged from the heavenly Father, the Living God, as even to shrink from the personal pronouns as applied to the Deity’. With a Deity which is ‘not only . . . a necessary but . . . a necessitated Being . . . Justice . . . [is] but a scheme of General Laws . . . Holiness . . . the divine Hatred of Sin . . . Sin itself [are] words without meaning’.166 But not least in the case of a thinker like Coleridge, the problems of describing this movement as a mere return to orthodox theism are obvious. I believe it should rather be described as a move towards modern personalism in at least one of its aspects. Mansel had discussed at length the issues of the relation between inWnity and personality in God, and of the link between our consciousness of our own personality and the personality of God. And so had Martineau.167 The concept of the personal absolute and the personalistic criticism of pantheism are the basis of his Study of Spinoza, and in A Study of Religion God’s personality is characteristically aYrmed as compatible with inWnitude; God’s personality is said to be contradicted only by illusory notions of the inWnite, and personality is defended as the highest fact in the cosmos.168

Pringle-Pattison If the new philosophy of the absolute is to be coherent and meaningful, PringlePattison argued, it is necessary that the ‘divine, creative Self ’, the ‘Absolute Ego’, should really ‘be an Ego’, distinct from ‘the individuals whom it constitutes, and 164 Coleridge’s Writings, iv, ‘On Religion and Psychology’, 83–4. 165 Ibid. 210–11, 255, 294, 299–300, 305. Coleridge’s development can be closely followed in his Notebooks. 166 Ibid. 308–9. 167 Mansel, The Limits of Religious Thought, passim; Martineau, A Study of Religion, ii. 192, 361–5. As the leading British Unitarian thinker of the period, Martineau was of course Wrmly committed to the formula ‘One God in One Person’. 168 Martineau, A Study of Religion, ii. 192, 361–5.

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in whom it creatively works’; in order to ‘justify . . . the appellation of spiritual principle, it must exist for itself, with a self-consciousness of its own’.169 Hegel criticized J. G. Fichte for considering what he called ‘the Idea of the Ego’, roughly equivalent to Hegel’s own idea of ‘perfected knowledge’ or ‘an eternally complete self-consciousness’, as merely ‘an ideal incapable of realisation’. In Fichte, this position was the result of his incomplete notion of the absolute, his locating of self-consciousness in the morally striving Wnite selves alone. PringlePattison therefore holds that ‘In one sense Hegel is plainly right, for it is an impossible speculative position to found upon an ideal which is nowhere real’. But, he continues, cutting to the heart of Hegel’s ambiguities, if Fichte merely meant to say that this speculative ideal is not, and never will be, realised in the progress of human experience, then Hegel is as plainly in the wrong if he intended to call this position in question. It may be granted to Hegel . . . that the idea must be realised in the divine self-consciousness—that, so far, it is not a mere Ought-to-be. But to us such realisation remains a belief or faith, not something which is attained in actual knowledge, even in the reXective knowledge of the absolute philosopher. It is one thing to assert the metaphysical necessity of an Absolute Self-consciousness, another to assert the present realisation of absolute knowledge in a philosophical system. [But] it is a characteristic of the Hegelian system to bind up these two essentially diVerent positions in such a way that it becomes impossible to say which is intended.170

Insisting on the distinction between the two positions, Pringle-Pattison was in line with the earlier development of personalism. At the same time there entered along with his distinct personalistic theism not only the elements of pantheism which were characteristic of speculative theism, but stronger tendencies to immanentism, which were rather in line with the secular humanist development of German and British absolute idealism. Other considerations, primarily those of biological and evolutionary thought, conWrmed this trend. Since the immanentistic tendency has grown stronger in Pringle-Pattison than in the earlier speculative theists and especially the idealists of personality, it is not obvious that his version of British personal idealism represents a further step towards a fully developed personalism in comparison with them, but as we have already seen, so broad and nuanced is the spectrum of idealism, from impersonalism to personalism, that this fact in itself does not support the interpretation that Pringle-Pattison’s philosophy was just a marginally divergent version of that of British absolute idealism or that he gradually moved closer to the latter. It only conWrms that personalism was developed more fully earlier in the nineteenth century. Pringle-Pattison still clearly belongs in the line of that earlier development. The insistence on a partial transcendence had always been characteristic of personalism, but this transcendence is now of a new kind. This can be seen not least in Pringle-Pattison’s understanding of the realm from which the experience is drawn by which we attain knowledge of the content of the personal absolute. 169 Pringle-Pattison, Hegelianism and Personality, 65–6.

170 Ibid. 105–6.

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He agrees with earlier personalists in holding that, ‘apart from our actual experience, God or the Absolute is a subject waiting for predicates, an empty form waiting to be Wlled’. And as we have seen, Pringle-Pattison emphasizes the role of the ideals directly present in the mind. But as for the knowledge of the predicates of God or the Absolute, the focus in Pringle-Pattison is not as strongly as in Jacobi and some of the speculative theists on a rational exposition of the content of higher reason, to which the nature of transcendent divine being is somehow present. It is quite as much or more on God’s outer manifestation in the created universe, in nature and ordinary human experience. How great this diVerence should actually be considered to be depends on the scope PringlePattison can be said to allow for God’s manifestation, since the earlier personalists did describe precisely the content of higher reason with this term, or as a ‘revelation’. Yet Pringle-Pattison sometimes explicitly refers to outer manifestation, and he dismisses philosophers who ‘clamour for a knowledge of God, not as He reveals himself in nature and in human experience, but as something to be known, it would seem, directly, apart from his manifestation altogether . . . when this craving for the impossible is not satisWed, they either deny his existence or proclaim his nature to be unknowable’.171 But apart from the fact that the earlier personalists accepted the content of higher reason as an inner manifestation, they also of course did not deny God’s revelation through other manifestations—quite the opposite: these too, as we have seen, pointed towards the concrete absolute. When Pringle-Pattison asserts that the nature of ‘ultimate Reality’ may be ‘truly’ read in its manifestation, albeit not exhaustively, since all revelation is ‘proportionate to the capacity of the receiving mind’, the polemic is against Herbert Spencer’s ‘sheer disjunction between appearance and reality’, a disjunction which, mutatis mutandis, would be central also to Bradley. Reintroducing the erroneous distinction between substance and accidents, a ‘bare point of existence to which . . . qualities are somehow attached’, it ‘leaves the one member a blank abstraction’, to which, ‘as Spencer truly says, ‘‘no attributes can be ascribed’’ ’, since the manifestation reveals nothing of what is manifested. SigniWcantly, however, Pringle-Pattison did not think that Bradley meant to deny the reality of appearances. In them, ‘we already grasp the nature of reality’ and ‘we can attain to it in no other way’. Pringle-Pattison also more generally emphasizes the importance of ‘the content of the universe’, ‘inWnite values open to appropriation and enjoyment’ by the Wnite beings, rather than the Wnite being as a bare point of existence in itself.172 This is in some respects a Hegelian theme which is not present to the same extent in an earlier, ‘Platonic’ individualist like Biberg. For Pringle-Pattison, this emphasis and the doctrine of the reality of appearances are part of his defence of the immanence of God, and this way of defending the concrete determinations of the absolute would clearly end in a kind of personalistic pantheism, had it not been counterbalanced by Pringle-Pattison’s own version of the quintessential personalistic criticism of wholesale pantheism: 171 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 158.

172 Ibid. 172, 175, 204, 217.

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If every phenomenon is, so to say, as good as another, there can be no talk of a principle of the whole and no sense in seeking to determine its nature. If every event, every feature of the world, in its isolation as a particular fact just as it occurs, is referred directly to the operation of the supreme principle, that principle becomes simply the pell-mell of empirical occurrence over again. The doctrine of immanence becomes on these terms a perfectly empty aYrmation; for the operative principle supposed to be revealed is simply the characterless unity of ‘Being’, in which the sum-total of phenomena is indiscriminately housed. The unity reached is the unity of a mere collection, and everything remains just as it was before. Such a pantheism is indistinguishable from the barest Naturalism. ‘All in All,’ said Fichte in another reference, ‘and for that very reason nothing at all.’173

This kind of pantheism tends to ‘press the idea of the immanence of the divine in all phenomena equally, and thereby to use the Absolute as an instrument for the obliteration of all distinctions of rank and value’. Sometimes this ‘levelling down of Wnite distinctions’ is ‘the counterpart of an insistence on the incomparable and unapproachable greatness of the divine’—which in fact turns out to be similar to radical apophaticism: The tendency of mystical thought to exalt the divine above all predicates, making it literally the unnameable, the ineVable, the unknowable, leads in a similar direction; for that which is characterless cannot be said to reveal itself more intimately in one aspect of experience than another; and so, as Bradley says, this empty transcendence and this shallow pantheism are seen to be opposite sides of the same mistake. But the ‘principle of unity’ which philosophers seek is not the unity of a mere collection or of a bare abstraction.174

Pringle-Pattison’s view of the concrete determinations of the absolute had a more immanentist slant than Biberg’s, yet the manifested determinations were real appearances of the absolute. He sets against apophatic pantheism not the concrete determinations of the absolute as apprehended by some higher reason or individualized organ of mind, but the unity of the systematic structure of the whole of Wnite experience of appearances, which provides the criterion of value and thus saves ‘discrimination, perspective, something like a hierarchy of means and end’.175 The solution seems not very diVerent from Bradley’s or even Spinoza’s. Yet Pringle-Pattison brings in again his theory of the ideal, and, in the light of his criticism of what he sees as Bradley’s—and Spinoza’s—illusory philosophizing from the perspective of the absolute rather than the human experience, he relates it speciWcally to the Wnite individual. What Pringle-Pattison calls the ‘lower Pantheism’, degenerating ‘into an acceptance and justiWcation of the actual, just as we Wnd it’, Pope’s shallow ‘whatever is, is right’, ‘ascribing everything that happens to the direct or immediate agency of God’, is, he claims, ‘a virtual denial of the existence of reXective selfconscious, spiritual centres, such as we know them in our own experience’. It reduces us to ‘divine automata, with at most a passive sentience of what goes on within us’, and God to ‘a collective name for a world of things which simply exist’. Apart from the capacity of self-reference of action ‘there can be no ideals, but only 173 Ibid. 219.

174 Ibid. 220.

175 Ibid.

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bare facts’; the experience of the ideal also means the reality of desire for what is better than the actual. This in turn reveals the concept of the ideal self, which, ‘as a permanent and authoritative object of desire, it is the function of experience in the individual and in the race to develop and organize’. Pringle-Pattison thus restates in his own terms the central analogical theme of personalism: if the lower Pantheism is justly criticized as being indistinguishable from Atheism, the reason is that there can be no true doctrine of God which is not based on a true doctrine of man. Now the essence of human nature is just . . . the contrast between the actual present and the unrealized future, passing into the deeper contrast between the ‘is’ and the ‘oughtto-be’, and the duality of what is commonly called the lower and the higher self, with the discord and the struggle thence resulting.176

Still, Pringle-Pattison would hardly reject the designation of his own position as ‘higher Pantheism’. For the presence of the ideal is also the presence of the perfection of God in man, the experienced fact of man in God and God in man. This largely Hegelian reciprocal mediation, with its strong immanentism,177 is what more orthodox theistic critics focused on. Rejecting a ‘purely transcendent theory’, Pringle-Pattison holds that ‘the transcendence which must be retained, and which is intelligible, refers to a distinction of value or of quality, not to the ontological separateness of one being from another. It refers . . . to the inWnite greatness and richness of the containing Life, as compared with anything as yet appropriated by the Wnite creature.’178 Thus far, we have seen how Pringle-Pattison reaches what could be termed the concrete absolute. Moving on from here, however, following the central personalist analogism which bases the true doctrine of God on a true doctrine of man, he also dwells with focused attention on the question of the personality of this absolute. Turning to a criticism of the view of the Trinity of both Hegel and early apophaticists, he approaches the central question of personality in God versus personality of God. In Hegel he sees again in this connection the error of ‘philosophical reXection on the implications of thought . . . hypostatized . . . into an actual process generative of reality’ which the personalists had focused on from the outset. If we recognize that the Father and the Son are not ‘two separate individuals, two Gods, then the origination of the one by the other, even when stated to be an eternal act, is plainly a Wgure of speech’. It is meaningless to hold that the Father ‘knows himself in the Son’, that ‘the Son is the object without which a divine self-consciousness were impossible’, or that ‘God utters himself, Wrst becomes articulate, in the Son, who is called on that account, the Word’. For there is no existence of God at all without self-consciousness, without such self-articulation. The Father consequently, if conceived even ideally as prior, is simply the abstraction

176 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 253–4. 177 ‘God has no meaning to us out of relation to our own lives or to spirits resembling ourselves in their Wnite grasp and inWnite reach; and, in the nature of the case, we have absolutely no grounds for positing his existence out of that reference.’ Ibid. 254. 178 Ibid. 255.

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of the empty subject; and, as handled in the metaphysical creeds, the idea may be said to represent the inveterate tendency of our thought to try to get beyond or behind the ultimate, to project a more abstract God behind the living God, as somehow bringing the latter into being.179

Pringle-Pattison goes on to criticize Philo, Scotus Eriugena, Plotinus, Proclus, and Eckhart, in whom ‘thought, grasping at the transcendent, and seeking something more real than reality, overleaps itself and falls into the abyss of absolute nothingness’.180 This, however, is not a defence of the self-consciousness and self-articulation of a strictly transcendent Father, but of God as united to the universe of his manifestation, including the Wnite persons, God being but an abstraction if separated from them. Pringle-Pattison thus again moves closer to Hegel. But while Hegelianism and personalism share some elements which distinguish both of them from traditional theism, personalism, in reconsidering the relation between transcendence and immanence, and the inWnite and the Wnite, makes a diVerent use of them and combines them with other elements of its own. It is by such developments that it manages to reject both the impersonalism of the apophaticism lurking behind the ‘personality in God’ formula and that of the new Hegelian cataphaticism. God as ‘an experience in which the universe is felt and apprehended as an ultimately harmonious whole’, and the experiences of Wnite persons, are distinct yet in necessary relation. God cannot be thought as an absolute ‘in the old sense’ of self-suYcient independence. Not following Coleridge in the acceptance of the orthodox Christian view of the possibility of God without the world, Pringle-Pattison accepts his own teacher Fraser’s position that such a view is merely Christianity as popularly understood. Here, Pringle-Pattison and personalists in general to some extent shared Hegel’s and pantheism’s view. But the decisive diVerence, that cannot be too strongly emphasized, is that the motivation was for them wholly diVerent. For them, in Fraser’s words, ‘the absolute correlation of God and the world’ follows precisely from ‘the moral nature or personality of God’. God or the divine life is, Pringle-Pattison writes, essentially and eternally a ‘process of self-communication’, of ‘Goodness or selfrevealing Love’,181 in the literal sense that follows from the focus on the reciprocity of personal centres. In Pringle-Pattison’s attempt to work out his idea of the personal God, without relinquishing the notion of the absolute, we Wnd the blend of speculative Greek and biblical motifs in a modern intellectual and moral setting that was the hallmark of personalistic idealism throughout the nineteenth century. But as The Idea of God was a late work, we Wnd also introduced into his version of this synthesis distinctive new elements. Some of these were borrowed from Bergson. Having established the primacy of personal experience and the partial analogy

179 Ibid. 313.

180 Ibid. 314.

181 Ibid. 314–15.

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between man and God in this respect,182 Pringle-Pattison used Bergson’s analysis of time to move away from the view of eternity both as everlastingness, the ‘bad’ inWnite, and as timelessness, the Platonic conception of metaphysical reality in terms of the timeless validity of truths and Aristotle’s understanding of the selfthinking thought ‘on the analogy of a timeless system of abstract conceptions’ against which, as we have seen, personalism had already long reacted.183 Bergson serves here merely to develop Pringle-Pattison’s own version of the element of time in the existence of God, a version which diVered from the temporalism later adopted by Brightman and the process theologians and remained closer to the notion of the ‘specious present’ developed by Royce and others in the United States. Neither Pringle-Pattison nor the Americans were, however, the Wrst to articulate this kind of modiWcation of the timelessness which was also naturally accepted by some modern absolute idealists. As we have seen, the theme appeared in Schelling, and was taken up in a modiWed form by the speculative theists. Timelessness as the validity of abstract concepts or truths, in terms of which God’s eternity is conceived by some absolutists and most classical, ‘prepersonalistic’ theologians, is, according to Pringle-Pattison, ‘not calculated to throw light on what may be meant by eternity, as predicated of any concrete experience’. This view, in the form of the ‘logical unity of the subject involved in every judgement’ or the ‘ideal focus of a system of intelligible relations’, also in Pringle-Pattison’s view determines Green’s concept of the absolute consciousness, and makes it impossible to accept as ‘an eternal or divine Self operative in our individual experience’.184 Yet against pure temporalism, Pringle-Pattison sought to retain timelessness in another sense. First of all, he denies the evolving God that, in point of historical fact, had been presented in the theosophic speculation of Schelling in line with the Hermetic tradition as carried on by Bo¨hme and Baader, and that was later accepted in a modiWed form by some Wnitist personalists, by William James’s pluralism, and by the process theologians. Even if the existence of ‘a universe in the sense of a single systematic whole’ is denied, the given existent facticity of the universe is undeniable, and its qualities and combinations, whatever they may be, ‘must be due to its own inherent constitution’, and in this sense, ‘the All . . . is not susceptible of growth, addition, or improvement’. The concept of the absolute is thus insisted on; but within it, Pringle-Pattison seeks to safeguard the dynamic realities of personal life. To these belong not only relations changing in time, but, as in all of the more Christian and theistic versions of personalism, some idea of the createdness of the Wnite persons by the inWnite person, and, more generally, 182 ‘The characteristics of the ethical life must be taken . . . as contributing to determine the nature of the system in which we live . . . the ethical predicates must carry us nearer to a true deWnition of the ultimate Life in which we live . . . Whatever else [the doctrine of the Incarnation] may mean, it means at least this—that in the conditions of the highest human life we have access, as nowhere else, to the inmost nature of the divine.’ Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 156–7. 183 Ibid. 346. 184 Ibid. 347. A. E. Taylor held that Green’s absolute was ‘an only half-baptized Aristotelian God’; cited in Sell, Philosophical Idealism and Christians Belief, 112.

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of the dynamic element of creation and creativity as constitutive of personal existence and relation. Even with a God who is ‘organic to the world’, creation exists as ‘an eternal act or process’, ‘a self-revelation of the divine in and to Wnite spirits’, since God is ‘a self-communicating Life’.185 We will return to this aspect of Pringle-Pattison’s philosophy in the next chapter; here, it is important to see how these considerations were decisive for the perceived necessity of working out an idea of a personal absolute. Accepting with James Ward that ‘God is God only as being creative’, PringlePattison also rejects with him the idea of a ‘self-limitation’ of God or the absolute, holding instead that creation, and thus a certain dualism, is permanent. Against a personalist like Rashdall, he argues that in reality this does not imply any kind of limitation. For there has never been any other, presumedly ‘unlimited’, prior state without creation, and, as for Lotze, the necessity of God’s own nature is not a limiting, extra-personal necessity or fate: ‘Why should the creation of Wnite spirits be treated like a pegging out of claims in a hinterland, by each of which the rights and privileges of the original proprietor are proportionately diminished? Surely the older theologians were right in regarding the existence of spirits not as an impoverishment but as an enrichment of the divine life. The divine life is, in short, the concrete fact of this inter-communion.’186 In this sense, Pringle-Pattison accepts, with Ward, Hegel’s view that without the world, God is not God,187 and the view that the ‘single eternal Fact’ is, in Ward’s own formulation, the absolute as ‘God-and-the-world’. Both the cause–eVect relation between God and the created beings which was fundamental to Jacobi—and upheld by Rashdall— and the logical implicationism of pantheism against which it was deployed, are replaced by a new absolute creationism.188 Rashdall’s concept of the absolute as ‘God and the spirits’, however, was seen by Pringle-Pattison as implying ‘co-existence on terms of mutual exclusion’, as placing ‘God and men in the same numerical series’, as if ‘we and God together, in a species of jointownership, constituted the sum-total of existence’; God becomes ‘one of the eaches’.189 On this view, God is not the absolute; the hen kai pan is set above the personality of God. Yet there is no formal diVerence between the relationship of the Wnite being to God and the relationship between the Wnite beings themselves. This conclusion would not seem to be very far from the formulations of the reciprocity of the I–Thou relationship as stated by Jacobi and Geijer, but it was not and could scarcely have been drawn by them in general metaphysical terms. To some extent 185 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 381, 432–3. 186 Ibid. 387–8 and n. 4. 187 Cf. Hegel, Werke, xvi. 192. 188 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 387 n. 4, 388. With Ward, Pringle-Pattison signiWcantly rejects as incompatible with the view of God as constitutively and eternally creative both the more ‘orthodox’ view of creation understood in terms of ‘transient causation’, and the more ‘pantheist’ one of ‘immanent causation’ in the form of a change in God: ibid. 387–8 n. 4. 189 Ibid. 387–9. Pringle-Pattison points out that Rashdall’s concept does not, as he thinks it does (Pringle-Pattison cites his formulation that ‘minds are not Chinese boxes that can be put ‘‘inside’’ one another’), escape spatial metaphors: ibid. 389.

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Pringle-Pattison here echoes Hegel’s criticism of atomism. But, more importantly, he signiWcantly argues at least to some extent with Lotze against the substantial equivalence of such relations: if the assertion of the personality of God is to lead us to the result that ‘all the conclusions which are applicable to each particular self in his relation to another seem to be equally applicable to the relations between God and any other spirit’, we must reply that it is ultimately unmeaning to treat the universal as one of the particulars. To speak of God in this sense as ‘one of the selves’ is to justify all the criticisms which treat personality as a limitation inapplicable to the sustaining and containing Life of all the worlds.190

Pringle-Pattison also alleges that Rashdall’s separation carries with it a reversal to abstract deistic transcendence in the view of God. Here the criticism is again distinctly Hegelian. Rashdall is reluctant to accept the concept of the absolute or to identify it with God. For James, its rejection, or the distinction between it and God, is a central theme: God for James is Wnite, a primus inter pares, and the world is ‘unWnished’.191 Against such thinkers, Pringle-Pattison defends the concept of the absolute as the one that best describes ‘the unity and system of the whole’, the ‘self-contained and internally organized whole, beyond which there is nothing’, distinct from ‘the ‘‘bad’’ inWnite, the endless progress’, and the view of creation and the relation between God and the world that he seeks to show follows from it.192 Like the speculative theists, for whom it was essential to insist on the concrete determinations of the absolute against the empty principle of pantheism, PringlePattison points in this connection—with his more immanentist focus—to the distinction between form and content. Rather than defending a ‘realism’, in the modern sense of the word, which would supply the concrete reality missing, on his in some respects problematic interpretation, in mainstream post-Kantian idealism, Pringle-Pattison repeats the characteristic view of personalism ever since Jacobi, that it is rather this post-Kantian idealism that turns into some such realism by its separation of an abstract absolute principle and the empirical manifold. The kind of experiential realism that—with the partial diVerence mentioned above concerning the nature of the ‘manifestation’ of God—he and the earlier personalists advocate is for them the only way to safeguard an idealistic worldview. But, mutatis mutandis, Rashdall’s personalism too is characterized by an illegitimate abstraction. For his position is a result of ‘the substantiation of the form of consciousness apart from its content or constituent nature’. It was not only the substantiation of this form as ‘the universal Self, as an identical Subject which thinks in all thinkers’, as performed by the post-Kantian idealists, that was problematic, ‘fatal . . . to the real selfhood either of God or man’, as he had shown in Hegelianism and Personality. The substantiation as such was problematic. It also takes place

190 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 389. 191 Ibid. 393–4. James’s Wnitism and pluralism were decisively inXuenced by Renouvier’s. 192 Ibid. 432.

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if we cut loose the individual selves from the common content of the world and treat them as self-existing and mutually independent units. We are then obliged to proceed to represent the universal Life in which they share as another unit of the same type, and diYculties immediately arise as to the relation between the great Self and its minor prototypes. Thought sways between a Pluralism, disguised or undisguised, and a Pantheism which obliterates all real individuality. But by the existence of the personality of God we do not mean the existence of a self-consciousness so conceived. We mean that the universe is to be thought of, in the last resort, as an Experience and not as an abstract content—an experience not limited to the intermittent and fragmentary glimpses of this and the other Wnite consciousness, but resuming the whole life of the world in a fashion which is necessarily incomprehensible save by the Absolute itself.193

It is for Pringle-Pattison mainly the argument about the importance of content which obviates the pluralistic conclusion that all that holds for the relations between Wnite selves holds also for the relations between the Wnite selves and God. Yet it is crucial to understand that this argument is not for Pringle-Pattison incongruent with the personalistic insistence, against a certain form of pantheism, that ‘the experiences of Wnite selves do not form part of the divine experience in the same sense in which they are the experiences of the selves in question’.194 We stand here before a completed, historically signiWcant change in the personalistic argument that had been introduced by Schelling and inconclusively continued by some of the speculative theists. As expressing the new kind of insight into the I–Thou relationship and the personality of God, and especially as implying a criticism of abstract Enlightenment deism, Jacobi’s concept of God was to some extent a new one. Yet it still bore some of the characteristic marks of what Hegel, and Pringle-Pattison, called ‘abstract monotheism’ (which is related to Hegel’s criticism of atomism and his concept of abstract personality).195 However, the diVerence between Jacobi’s view and that of the pluralists comes out clearly if we bear in mind that Jacobi opposed his concept of God to the pantheistic blurring of the distinction between God and man/creation. For Pringle-Pattison, it was abstract, transcendent monotheism which, at the hands of the pluralists, had become tantamount to a position which unduly reduced, if not the distinction, at least the diVerence between God and man. For the purpose of re-establishing that diVerence, he opposed to this new form of abstract monotheism elements precisely of the pantheism that Jacobi had fought. The speculative theists had indeed insisted on the content, the real determinations of God, but they had struggled, more or less successfully, to raise that content above the determinations of nature or the phenomenal world. In Pringle-Pattison this is much less important, as with a stress on immanence and—in the footsteps of Lotze—on values, he argues that God means, for philosophy at all events, not simply or primarily the existence of another self-conscious Being, but rather the inWnite values of which His life is the eternal fruition and which are freely oVered to all spirits for their appropriation and enjoyment. Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Love—these constitute the being of God—‘the fulness of the Godhead,’ 193 Ibid. 389–90.

194 Ibid. 434.

195 Ibid. 393–4.

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brokenly manifested in this world of time. God is Love. ‘God Himself ’, said St. Bernard, ‘is manifested in His wisdom and His goodness, for God consists of these His attributes.’ Both God and man in fact become bare points of mere existence—impossible abstractions—if we try to separate them from one another and from the structural elements of their common life.196

In this passage, the values seem to take precedence over personality. In words that could have been Schelling’s, Pringle-Pattison insists that ‘the traditional idea of God’, ‘a fusion of the primitive monarchical ideal with Aristotle’s conception of the Eternal Thinker’, ‘the idea of a self-centred life and a consequent aloofness from the world’, ‘the far-oV, self-involved, abstractly perfect and eternally blessed God of pure Monotheism’, must be ‘profoundly transformed’. In the spirit of some late historicist liberal theologians—some of whom were inspired by Lotze—he claims to have access to original Christian truth, but in this case this is for him the ‘speculative truth’ of the doctrine of the Incarnation, which, he says, has subsequently been obscured by theology and metaphysics as they ‘stiXe[d] what was most characteristic in the world-view of the new faith’. The important thing about Pringle-Pattison’s version of immanentist interpretation in this connection, however, is that by the way in which it focuses on the Son, it at the same time tends in the direction of a view of the personality of God against mere personality in God. The Father and the Son are not ‘two distinct personalities or centres of consciousness, the Father perpetuating the old monarchical ideal and the incarnation of the Son being limited to a single historical individual’. And the doctrine of the Spirit does not establish ‘a third centre of consciousness mysteriously united with the other two’. The doctrine of the Trinity, in Wne, does not express ‘a supra-rational mystery concerning the inner constitution of a transcendent Godhead’, but ‘the profoundest, and therefore the most intelligible, attempt to express the indwelling of God in man’.197 Despite the diVerences from Jacobi and the similarities with Hegel, the personalistic continuity is obvious and the polemic against impersonalistic pantheism and absolute idealism still central. Pringle-Pattison insists not only, against pantheism, on distinction between the absolute and the Wnite person. He also insists on transcendence—seemingly going somewhat beyond his redeWnition of it as ‘distinction of value or of quality’—against Bosanquet’s ‘analogy of a continuum’. Pringle-Pattison’s various formulations on the nature of the absolute and the relation of God to the world aim at keeping in view ‘at once the transcendent being of God for Himself, which we inadequately Wgure to ourselves as a self-consciousness or personality on the model of our own, and the creative and illuminative activity of the same Spirit in the beings which live, and are sustained in life, only through its self-communicating presence’.198 It is important in this connection to note that Pringle-Pattison does not simply accept the terms God and the absolute as ‘precise equivalents in the sense that the one may be substituted for the other in any context’. The Wrst series of lectures on 196 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 434–5.

197 Ibid. 407–10.

198 Ibid. 435.

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The Idea of God had dwelt on the immanence of God and Wnite experience, and here Pringle-Pattison joined forces, as in many respects he had done also in Hegelianism and Personality, with much of modern idealism in general. Here, the terms God and the absolute were more closely identiWed. As he proceeded in the second series to deal with the relation between ‘an impersonal Absolutism and a Theism which should be at once ethical and religious’, and when thereby ‘the fact of the divine transcendence became as obvious as the doctrine of immanence’, shifts in the deWnitions of the terms as well as a ‘growing diVerentiation’ between them take place.199 But despite this, Pringle-Pattison, in his quintessential defence of the new concept of the personal absolute, explains that he still sometimes uses them ‘as interchangeable even to the end’, a usage which he thinks may be ‘defensible and need cause no real confusion of thought’.200 Thus standing by this identiWcation, Pringle-Pattison at the same time frees it of the distinct ambiguities of Hegel, where the theological and theistic formulations normally represent a lower mode of apprehension of the reality or truth which is grasped on a higher level in philosophical terms, and are to some extent perhaps mere window-dressing to avert the censorial measures of the Prussian authorities. For Pringle-Pattison, the absolute being God means that the absolute is personal in a distinctly non-Hegelian sense. Returning, in The Idea of Immortality, to his criticism of Bosanquet, he Wnds in him what is obviously the continuation of the empty principle of pantheism in its various modern forms, of which Jacobi seems to have been the first to perceive the vast implications. Like many of Spinoza’s and Hegel’s formulations, Bosanquet’s description of the absolute as a ‘universal mind’ or a ‘universal experience’ conXict with other formulations, judging from which the absolute cannot possess ‘the spiritual unity which would enable it to enjoy the process of its own experience’.201 In direct succession to Jacobi, Pringle-Pattison objects to the moral nihilism implicit in this kind of absolute idealism. He cannot accept that the absolute is ‘ ‘‘the totality of things as a totality’’, ‘‘rather the theatre of good and evil than good or evil in itself ’’, or again, ‘‘the whole considered as a perfection in which the antagonism of good and evil is unnoted’’ ’. Nor can he accept that ‘ ‘‘The general form of the Absolute’’. . . is ‘‘the transmutation and rearrangement of particular experiences, and also of the contents of particular Wnite minds, by inclusion in a completed whole of experience’’ ’. Although Pringle-Pattison accepts the whole as the truth, he nevertheless cannot condone it as ‘the whole, just as such’, which to him ‘seems to be little better than an empty space in which everything happens’.202 The truth is the whole, and it is indeed experience, but it is the experience of the concrete personal God.

199 Pringle-Pattison’s formulations should be compared with Hegel’s on the relation between the concepts of the absolute and God in the lectures on the philosophy of religion, in Vorlesungen, i. 31–8. 200 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 431–2. 201 Id. The Idea of Immortality, 158. 202 Ibid. 158–9.

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In his view of the absolute, Pringle-Pattison Wnds himself, in The Idea of Immortality, to be closer to Bradley than to Bosanquet. But this does not mean that the later Pringle-Pattison has moved closer to Bradley’s absolute idealism compared with the early Pringle-Pattison. Quite the contrary: the reason for the proximity is that the later Bradley has moved closer to Pringle-Pattison compared with the early Bradley. Pringle-Pattison cites his own early criticism of Appearance and Reality, where against Bradley’s challenge that the absolute could be ‘neither personal nor moral nor beautiful nor true’, he had argued that this ‘cluster of negations’ would lead to the view of the absolute either as ‘a mere Unknowable with which we have no concern’ (as in Spencer), or as ‘a unity indiVerent to these higher aspects of experience’. In true Jacobian and Schellingian fashion, PringlePattison had argued that ‘Both religion and the higher poetry . . . just because they give up the pretence of an impossible exactitude, carry us . . . nearer to the meaning of the world than the formulae of an abstract metaphysic’. Now, thirty years later, Pringle-Pattison Wnds to his satisfaction that Bradley, in his own words, wants ‘to lay a diVerent emphasis upon some aspects of the question’; the result is that he now at least acknowledges that ‘an obstinate demand for theoretic consistency may easily defeat its own object’, and that ‘ ‘‘the ideas which best express our highest religious needs and their satisfaction must certainly be true’’, in the sense of possessing the practical truth that matters’.203 In fact, the formulations where Pringle-Pattison contrasts the absolute as an abstraction with the absolute as an experience are now often identical with those of Bradley.204 But again, rather than proving that Pringle-Pattison had joined the main current of absolute idealism, this shows that Bradley, in this regard, had left it and was now closer to the alternative current of personalistic idealism. Bowne rightly insisted that not only the concepts of ‘idealistic realism’ and ‘realistic idealism’, but also that of ‘theistic idealism’ needed to be interpreted. Yet in a sense which is plainly recognizable as in important respects identical, we Wnd in Europe long before Bowne distinct positions of personalism for which, if a general designation of this kind is needed, we can use no better term than theistic idealism. In Pringle-Pattison, the leading British heir of these continental positions, we Wnd neither, as Copleston thinks, ‘an abandonment of absolute idealism for theism’, nor an attempt to ‘revise’ absolute idealism ‘in such a way that it permits more value being attached to Wnite personality’. It was not a question of some external combination of ‘absolute idealism’ and ‘elements of theism’, the result of which was ‘ambiguous’ and an ‘unsatisfactory amalgam’. Copleston’s characterization hides from view the broader current of nineteenth-century thought to which Pringle-Pattison must be said to belong. The position developed by this current was historically new, restating the central themes of the original classico-Christian synthesis in a way which, because of its distinct lineage and independence, cannot be described as a mere compromise between or even

203 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of Immortality, 159. 204 See e.g. Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 284.

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synthesis of absolute idealism and traditional theism. Elements that went into absolute idealism and traditional theism were developed in an original fashion into a new kind of absolutistic theism long before the work of the personal idealists on whom Copleston focuses. The latter drew on this earlier work as it was transmitted to them mainly by Lotze: a body of new positions developed since the late eighteenth century. It is obvious that Pringle-Pattison and other personal idealists were strongly inXuenced by absolute idealism as well as by traditional theism. Yet like the earlier continental personalists, they worked out a distinct alternative that went beyond what could possibly be obtained from their mere combination and mutual adjustment.

Upton, Illingworth, and Webb Upton was perhaps the Wrst to include the later British absolute idealists, more speciWcally the Cairds and Bradley, among the targets of the personalist criticism. He places them in a deep historical perspective, deeper, in fact—or at least more comprehensive—than that of most personalists. About Bradley’s Appearance and Reality he says merely that it is reminiscent of Spinoza, but Green’s and the Cairds’ philosophies are also said to represent ‘the attempt to give . . . a rational expression and justiWcation’ of the ‘Theosophy’ of the Upanishads, the SuWs, the Stoics and Neo-Platonists, the Alexandrian Christians’ logos-theology, and the mysticism of Eckhart and Tauler.205 Upton dwells at unusual length on this historical lineage: Whenever, as in the Upanishads, the idea of a personal relationship between man and God fades away, and the gods which in the Vedic hymns were invested with personality are replaced by the Pantheistic conception of an impersonal and eternal self, then, though philosophy may thrive vigorously in this atmosphere of speculative thought, religion proper inevitably decays and dies, for it lacks that sense of immediate personal contact with a superior being which is the indispensable condition of its birth and of its life.206

The Upanishads, Upton holds, represent a philosophy rather than a religion. What this means is that for Upton their worldview is the result of the same one-sided theoretical interest that is the cause of Western philosophical pantheism. With the Upanishads’ impersonal concept of God as the ‘immanent, all-pervading Self ’, the prime characteristic of their worldview, the human self is reduced to ‘a mere transient phenomenal phase of the life of the Great Self who is the only Reality’, and thus loses ‘all true reality and all moral relations to God’.207 Upton shares the view of some of the speculative theists that this was not the original worldview of the Orient but a later development, and he is among the Wrst personalists to note that apart from the Vedic hymns there is also a theistic and indeed personalistic alternative already in India.208

205 Upton, The Bases of Religious Belief, 21, 282. 207 Ibid. 28. 208 Ibid. 363–4 n. 1.

206 Ibid. 24.

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For the rest, Upton’s rendering of the new personalism keeps to the basic contours of the worldview, making these somewhat sharper than in Pringle-Pattison’s. In the contemporary West, the opposition between the personalist and the impersonalist takes the form of ‘the great battle of the religious philosophies—the battle between the Ethical Theism of such thinkers as Lotze, Ritschl and Dr. Martineau, and the Absolute Idealism of Hegel and his disciples’.209 ‘Ethical Theism’, it should be noted, was one of the main designations which I. H. Fichte had used for his own and Weisse’s positions, and its deWnition was explained at great length, in polemical contrast to Schelling’s ‘naturalistic theism’.210 With the other personalists, Upton grants that the ethical theists and the absolute idealists agree in certain important respects. Most fundamentally, Upton shares the Schellingian and early speculative theist position that ‘all religion of the inner and deeper sort must be in some measure Pantheistic’, pantheism being understood as ‘the indwelling presence and immanent activity of the life which animates and uniWes the whole’, and which is implied in the life of nature and of the soul. More speciWcally, but still in line with early speculative theism, the ethical theists also accept Hegel’s general idealism, his rejection of matter as radically diVerent from mind. Hegelians are right that there must be a deeper unity which connects the parts to the ‘unitary life of the Whole’, if ‘reciprocity of causal action’, knowledge, and ‘the presence of absolutely worthful ideals in our consciousness’ are to be accounted for.211 With regard to deism, both parties reject its view of isolated individuals which ignores the immanent divine nature by which the individuals are interrelated and united. They both reject deism’s radical separation of God and man and its external view of their relation. But the Hegelians have carried the idea of unity too far: ‘denying that God has given to the Will of man any real power to put itself in antagonism to His Will, they have undermined the basis of Ethics, have turned Theism into Pantheism, and converted human individuality from being a real ‘‘other’’ than God into a mere Wnite phase of God’s Eternal Life.’212 To John Caird’s Hegelian interpretation of Christianity as dissolving the dualism of the Wnite and the inWnite through God’s self-realization in humanity, Upton objects that ‘Christianity . . . does bridge the gulf between God and man, but certainly not by the simple Hegelian expedient of making the will of man only the will of the immanent God under a diVerent name. Jesus surely means by ‘‘Sin’’ something inWnitely deeper and more ontological than it is possible for those thinkers to mean who accept the Spinozistic and Hegelian dogma that the real is the rational and the rational the real.’213 When, despite this, Upton asserts that there is agreement on the rejection of pantheism’s abrogation of human individuality and moral accountability by the identiWcation of God and man, his intention is to go on to show that, on the part of the absolute idealists, this is a mere nominal criticism which is unsustainable by their substantial position. Thus 209 Upton, The Bases of Religious Belief, 303. 210 See the essay ‘Ueber den Unterschied zwischen ethischem und naturalistischem Theismus’ from 1856, in Fichte, Vermischte Schriften, i. 211 Upton, The Bases of Religious Belief, 297–8, 330. 212 Ibid. 298. 213 Ibid. 294–5.

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he cites Edward Caird to the eVect that the insistence on the existence of an alternative in any of our moral decisions ‘oVends science by the assertion of a kind of freedom in individuals which seems to be the negation of all laws of causation; and . . . oVends philosophy by the denial that there is any point of view from which the diVerences of things can be brought back to a rational unity’. If, Upton continues, the rationality in question refers not only to a unity ‘comprehensible by the human intellect’, but implies that ‘a universe involving the existence of intelligent beings morally free would be, from the Divine point of view, an irrational universe’, Upton rejects it outright. In a ‘scheme of creation through which the eternal love of God seeks to confer the highest possible blessedness on the creatures who are fashioned out of His own substance and made after His own image’, moral freedom is essential to rationality itself.214 Absolute idealism is thus, according to Upton, incapable of fulWlling the function of being a ‘true and satisfactory mean between Deism and Pantheism’. In reality it is ‘unmitigated Pantheism’, and the kind of pantheism that leads to naturalism: ‘The Absolute, manifesting itself through the process of evolution and heredity, is responsible for every man’s special character, and every one’s conduct follows inevitably from his character and his environment.’ This is nothing but a ‘depressing fatalism’. Since God, or the ‘timeless principle of thought’ which Upton accepts as necessary for the logical uniWcation of phenomena, is regarded by the Hegelian as exhaustively manifested in the latter, and ‘these phenomena Wnd their sole and suYcient explanation in the relations among themselves which science and philosophical reXection gradually discover’, Upton agrees with Schiller that God may ‘be safely treated by the consistent idealist’ as ‘une quantite´ ne´gligeable’. There is a ‘complete merging’ of the theological interest into the scientiWc and philosophical, and this is conWrmed by the fact that the absolute idealists are no longer concerned with theology and worship, but rather with ethics and sociology. While claiming to supply ‘the only satisfactory rationale of what is deepest in Christian thought and sentiment’, they increasingly turn to ‘noble eVorts to apply and realize ethical ideals in social and political life’.215 Both Spinoza’s and Hegel’s pantheisms are ‘derived by abstraction from the universal elements of thought’. The pantheistic self-realization of God implies that ‘every feature in the process, the basest and cruelest, as well as the noblest and the most beneWcent, are equally indispensable features in that process of selfevolving Thought which constitutes the universe’. Against this, ethical theism insists that ‘the inner nature of God transcends all phenomenal manifestations’.216 If there is nothing original in the latter position, we Wnd instead Upton’s originality, or rather the personalist originality in general, in the insistence on the distinctly personal nature of God or the absolute. Like some of the earlier European personalists, Upton is signiWcantly uncomfortable with eternity, and the consciousness of God, as pure timelessness; such timelessness would even ‘make man’s moral freedom a self-contradiction’. With it, ‘our individual selves 214 Ibid. 287–8, 292–3.

215 Ibid. 293–4, 322–4.

216 Ibid. 325, 330–1, 339.

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and our development of character’ must, as in Hegel, appear as illusions to the eternal. For this reason, timelessness seems to Upton ‘to deny to the Supreme Being all those aspects of consciousness which lend interest to our own life’. Pantheism does not allow the personalist combination of analogy and experience, since man’s personality is reduced to a ‘Wnite phase’ of the absolute. Spinoza’s comparison of the similarity between human and divine intelligence with that between the animal ‘dog’ and the constellation of the same name, and Hegel’s typical dismissal of personality or selfhood as per deWnition incompatible with the inWnite, illustrate the diYculty. Against this, Upton again agrees with Martineau that the absolute is, in the latter’s words, ‘an ever-living God . . . a Divine Mind and Will ruling the universe and holding moral relations with mankind’.217 Upton restates Lotze’s argument about dependent human personality as a mere imperfect reproduction of the unlimited divine personality. Sometimes we see here at least an attempt to make—as Knudson says of Bowne—something more ‘enthusiastic’ out of the personalistic insights than what is found in the minimalism of Lotze’s formulations. This would in fact be characteristic of the whole development of personalism in Britain: If this Absolute Presence which meets us face to face in the most momentous of our life’s experiences, which pours into our fainting wills the elixir of new life and strength, and into our wounded hearts the balm of a quite inWnite sympathy, cannot Wtly be called a Personal Presence, it is only because this word personal is too poor, and carries with it associations too human and too limited, to adequately express this profound God-consciousness. But we cannot spare the word ‘personal’ in this connection, for we have no higher term; and if we part with it, our description must needs sink to a lower level . . . it is quite possible to retain all the essential and positive elements which this word connotes apart from those negative and limiting features which necessarily appertain to our Wnite experiences, and thus to discern in the highest forms of human personality a true, though not exhaustive, revelation of the nature of the Perfect Personality of God.218

By this appropriation of Lotze, the continental development of personalism was reunited with the British one. The conXuent tradition was left to better-known philosophers and theologians to carry on. Inspired by Pringle-Pattison’s Hegelianism and Personality, Illingworth too developed a philosophy of the personal absolute. Illingworth was trained in the idealism of Green but, as he signiWcatively explained, using an analogy with the split in the Hegelian school in Germany, he joined what he called the ‘Greenites of the Right’, represented by Pringle-Pattison, and turned against the ‘Greenites of the Left’, presumably absolute idealists like Bradley and Bosanquet.219 But there was also the shared inspiration of Lotze, on whom Illingworth drew independently. Illingworth’s Personality Human and Divine, with its relatively careful historical analyses of the development of the concepts of the personality of man as well as of God, must be considered a major document of the doctrine of 217 Upton, The Bases of Religious Belief, 22–3, 306–7, 337–8. 218 Ibid. 363. 219 A. L. Illingworth (ed.), The Life and Work of John Richardson Illingworth, 90 (letter to W. Richmond, 14 Dec. 1888).

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the personal absolute. The analogical thinking, but also the view of full personality as manifest only in God and not in man, are taken over directly from Lotze,220 but Illingworth adds many formulations of his own. ‘If . . . we are to think of God as personal’, he says in one place, ‘it must be by what is called the method of eminence (via eminentiae)—the method, that is, which considers God as possessing, in transcendent perfection, the same attributes which are imperfectly possessed by man.’221 Illingworth also carries on the distinct speculative theist polemic against all developmental, evolutionary, theogonic, or process views of God and God’s personality. As a true Right Hegelian or Greenite, and as a British speculative theist, there can for Illingworth be no self-actualization of the absolute, but only of Wnite beings. Even more strongly than Lotze, Illingworth insists on God’s transcendent completeness, on his eternal, full actuality: in no way is God dependent on the processes of the world, in no way is the universe ‘essential to His being’. God’s ‘absoluteness . . . is not aVected by His relation to creation since that is not a necessary relation, but one contingent on His own self-determination—His own will to create’; ‘voluntary self-restraint does not diminish, but rather emphasizes his essential freedom’. Although God manifests and realizes himself in ‘a new region’, this does not aVect his ‘divine personality, or absolute Being, as such’: ‘we might say that His purpose is increasingly realized, but not His person.’ God possesses ‘absolute personality’.222 This is opposed to ‘the pantheistic alternative’:223 all of the criticisms of pantheism familiar since Jacobi are rehearsed by Illingworth in condensed form, and linked, in the fashion of the same Jacobian lineage, to the central arguments of analogical personalism. God is certainly immanent both in the Son, and, in a secondary degree, in his work, creation and nature.224 Illingworth insists to the end that both immanence and transcendence are necessary, that they are ‘not alternative but correlative conceptions’, of which ‘The one guards us from the pantheistic confusion of God with the universe; the other from the Neoplatonic separation of the two.’225 But already our own experience of combining in ourselves, ‘in our own personality’, immanence and transcendence is evidence against a mere immanence of God: ‘however incomprehensible this relationship may be, we know it in our own case to be a fact, and may legitimately infer its analogue outside ourselves.’ It gives the answer to the question of the relation of the supreme spirit to nature, whereas pantheism ‘cannot really be construed into thought. Spirit which is merely immanent in matter, without also transcending it, cannot be spirit at all; it is only another aspect of matter, having neither selfidentity nor freedom. Pantheism is thus really indistinguishable from materialism; it is merely materialism grown sentimental, but no more tenable for its

220 One of the central passages is quoted in Illingworth, Personality Human and Divine, 53. 221 Ibid. 74. 222 Id. Divine Transcendence, 15, 48–50. 223 Ibid. 49. 224 Id. Divine Immanence, 73. 225 Id. Divine Transcendence, 72.

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change of name.’ Monism too, both in its Spinozistic and in its Haeckelian, materialistic form, ‘denies the reality of experienced dualism’.226 Noting the increasing diversion of the use of the term ‘divine immanence’ from a Christian to a pantheistic sense, Illingworth came to regret his earlier use of the expression ‘higher pantheism’ in Lux Mundi, and, following Coleridge, to hold that ‘If the whole notion of transcendence is rigorously excluded, we can no longer distinguish between God and the universe except as diVerent aspects of one and the same thing . . . they are only diVerent ways of describing the same reality, which may equally well be called nature or God.’227 Pantheism threatens moral freedom and the distinction between good and evil. God is ‘our inWnite and absolute Other. He is all that we are not . . . When we pass on, as Christians, to the further thought of God’s indwelling presence or immanence within us . . . the whole signiWcance of this depends upon the fact that God is our eternal Other, and not our self.’228 When Illingworth thus insists on God’s ‘free relation to the universe’, on God’s being ‘completely self-dependent and self-determined’, it is of course in many respects a mere restatement of ‘classical’ or ‘traditional’ theism.229 But at the same time this God is very explicitly the new absolute. God’s freedom is a freedom from being related to anything outside himself. Like Lotze, Illingworth is not even willing to accept with Jacobi and Schelling that the personality of God necessarily implies limits of some kind. The reason why empiricists who hold—as did Plato—that the inWnite means only the indeWnite of which we can have no knowledge, or that as the negation of the Wnite it must also be limited by it and consequently not truly inWnite, are wrong, Illingworth argues, is that they disregard the diVerence in ‘quality or kind’, that they treat both the Wnite and the inWnite as ‘mere abstractions from which all but quantity [has] been taken away’. We also recognize in Illingworth’s solution a combination of the concrete content of appearance-reality of Pringle-Pattison and the concrete determinations of transcendent reality of the kind we Wnd in Biberg: when we speak of inferring the inWnite from the Wnite, this Wnite, from which our reasoning starts, is no abstraction, but the real, visible, substantial, concrete world around us, quick with all its palpitating life. Consequently, when we argue that this Wnite implies an inWnite, we do not mean that it implies an abstract fringe of emptiness outside it; but, on the contrary, that it implies something inWnitely more comprehensive, and concrete than itself, something which underlies, and includes, and sustains it, an inWnite reality, an inWnite fulness, a totality of which it is a part.230

This inWnite, this absolute, is identical with the personal God; personality is indeed for Illingworth the category which alone can explain how the inWnite being can remain independent, absolute, of the Wnite beings which it sustains. Illingworth here develops in what seems to be an independent manner the experiential analogies between man’s and God’s personalities which had been 226 Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 69–70, 72. 228 Ibid. 16–17, 67–8. 229 Ibid. 15, 48.

227 Id. Divine Transcendence, 68–9. 230 Id. Personality Human and Divine, 89–90.

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central in personalism ever since Jacobi. Even as Wnite, we can, as persons, gradually make the external world our own, ‘internal to ourselves; a world within us instead of without us, in which we are no longer slaves, but free’. As persons we experience ourselves as ‘identical in the midst of change’, and as such we can ‘progressively appropriate things and inXuences outside us, and so transform them, from being limits, into manifestations of ourselves’. Thus we Wnd ourselves to be ‘potentially inWnite’. Our independence or self-dependence is increased. And on this analogy ‘we can conceive of an InWnite Being as One whose only limit is Himself, and who is, therefore, self-determined, self-dependent, self-identical; including the Wnite, not as a necessary mode, but as a free manifestation of Himself, and thus, while constituting its reality, unaVected by its change—in other words, an InWnite Person’.231 We Wnd in the universe qualities and workings which ‘have no counterpart except in the region of our own personality, and can only, therefore, be interpreted as attributes of a person’. This intuition, based in our own nature, is Illingworth’s (and Lotze’s) personalistic version of the cosmological argument, which was developed also by Bowne at about the same time: ‘we see in nature, not merely an artist or designer, but a person.’ Similarly, the intelligibility of the world, the correspondence of thought with things, which we necessarily assume as thinking beings, can only be granted if things proceed from ‘a mind—and a mind which must be the source of everything that is intelligible, (including all our ideals,) and therefore be the highest which we can think, and therefore, at least, be personal’.232 Webb analyses the diVerence between Lotze’s and Bosanquet’s views of personality in terms of the distinction between the diVerent strands in the history of the meaning of the term person which was to be used also by the Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie. Bosanquet, Webb shows, stands Wrmly in the Hegelian tradition in which the legal and judicial meanings—developed out of the meaning of mask and the dramatic and social role—of the word person are the important ones.233 In this tradition, the person is not separate but dependent upon other persons in a social nexus of claims and counter-claims. These meanings explain why, for Bosanquet, personality ‘should seem an attribute wholly inapplicable to the Absolute, which cannot stand in an external relation to anything else’. But Bosanquet’s designation of the absolute as an individual in the logical sense, on the other hand, precisely describes this view of an absolute with all relations within itself: ‘To the all-inclusive reality of the Absolute personality is inapplicable, but individuality is its prerogative; we, on the other hand, just because we are persons, can only be called individuals in a qualiWed sense and, as it were, by courtesy.’ The considerations which make Lotze ascribe personality to the absolute (and not in the full sense to Wnite beings) are, Webb shows, similar to those that make Bosanquet describe it as an individual. The diVerence is 231 Ibid. 91–2 232 Ibid. 93, 100–1. 233 Webb does not discuss fully Hegel’s concept of the person, his historical analysis of its development, and his distinction between abstract and concrete personality.

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explained by the fact that Lotze’s understanding of the meaning of the term person is derived from the Greek use of hypostasis and the Boethian tradition (the Wo¨rterbuch’s ‘concept that aims at the spirit-gifted individual’), and not from the tradition of the mask, the role, or the social and legal function: ‘only an InWnite Being can be supposed consciously to possess its whole nature in the manner in which we consciously possess that part of our experience which we feel to be most intimately our own.’234 Webb proceeds to link this explanation to his distinction between personality of God and in God. Terminologically, Webb points out, it is Bosanquet who is in line with the Christian tradition. In substance, Lotze’s arguments that ‘what has supreme reality has also supreme value’, that our highest conceptions, like that of the moral good, can only be real and concrete as referred to a person, and that the supreme being as, in his own words, ‘a Living Love that wills the blessedness of others’ is not incongruent with God’s freedom from want or dependence, seem closer of course to the tradition of Christian theology.235 Yet Lotze’s ascription of personality to the absolute as the personality of God distinguishes it, albeit in another way than Bosanquet’s absolute, from the position of traditional Christian dogma. SigniWcantly, Webb diVers from Lotze in adopting, like Illingworth, a social Trinitarian position. With regard to Lotze’s argument about the Supreme Being as a living love that wills the blessedness of others, he points out that Lotze did not carry this ‘so far as to represent this will to bless others as rooted in an eternal activity of love between persons who are not other than the Supreme Being, because their distinction from one another falls within its unity, and yet are not (like the persons who in Mr. Bosanquet’s doctrine also fall within the unity of his Absolute) transitory and Wnite manifestations of an eternal and inWnite Reality’.236 But this position, although problematic as an interpretation of the meaning of personality in Trinitarian dogma, seems nevertheless to come close to the ‘personality in God’ position. Towards the end of the last lecture of God and Personality, Webb says that ‘It will perhaps have occurred to my readers that the arguments of this Lecture have pointed rather to a single personality of God than to [the] distinction of persons in God’. And he adds that the personal distinction within God ‘cannot be interpreted as involving a diVerence in personal character without abolishing that unity behind and through all diVerences which is what we primarily have in view in speaking of the Absolute at all’. But elsewhere, Webb is more clearly hesitant unambiguously to accept the personality of God, which he associates with Unitarianism, preferring instead formulations like the more vague and general—and orthodox—‘a God with whom we can stand in personal relations’.237 The distinctive position of Webb is that he uses many of the familiar earlier personalist arguments that pointed in the direction of the personality of God, but shrinks back from Wnally accepting this formulation, preferring instead

234 Webb, God and Personality, 52–4. 235 Ibid. 101–2, 106. 236 Ibid. 107. 237 Ibid. 84, 153, 272–3.

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persons in God without acknowledging any higher unity behind, in, or above these persons. Webb rehearses the prominent personalist theme of values or a rational or moral order being one with the personal God and not in any way set above him, relating it, like Lotze, but with speciWc historical references,238 to the scholastic doctrine that ‘whatsoever God is, he is that not in virtue of a nature which he possesses or in which he shares, but in his own right and, as it put it, substantially’ (that is, not ‘accidentally’). When we call God wise and good, we mean something diVerent from when we call men wise and good—we mean ‘that he is himself the wisdom and the goodness of which we are speaking; there is no wisdom and goodness beyond him in which he shares’. The philosophical background of the decisions of the council of Nicaea and the debates of the preceding councils was the Platonic distinction between God and the form or idea of the good: ‘the religious consciousness of the Christian Church . . . could not Wnd satisfaction in an object of worship which, however exalted, was less than the Highest; and hence was driven to aYrm an absolute equality between the Logos, the Word or Manifestation of God, and the Supreme Father, whose manifestation and utterance he was acknowledged to be.’239 Here, the logos is of course Christ, God as the personal object of worship, not the impersonal order beyond him; rather, the Supreme Father is that unmanifest Highest that could easily be interpreted as such an order—although the terminology seems to indicate the reverse, so that the problem of Nicaea would be, as it was not, the elevation of the impersonal order to the level of the supreme personal. The concern was to establish the personal divine Spirit as the Highest. Webb is convinced that the maintenance of the Platonic distinction can never prove in the long run satisfactory to the religious consciousness. The God whom we worship must be the Highest, must be what Plato called the Idea of the Good; but this Good must not, as in the Platonic tradition . . . be something in its innermost nature above and beyond even the most exalted kind of Soul. The best Soul, the divine Spirit, which moves and works in the world, and is the source of what is good in the human souls, which derive their origin from it, must be essentially one with the Highest; even in its innermost nature the Highest must possess that spiritual life of which our personality is but a faint and imperfect likeness.240

Yet the conclusion that the council of Nicaea reached, and which Webb tends to accept, is that this personal highest, to which the good is not a superior order, is not a person or one person (personality of God), but three persons (personality in God). The reason for this, on Webb’s interpretation, was that ‘the highest personal activities, those of knowledge and love, demand an intercourse of person with person; and yet the Highest (it was thought) could not be dependent for what is intrinsically necessary to its nature upon beings less exalted. But there is

238 Webb was a prominent historian of medieval thought and a pioneer of medieval studies at Oxford. 239 Webb, God and Personality, 237–8. 240 Ibid. 173–5.

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nothing impersonal above and beyond the Persons to whom the supreme Good belongs, or rather who in their eternal mutual intercourse are that supreme Good.’241 Conceiving the divine as ‘a personal character wherein desire and will are completely coincident with the requirements of Reason’ is merely to accept as real ‘a perfection our comprehension of which is implied in the very contrast with it of the imperfection of human personality’. But ‘supposing an impersonal order which should yet be capable of inspiring in a supreme degree the veneration and the conWdence which we render in varying measure to wise and good persons’ is to unite ‘by a merely verbal device characteristics which cannot really be thought together, while secretly cancelling the inconsistency by indulgence in an emotional attitude which presupposes a quite diVerent, indeed a personal, object’. Rather than venerating it, we are more likely to ‘loathe and curse’ an ‘eternal Order conceived impersonally’. Yet even so, ‘we shall not cease to illustrate the unconquerable tendency of the human soul to envisage its relation to the ultimate Reality in terms of personality; we shall but be treating it as a devil instead of as a God’.242 Like Illingworth, Webb accepts both the personal absolute and the social Trinity. One way to do this would be simply to hold that the person of the Father is the absolute—the Father as the personal absolute—and that the persons of the Son and the Spirit are somehow contained within him rather than within some impersonal unity.243 For Lotze it is enough to have established, in the speculative theist tradition, the personal absolute; declining further interpretations of the dogma of the Trinity, he yet adopts a characteristic liberal theological view which is wholly in accord with his speculative position (Christ has ‘unique value’, ‘God’s Son’ is a ‘Wgurative expression’, God reveals himself ‘at particular moments and in particular persons . . . in a more eminent way . . . than at other moments and in other persons’).244 Webb’s solution is simply to assert that the three persons, as three, without subordination, are supreme and absolute, and to deny the implications of impersonality of the problem of distinction and unity of essence that were once close at hand in an intellectual culture strongly inXuenced by NeoPlatonism and radical apophaticism. Webb’s orthodox formulation ‘a God with whom we can stand in personal relations’ is important since for Webb our being able to stand in personal relations is the criterion of the personal God.245 Yet with his focus on these relations—our relations—the distinction between personality in God and personality of God, which Webb himself establishes so well, again becomes somewhat less central to his own position, and much of his reasoning applies to both views. Thus the central personalistic contrast of personality and impersonal rationality is hardly aVected by these nuances.

241 Webb, God and Personality, 238. 242 Ibid. 250–1, 255. 243 This seems to be what Zizioulas holds that the Cappadocian Fathers actually meant. 244 Lotze, Grundzu¨ge der Religionsphilosophie, 92–3. 245 Webb, God and Personality, 78.

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In unbroken and unchanged yet unconscious continuity with Jacobi, Schelling, Geijer, and all the other early personalists, Webb draws our attention to how the impersonal view of the system within which we live and move and have our being presupposes a perceived ‘contrast or antithesis of Personality and Reason’: ‘Just because the supreme system . . . is to be the complete expression of Reason, it can include but cannot itself possess Personality. Reason is indeed the characteristic constituent of Personality; but there is always in Personality something which falls short of the universality of Reason, and therefore it cannot without selfcontradiction be ascribed to the universal Reason.’246 But with regard to the concept of the absolute, there is for Webb so little of a contrast between it and the God of religion that, on the contrary, in the discontent with the alternatives of a merely immanent and a merely transcendent object, religion ‘reveals itself as essentially concerned with nothing but the whole, the ‘‘Absolute’’ of modern philosophy’; while at the same time nothing possesses the character of transcendence required by religion in its object, ‘the character of a reality fully equal to that of the subject, except what can claim to be, like the subject itself, personal ’.247 Nor does the distinct nature of Webb’s understanding of the personal absolute aVect his critical scrutiny of the absolute of the pantheists. As in Jacobi, we Wnd a continuous argument against pantheism in a broad sense, extending from Spinoza to its latest representatives. Their God is like Ixion’s cloud goddess:248 ‘it is fallacious to infer that because there is in one sense no limit to the process in which we lay aside in turn every imaginary picture of God as inadequate to his inWnite perfection, therefore a transformation which leaves no Being to whom we can intelligibly ascribe a reciprocation of our personal address to him is but a further extension of this same process.’ Since this is what Spinozistic pantheism does infer, there was truth in the instinct that saw in Spinoza ‘the great standard-bearer of atheism’.249 Since for Bradley God and his worshipper, as related and thus both Wnite, are necessarily mere appearances and not ultimate realities in the absolute, he shared the doctrine of the Wnite God of other recent philosophers who saw God and the Wnite beings as both included in a higher impersonal whole. Bosanquet at least insisted that his absolute contained ‘all that piety seeks in God and more’. Even apart from Webb’s Lotzean philosophical arguments against the conceivability of rationality and values apart from a personal God, and despite his readiness to grant that the absolute idealists did not think of an absolute that was ‘less’ than personal and to insist with Lotze that God as the absolute individual must be free from the limitations of Wnite personality, Bosanquet’s claim can hardly have been viewed by him as anything but a misunderstanding of the meaning of piety. Against it, ‘even the most cautious maintainers of Divine Personality’ must assert the capacity for personal relations in both Wnite persons and the supreme reality,

246 Ibid. 127. 247 Ibid. 248. 249 Webb, God and Personality, 132.

248 This trope had been used by Jacobi: Werke, ii. 28–9.

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‘and therefore the presence in the Supreme Reality of whatever is necessary for the existence of such a relation thereto’.250 But the centrality of the criterion of personal relations of course comes out even clearer in Webb’s restatement of the core personalist criticism of Spinoza’s doctrine, the most ‘highly developed’ and thus ‘adequately representative’ version of pantheism. Indicating ‘the crucial point at which any theology which is concerned to ascribe personality to God must take leave of Spinoza’, Webb holds that ‘it is abundantly clear that there is in this amor intellectualis Dei no question of reciprocation. According to Spinoza God neither ‘‘Wrst loves us’’ nor does he return our love. And it is just this impossibility of a reciprocation of love which makes it . . . impossible to speak of him as teaching the personality of God.’251 Personal relations are possible neither with a merely immanent God like Spinoza’s nor a merely transcendent God like Aristotle’s. God’s transcendent completeness, God’s being not merely ‘prospective’ but ‘actual’, ‘already possessing all to which we can aspire’, ‘all which the human spirit is capable of becoming’,252 does not preclude the signiWcance for God himself of his immanent relations to the highly incomplete and prospective persons of Wnitude: ‘it is precisely in the instance of personal character that we come nearest to understanding how perfection might not exclude the desire of self-communication; since in this instance the notion of a self-suYcient perfection strikes us as displeasing, and as really contradictory of our notion of what would be perfect in its kind.’253 In personal character, Webb thinks, perfection is compatible with ‘a living activity, whose course could by no means be settled beforehand, but would aVord to the spectator the joy of anticipating ever new and unexpected manifestations of power and wisdom and goodness’—a conception which of course implies the abandonment of the exclusively non-temporal God. The religious consciousness of personal intercourse is ‘that which takes us farthest into the heart’ of the supreme reality and ‘gives most assurance of the solution of problems which yet to us remain mysteries indeed, but ‘‘joyful mysteries’’, mysteries of love, which may be said not so much to baZe Reason as to enlarge its scope and opportunity’.254 250 Webb, God and Personality, 128–9, 132–3. 251 Ibid. 69–70. 252 This position Green too, in his own way, had defended. 253 Webb, God and Personality, 78, 208, 210. 254 Ibid. 211.

4 Personal unity-in-diversity In this chapter we shall look further at the development in early personalism of the interpretation ‘not only [of] the life of the individual but the world at large in personalistic terms’ (Yandell). We shall look at the idea of what Lavely describes as ‘reality’ as a ‘society of persons’, and Yandell as ‘a society of interacting persons’. Against rational as well as Romantic pantheists, the personalists held, with Jacobi, that both God and man are persons in a speciWcally modern yet at the same time tradition-oriented sense. By their simultaneous insistence on individuality, freedom, will, the distinctness and otherness of creation, Wnite autonomy, and the I–Thou relation, and on the element of unity which was for them the organism of the personal absolute within which the Wnite beings were independent personal ‘parts’, the early personalists gave expression to ‘that form of idealism which gives equal recognition to both the pluralistic and the monistic aspects of experience’ (Knudson). In other words, they gave expression also to the idea of the whole of reality as ‘a society of interacting persons’. Already in the early nineteenth century there thus developed a personalistic worldview which is ‘pluralistic’ in the sense that ‘reality is a society of persons’ and ‘theistic’ in the sense that ‘God is the ultimate person and, as such, is the ground of all being and the creator of Wnite persons’ (Lavely). From the beginning, one of the number of persons in the society of persons that is reality was considered ‘ontologically ultimate’; the ‘idealistic’ idea that ‘all reality is personal’ (Lavely) was part of personalism in the Wrst half of the nineteenth century. The relational, dialogical, I-Thou thematic, which was typically developed by twentieth-century European personalism, was perhaps more characteristic of the earlist phase of personalism as I define it, in the late eighteenth century and the Wrst half of the nineteenth, than in the personalism of Lotze, Pringle-Pattison, and Bowne. We shall see how the idea of creation was deployed, in a reinterpreted form, to defend the plurality of persons-in-relation with independent lives against absolute idealism, and how personalism Wrst came, in Yandell’s words, to ‘place ultimate value in the person . . . as a free, self-conscious, moral agent . . . rather than in either mental states or in apersonal states of aVairs’. We have seen that according to Knudson, personalism ‘leans toward pluralism and natural realism’ in the interest of its new conception of the inWnite, while at the same time insisting on monism and absolutism. But it also, Knudson writes, leans in the direction of pluralism and realism ‘in the interest of the reality and independence of the Wnite person’. Further, it ‘maintains that reality in its essential nature is active’, which is the

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same as to interpret ‘substance in terms of causality’. Finally, breaking with ordinary realism, it interprets ‘energy or causality . . . in terms of volition’.1 The view of personal ‘reason’ and impersonal ‘understanding’, and of the personal absolute, which were essential parts of the emerging worldview of personalism, had distinct consequences for, and implied in themselves, a number of other positions. Only together with the latter can personalism be said to possess the comprehensiveness and rounded completeness that belong to a worldview. It is impossible to cover all aspects; it will have to suYce to look at some of these implications in broad outline, and thus to point to still further continuities in the development of personalism from Jacobi and Schelling to the British and American personalists. The themes that I will focus on are those that developed as essential constituents of the new worldview of a dynamic plurality of persons in relation. The absolute idealists, as well as many earlier metaphysicians, often spoke of a unity-in-diversity or a diversity-in-unity. The personalists too often adopted these or similar formulae, but with a decisive diVerence: their unity-in-diversity was a personal unity-in-diversity, where both the unity itself, and the diversity within it, were ultimately personal. The implications of this diVerence are radical. Indicating this basic characteristic of the new worldview, the personal unity-indiversity, as descriptive, for the personalists, of the deepest truth about reality, I will point out how, apart from the epistemological analysis of self-consciousness and self-determination with which we have already dealt, it implied, as a dynamic system, a new emphasis on will, not least in God—an emphasis which also led to a new understanding of creation. We return here, in a new context, to freedom, which was one of the most important issues that Wrst caused personalism to part company with impersonalism in its various pantheistic forms, and which precipitated the elaboration of the alternative worldview of personalism with its new epistemology and its new view of the absolute. Further, I will show how, while rejecting Romantic theogonies and maintaining the classical theistic understanding of the transcendent perfection of God, it emphasized the development and the individual self-actualization of the Wnite person. And I will indicate how the primacy of personality in relation to any kind of impersonal order prompted a rethinking of ethics and value-philosophy in individualized, personalistic terms. The self-actualization of the Wnite being as an individual person was inseparable from, and required, a new, concrete, individualized ethics, where morality, without losing its objective and universal aspect, was determined by the unique individuality of the person. Only so much will be said, however, as is required to support my argument about the historical lineage, the development, and the nature of early personalism. Because of the systematic interrelatedness of the various aspects of personalism, much has already been said about these themes in preceding chapters, and owing to the same interlocking cohesiveness the themes of this chapter are also themselves closely integrated.

1 Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 178.

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JAC O BI Even at what can be described as the earliest stages of the development of personalism, the two strands of interpretation of the concept of personality indicated by the Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie—‘The concept that aims at the spiritgifted individual’, or the ‘substantialist personalism’, and ‘the concept developed from the role’, the relational and dialogical personalism according to which ‘a person is a person only by the fact that it faces other persons’—were not only compresent, but coalesced and merged. Uniting from the beginning the social and the individualistic strands and their historical lineages, Jacobi seems to have been the Wrst philosopher to enunciate the personalist thematic of the I–Thou relationship. With his most important insight, the co-originality of the I and the Thou, Jacobi, in O. F. Bollnow’s view, anticipated with the intuition of genius results which twentieth-century philosophy would reach only after much hard work.2 This fact is not well known in the English-speaking scholarly world, and the various passages where the formulation of the principle appears therefore deserve to be rendered here in extenso. The Wrst is from Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza: Through faith we know that we have a body, and that outside of us there are other bodies and other thinking beings. A veritable and wondrous revelation! For after all we sense only our body, constituted in this way or that; and in feeling it constituted in this way or that, we become aware [gewahr] not only of its changes, but also of something more, wholly diVerent from it, which is neither mere sensation nor thought, other real things, and that with the same certainty [mit eben der Gewißheit] with which we become aware of ourselves, for without Thou, the I is impossible. We obtain all representations, therefore, simply through modiWcations that we acquire, and there is no other way to real cognition; for whenever reason gives birth to objects, they are chimeras.3

The second passage is from David Hume: ‘also in the most primordial and simple perception both the I and the Thou, the inner consciousness and outer object must be present at once [sogleich] in the soul, both in the same now, in the same indivisible instant, without before and after, without any operation of the understanding, yes, without beginning in it even from afar the generation of the concept of cause and eVect.’4 Interestingly, in both passages the ‘Thou’ stands rather for external things, in the way we noted in the previous chapter. In this Jacobi anticipates Buber, who, in addition to his strictly personalist use also, albeit with

2 Bollnow, Die Lebensphilosophie F. H. Jacobis, 132. Bollnow’s analysis in the light of twentiethcentury phenomenological dialogicism is more important than his connection of Jacobi with irrational Lebensphilosophie, even though an unhistorical element enters into both interpretations. Hammacher, in Die Philosophie Friedrich Heinrich Jacobis, develops the phenomenological and dialogical interpretation, but also combines it with a transcendental idealist one; cf. Hammacher, ‘Jacobi und das Problem der Dialektik’, in Hammacher (ed.), Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. 3 Jacobi, Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza, 163–4 (the Wnal sentence is omitted in the Werke edition); cf. the ‘Beylage’ to this work: Werke, iv/1. 211. 4 Id. Werke, ii. 176.

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a different meaning, used the term about nature. In these formulations Jacobi’s main concern is to defend reality independent of the idealistic subject. A third passage is found later in the same work: Life and consciousness are one. A higher degree of consciousness depends upon the greater number [in the 1815 edition, ‘and nature [BeschaVenheit]’ is added] of the perceptions united in consciousness. Every perception expresses something external and something internal at the same time, and both in their relation to one another. Thus every perception is, as such, already a concept. As the action, so the reaction. And if the capacity to accept impressions is so varied and so perfect that the properties of imagination and memory, to which personality is connected, grow out of it, then what we call reason develops. [In the 1815 edition: ‘that an articulated echo is heard within consciousness, then above sensation there rises the word; there appears what we call reason, there appears what we call person.’]

In a note, Jacobi adds: ‘The ‘‘I’’ and the ‘‘Thou’’ are distinguished in the Wrst perception at the same time. But the ‘‘I’’ becomes more distinct in equal measure as the ‘‘Thou’’ does.—There arise concept, word, person.’5 Further on in the 1815 edition, Jacobi writes: ‘The human soul . . . is that which, distinguishing the I from the Thou (the not-I), clearly expresses [ausspricht] in us—the I.’6 In Von den Go¨ttlichen Dingen, Jacobi explains that we ‘must . . . Wrst receive our being [Daseyn] from another’: ‘Since for us, without outer no inner, without Thou no I is either actual nor possible, we are certain of the other as of ourself, and love it like life, which is granted us through it.’7 A further passage, in the 1815 introduction to the Werke, discusses the unsatisfactory way in which Kant, according to Jacobi, had taken up his formula in his ‘refutation’ of idealism, and how it had then been ‘turned around’ by J. G. Fichte as he sought to show that ‘ ‘‘Every Thou is I’’, or that the absolute I is all that is. But then it followed again at the end that ‘‘All that is, is nothing’’.—For what else would an absolute subjectivity be, or a subject that is just subject through and through?’8 There are other relevant passages, and the theme is present from the beginning in Jacobi’s thinking.9 Reality is for Jacobi transcendent in relation to the subject as well as immanent in it, since it is in the relation to it that the subject deWnes its identity, being thus distinct through the relation to that by which it is determined. But this also works the other way, and the transcendent reality too is deWned by the diVerentiation of

5 Jacobi, David Hume, 176–7 and n.; Werke, ii. 263. 6 Id. Werke, ii. 278. 7 Ibid. iii. 292. 8 Ibid. 39–41 and n. As we saw in the last chapter, Pringle-Pattison referred to the same point in Fichte’s philosophy. 9 This can be seen in a letter to J. C. Lavater from 1781, where Jacobi cites an earlier letter of his own from 1775 in which he expresses the centrality for him of the Thou both of other humans and of God; Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s auserlesener Briefwechsel, i. 330–2. Buber cites these early formulations as evidence both of Jacobi’s contribution to the dialogical principle and of what he sees as an insuYcient diVerentiation of the human and the divine Thou: ‘Zur Geschichte des dialogischen Prinzips’, 293–5.

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the relation. The diVerence between Spinoza and Jacobi is that, for the latter, the intuition of the reality that is not that of external objects and which corresponds to Spinoza’s vision preserves the distinction between subject and ‘object’. Since for Spinoza’s substance there was no ‘Thou’, it could not be an ‘I’.10 The reason why Jacobi focused so strongly on Spinoza’s monism and pantheism was that the question of personality was his main concern.11 When all abstractive distortion of experience is cleared away, we Wnd that the ‘I’ cannot be existentially asserted except in relation to a ‘Thou’. Awareness of the existence of the ‘Thou’ is implicit in our own self-awareness. The ‘I’ and the ‘Thou’ are necessarily and signiWcantly related as well as distinct, dependent as well as independent. But again, Jacobi’s formula that there can be no ‘I’ without a ‘Thou’ is applied to the outside world as such, to external things, not only to the other person. In Jacobi’s I–Thou formulations, experienced individuality in the external world is not so distinctly a personal individuality. Nevertheless, the basic relation is the relation to God, and it is in the experience of the simultaneously transcendent and immanent reality of God that the subject is for Jacobi consciously individuated. In the relation to God, God is, as the Thou is in principle, as every Thou, experienced as co-original—in Bollnow’s term, gleichurspru¨nglich— with the Wnite person. But as the ground, indeed the creator, of the latter, God is of course also a Thou that is more original—urspru¨nglicher.12 The relation is described in strongly and distinctly Augustinian terms: ‘Man Wnds God, while he can Wnd himself only in God, and he is himself unfathomable [unergru¨ndlich], since for him the nature of God is necessarily unfathomable’; ‘man loses himself as soon as he resists Wnding himself in God as his creator, in a way inconceivable to his understanding [seinem Verstande]’. And for Jacobi, the alternative to this Wnding, man’s grounding of himself in himself alone, is nothingness or selfdeiWcation: ‘there is no third.’13 Not only the thematic of the relation to God, but also that of how the human subject Wnds itself standing in relation to other similarly individualized human subjects, and how these enter into reciprocal relations as individual persons, was deWnitely present in Jacobi, as has been noted by Bollnow and others. The ‘Thou’ thus represents for Jacobi either external things or nature, other human persons, or the personal God. Individuation for Jacobi takes 10 In diGiovanni’s words, Spinoza’s ‘ ‘‘substance’’ could not be a recognizable individual since it had no counterpart before which it could utter ‘‘I’’ in a meaningful sense. It had neither consciousness nor individual freedom—no personality, in other words, as Spinoza himself clearly admitted. And since by its very presence it tended to dissolve whatever distinction was introduced within it, neither did it allow for personality to subsist within it as a limited reality. In a Spinozistically conceived universe, individual freedom and individual consciousness—the necessary conditions of personality—had to be mere phenomena due to a limited, and ultimately false, view of things.’ ‘Introduction’, 69. 11 Ibid. 69–70. 12 Bollnow, Die Lebensphilosophie F. H. Jacobis, 137. 13 Jacobi, Werke, iii. 48–9. Feuerbach’s later proclamation of sensual man as God somewhat bizarrely corresponds to Jacobi’s premonitions, retrieving the human I–Thou relationship in the consummation of man’s deiWcation.

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place through this interrelatedness of a plurality of individuals, the distinctions between which are numerical and not merely formal.14 His theory of consciousness—inseparable from his theory of personality—which was also involved in this analysis of individuation, seems to have introduced many of the themes of Anerkennung, the mutual recognition of one subject of another, which were to be further developed by the post-Kantian idealists, albeit in a way of which Jacobi did not in all respects approve. diGiovanni does not hesitate to draw out the fuller personalistic implications of Jacobi’s formulations which clearly distinguish him from such developments: ‘The ‘‘Thou’’ stands Wrst and foremost for God, whose immanence yet transcendence with respect to every created subject serves to individualize the latter radically. But once thus individualized, a created ‘‘I’’ is in a position to meet another equally created and individualized ‘‘I’’, and the two can then enter into a genuine relationship because, being irreducibly limited, they can truly face one another as real individuals.’15 And he goes on to point out the ‘scandalous’ nature of this position from the perspective of classical metaphysics: it ‘implies that God himself would have to be somehow individualized, hence in some sense Wnite, precisely in order to play his role as absolute Thou’.16 Here, Jacobi would refuse to be drawn into argument, for any paradox arises only on the assumption of the philosophers’ ‘inWnite’, which eschews determination and individuality by deWnition. So far as Jacobi is concerned, he only needs to identify the conditions that make for genuine personal relations. And if, to be true to these conditions, one must use with respect to God the language of metaphor—which portrays him both as almighty yet as someone who loves and hates like us—then metaphor will have to take precedence over concept. Through conceptualization we cannot penetrate to God’s being anyway; why should we then dismiss the witness of universal common language?17

In some passages Jacobi is still inXuenced by a non-individual, more Kantian view of the person, but he clearly insists on individuality as such, and in other passages he argues at length in historically signiWcant formulations for an individualized, and rather rich and deep, concept of the person.18 Personality is mysterious, unfathomable.19 Although the I–Thou principle was for Jacobi a general epistemological rather than a purely personalistic one, it can be seen as paradigmatic of the main line of personalism because of this new understanding of personality, and in the combination of the human-social view of the emergence of identity and the more individualistic or substantialist view of man as Wrst individuated by his unique relation to God. Taken together, the aspects of Jacobi’s philosophy that I focus on in this book fully warrant the identiWcation of him as a personalist. Timm points to Jacobi’s stress on reciprocal personal relatedness, and

14 16 18 19

diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 92–3. 15 Ibid. 81. Cf. above, Wrst section of Ch. 3. 17 diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 81. Jacobi, Werke, i. 236–7; iv/1. 23–4; Jacobi an Fichte, 101–2. Hammacher, Die Philosophie Friedrich Heinrich Jacobis, 92–4.

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to the similarities with the Interpersonalita¨tsphilosophie of the twentieth century.20 Indeed, he shows that, among his contemporaries, not only Goethe but Herder and other Romantic pantheists, as well as the earlier rationalistic ones, called Jacobi a personalist—in a derogatory sense and, despite Herder’s perception of the novelty of his concept of the personality of God, alongside other terms of opprobrium like ‘orthodox’ and ‘dualist’.21 Breckman emphasizes how Jacobi sought to assert the autonomy and freedom of created individual persons, while problematizing Kant’s understanding of subjectivity: his ‘attempt to establish self-certitude and autonomy upon our intuitive belief in the unconditioned ground of all being, the personal God, proved highly consequential for the course of post-Kantian idealism’. In many ways, seeking to ‘rescue free and autonomous individuals and the domain of human values from the nihilistic monism of universal rationality’,22 Jacobi could be said to have initiated the criticism of the modern philosophy of the subject in terms of a philosophy of the person, a criticism which carried with it a diVerent way of seeing the world. All the philosophies that Jacobi criticized had one central characteristic in common, and this characteristic was what he turned against. It is neatly summarized by Timm: they all took their point of departure in the ‘suprapersonal general’, not in the God revealed in inner certitude and in the individual that is his image; creation by a willing, intelligent God is denied, and the ‘unlevelable independence [unnivellierbare Eigensta¨ndigkeit] of the transcending faith in God of the created being’ are sacriWced to the ‘all-mediating rational nature, the Deus sive natura naturans’; ‘Where universal unity is to be thought, all designations of the whole must become arbitrary. Whether Ensoph, omnitudo realitatis, substance, I, or Geist is Wnally of no consequence.’23 The philosophies rejected by Jacobi all tried to reduce individual being and events and distinct human personality to mere phenomena or appearances of the only real, ‘original, absolute self-ness’. Descending into it, one leaves ‘all empirical givens behind, including the correlative determination of the religious relation between the soul and its God’. The coincidence of the Wnite and the absolute self, the all, may ‘lead to blasphemic conceit of omnipotence’ or ‘total annihilation’—but they amount to the same thing: Jacobi’s objection is that ‘subjectivity, because of its selfreferential closedness, is incapable structurally to represent the coexistential nature of human experience of reality. Basically, it has no need of communication with the world and others. To escape such unrest is precisely the existential motive of the ecstasy of solitary thought.’24 Through this criticism, Jacobi partly introduced the personalist view of reality as a system of persons, a worldview where the individual person was primary in every respect. In Snow’s words, Jacobi Wnds truth to be ‘most real when it comes

20 Timm, Gott und die Freiheit, 138. 21 Ibid. 139, 186, 231, 305, 339. 22 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 26–8. 23 Timm, Gott und die Freiheit, 158. 24 Ibid. 138.

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to life in particular individual people and situations’. Only in ‘the words and actions of individual people’ is there access to ‘universal truth about the human condition’, something which is ‘perhaps . . . no more paradoxical than the fact that the universal desire to know is always and only instantiated in actual living persons’.25 The problem, however, was that Jacobi did not provide any philosophical formulation of the relation between this individuality and universality; it was diYcult to see how the latter could still be meaningfully asserted. Applying Aristotle’s idea that the concrete good is what the good man chooses to do, Jacobi reduces morality to the immediate certainty of individual, subjective feeling or instinct and the study of its concrete expressions. This feeling or instinct is clearly a manifestation of man’s higher, supersensual nature. In this, Jacobi diVers from the Scottish philosophers. It is not only an expression of man’s consciousness of the good, beyond all utilitarian or hedonistic concerns, but it is also beyond the divinely implanted sympathetic feelings and their resultant unselWsh promotion of the general happiness. It demands the virtuous love of the transcendent good in itself. Yet it is always exclusively expressed in individual terms. General formulae or rules cannot capture it, Jacobi insisted; the letter kills, only the true inner spirit of morality brings it alive. Jacobi was not in all respects a typical Romantic; yet here he does seem to rely on a kind of moral individual genius. It is perhaps not surprising that when from such a position he asserted that the law is made for man, not man for the law, Goethe countered that ‘the law makes man’.26 There clearly emerges in Jacobi the view of the society of persons as a living one of will, action, and dynamism. He strongly stated a point that was to remain common in subsequent personalism, namely the validity of the category of causality as based in concrete personal experience and the structure of consciousness. Causality is a ‘concept of experience’.27 For the relation of the subject— closely connected through individuation to the concrete person—to its world is a dynamic relation of action and reaction. It is through this experience that the category of causality Wrst arises and acquires concrete meaning. Causality is thus characteristically linked to will, and the primacy of will is established as a central part of Jacobi’s polemic against Spinoza. We ‘cannot proceed from cause to cause ad inWnitum’, the series must end in the ‘will of some agent’ that ‘imparts direction’; this, in turn, cannot be conceived without conscious providence. As part of the personal analogy, creative causality is thus ascribed to God.28 Naturalism, Jacobi says, insists on ‘ground’, theism on ‘cause’.29 Causality and will are also linked to freedom. Only with freedom as the supreme principle can fatalism, and the reduction of ethics to physics, be obviated. But at the same time, freedom is not absolute, groundless self-activity: this is, in Jacobi’s view, the nihilism of ‘inverted Spinozism’. Freedom is self-activity

25 Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 28. 26 Warnecke, Goethe, Spinoza und Jacobi, 34. 27 Jacobi, Werke, iv/2. 145. 28 Ibid. iv/1. 132–3; diGiovanni, ‘Introduction’, 93–4. 29 Jacobi, Werke, iii. 404.

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determined by spiritual ideals, and independent of desire.30 It is wholly beyond the reach of Verstand, which, left to itself, denies it; it is inexplicable and unprovable, a given, original, underived, immediate, self-determined causal activity of the selfconscious individual in accordance with its own inner principle, which can only be experienced and described in particular instances of its working. It is, in other words, a power of personality. It has to be emphasized again, however, that Jacobi expressed his ideas only in a highly fragmentary, unsystematic manner. As the speculative theists were well aware, it is often diYcult to extract precise philosophical positions from his scattered pronouncements on the various issues I have discussed, and this is not least the case with freedom.31 The reality of freedom is for Jacobi given immediately with moral consciousness, but it also tends to be limited to this consciousness, consciousness determined by the good, so that the importance of formal freedom, freedom in the sense of liberum arbitrium, is obscured. This may have to do with his somewhat stricter, pre-Romantic dualism in his view of nature and man. Nature as an inWnite, universal mechanism is meaningless, only a principle that is outside the process of nature, persons with a higher reason inseparable from freedom, can give it meaning, and are an unavoidable presupposition.32 They are bringing freedom to nature rather than freely choosing within it. The philosopher must accept the divine will as ultimate and cannot proceed beyond it to further impersonal causes.33 The primacy of God’s causal, creating will leads to a distinct understanding of the nature and the status of the Wnite being in creation which is incompatible with impersonalistic pantheism. The Wnite person is, like God, a free initiator of action, and as individualized, he thus bears full moral responsibility for it. His nature is created by God, and is similar to God’s; individualized creative intelligence and will are primary in both God and man: If the universe is not God, but a creation; if it is the eVect of a free intelligence; then the original tendency of every being must be the expression of a divine will. This expression in the creature is its original law, in which the power to fulWl it must of necessity also be given. This law, which is the condition of the existence of the being itself, its original impulse, its own will, cannot be compared to natural laws that are only the results of relations and depend everywhere upon mediation.34

If Jacobi’s view of freedom was closely related to his view of morality, the latter, in turn, was closely connected with his understanding of religion, in a way which set it apart from Kant’s view of the latter as a mere practical postulate needed for the realization of morality. If we attempt to order more systematically Jacobi’s various formulations and positions discussed here and in the previous chapters, a distinct teaching with regard to morality and religion at least begins to emerge, a teaching which, as we will see, was to become richly developed and central in 30 Ibid. ii. 46–7; iv/1. 27. 31 On Jacobi’s view of freedom, see Lovejoy, The Reason, the Understanding, and Time, 50, 153–8. 32 Jacobi, Werke, ii. 315–17; iii. 401–2; iv/1. 28. 33 Ibid. iv/1. 249–50. 34 Ibid. 34.

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subsequent personalism. Morality and religion are for Jacobi inseparable, in that the immediate feeling or awareness of the good—as of the true and the beautiful—in the form of individual feeling is a manifestation or revelation of God, and is immediately experienced as such. In Jacobi, the emphasis on individual feeling still had strong Romantic overtones, being easily associated with the period’s typical idea of the ‘beautiful soul’, which was much too Rousseauan in its uncritical emphasis on self-expression to be representative of early personalism. Yet for Jacobi, God is the source and paradigm of the moral good thus experienced, and as such, he must be a moral intelligence, a personal being. This was not only an additional, moral argument for the existence of God; it was, when the implications were drawn out, a distinct, personalistic metaphysic of morals. The basic personalistic position that values exist in persons only was fully developed by Jacobi. He did not, of course, use the term ‘values’ for the true, the good, and the beautiful, nor did he consider them merely ‘valid’, as did Lotze and the Baden Neo-Kantians.35 He considered them real existents, and real only in persons—in God as well as in Wnite persons. All of this is discussed by Bollnow, who, however, tends to think that the true, the good, and the beautiful in themselves were for Jacobi more important than God’s personality, and stresses the Wnite person’s relation to other Wnite persons as the locus of the ‘valuereality’.36 But clearly, for the thinker who wrote that ‘for me, personality is Æ and ø’, and who held that he could ‘not at all understand’ what ‘being, reality’ was, if it was not ‘person’,37 value and personality were inseparable in both God and man.

SCHELLING With the later Schelling, the philosophy which regarded reality as primarily a plurality of persons in relation, with all of its implications for the various Welds of philosophy, was given a strong reinforcement and development. Like Jacobi’s beginnings, in central respects it deWned and anticipated the development of the whole of the emerging current of personalism. The early Schelling had agreed with Hegel that salvation lay in the merging of the individual and the absolute, an idea based on the Promethean Romanticism according to which, in Breckman’s words, ‘freedom consists of the radical overcoming of all otherness through the recognition of the universal presence

35 Schmid interprets Jacobi’s understanding of the true, the good, and the beautiful in terms of Neo-Kantian values, adding the value of ‘the holy’. 36 Bollnow, Die Lebensphilosophie F. H. Jacobis, 118–27. 37 In the letter to Lavater (1787) cited in the last chapter, in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobis auserlesener Briefwechsel, i. 436. The view of personality as Alpha and Omega should be compared to Schelling’s diVerentiation between God as Alpha and as Omega, as impersonal and undeveloped, and as having become personality through the developmental process of the world and man.

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of spirit in all nature’ and an ‘assertion of their ultimate identity’.38 He could write that ‘our highest strife is to destroy our personality, passing over into the sphere of absolute Being’.39 Again, it is on this issue that the break with his earlier system becomes most evident. For all the continuities, here there is a complete reversal. Schelling came to conceive of salvation as depending on ‘the person’s potentiality as the imago dei ’. He now thought that the individual ‘instinctively resists an Absolute that would swallow it, whereas he freely chooses in faith a God who is living, personal, and redeeming’, that ‘the relation between the divine and the human must always be between persons, a relationship of analogy and dependence rather than one of identity’.40 ‘A person needs [sucht] a person’.41 Knowledge is by personal ‘acquaintance’ or ‘association’.42 There is a need in the self which is practical in nature, which arises of practical necessity and out of a need for liberation: a need for a God beyond mere thought. This need cannot arise from thought itself, and is not a postulate of practical reason: ‘only the individual leads [fu¨hrt] to God. For it is not the general [das Allgemeine] in man that desires Bliss, but the individual . . . the I, as itself a personality, desires personality, demands [fordert] a person, which is outside of the world and above the general, which perceives him [die ihn vernehme], a heart that is similar to itself.’43 Thence the philosophy of a society of persons: ‘this is the secret of love, that it unites such beings as could each exist for itself, and yet neither is nor can be without the other.’44 The substantial and individualist view and the social and relational view of personality here seem to be Wrmly united. Even before the Freiheitsschrift, in Philosophie und Religion (1804), Schelling had introduced the idea of the ‘Fall’ of man from God, a radical ‘break’, or ‘leap’ from the absolute, taking place outside of time.45 The absolute as ideal, essence, and eternity is said to require the counterpart of the real, existent, and temporal. As Snow points out, this theory was intended to ‘render otiose all claims that the Wnite is somehow swallowed up in the inWnite’.46 History is conceived as the scene both of the acting out of the evil propensities of particular wills deformed to selfcenteredness, and, more fundamentally, of the process of reconciliation and return to the absolute: History is an epic composed in the mind of God; its two major parts are: that which represents the going-forth of mankind from its center to its greatest distance from Him, the other which represents the return. The former is the Iliad, the latter the Odyssey of history. In the former the direction was centrifugal, in the latter centripetal. The great purpose of the entire appearance of the world expresses itself in this manner in history. The ideas, the spirits, had to fall away from their center and enter into nature, the general

38 39 40 41 43 46

Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 58. Cited in Reardon, Religion in the Age of Romanticism, 95. Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 58. Schelling, Werke, xi. 566. 42 Ibid. viii. 81–2; x. 173. Ibid. xi. 569. 44 Ibid. vii. 408. 45 Ibid. vi. 38. Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 188.

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sphere of the Fall, into particularity, in order that afterwards they could, as particulars, return into the indiVerence and be in it, reconciled with it and without disturbing it.47

In Jacobi, the real otherness and real diVerentiation of created personal beings, which was the cardinal theme of his philosophy and which was to become a basic, determining tenet of the whole of the subsequent development of personalism, already had a strong Augustinian character, describing as it did man’s Wnding himself in God without losing his personal uniqueness. This character was reinforced in Schelling’s personalism, with its emphasis on the higher and lower will and the higher and lower self. For Schelling’s idea of the Fall was subsequently combined with the Augustinian theme of the bifurcation of man’s fundamental drive of amor into his lower, rebellious, ego-centred proclivities and his higher orientation towards God. Not only God’s but man’s selfhood is characterized and determined by will: self-will. In man, this will, pervertedly asserted against the whole, gives rise to his separation and turning away from God and thus to evil.48 This orientation of the will is also an expression of the impossible attempt on the part of the Wnite being to transcend the limiting conditions of his personhood, to raise to full actuality what must in him always remain to some extent potential.49 Despite its connection with sin, the Fall also, in Breckman’s words, ‘revealed the essential relationship between God and man. Echoing orthodox Christian premises, Schelling insisted that because humans are made in God’s image, they too have ‘‘personal unity’’ that allows them to raise their creaturely particularity to a principle of conscious self-assertion.’50 Thus Schelling’s new understanding of freedom came to be: it was ‘based not on the inWnite selfhood of spirit but on human personality born of sin and the radical capacity for good and evil in each person’.51 Jacobi’s concern for freedom was theologically oriented, and so was plainly, although in a slightly diVerent sense, Schelling’s. This theological and moral understanding of freedom was to remain predominant among personalists. Yet it was not opposed to the understanding of the theoretical signiWcance of freedom. Freedom as based on the person’s capacity for good and evil was related to Schelling’s new voluntarist metaphysics; and this metaphysics of dynamism was one with his new whole of personal relations. Yet it did not, in its rejection of idealism’s subjectivity, fall back either upon traditional theism, which was still bound up with classical metaphysics, or upon anthropomorphism, but ‘conceived of God’s personality as pure will and free creativity’.52 For Schelling, ‘the concept of being itself had to be rethought until it could be understood as compatible with the reality of freedom’. Schelling sides with Scotus against Aquinas, Hegel, and Enlightenment science.53 The central voluntaristic formulation 47 49 50 51 52 53

Schelling, Werke, vi. 57. 48 Ibid. vii. 364–5, 389–90, 399–400. Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 175; Schelling, Werke, vii. 399. Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 58. Ibid. Ibid. 56. Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 111–12, 155–6.

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is the one found in the Freiheitsschrift: ‘Will is primordial being, and all predicates apply to it alone: groundlessness, eternity, independence of time, self-aYrmation. All philosophy strives only to Wnd this highest expression.’54 But equally strong formulations are found in the Munich lectures on the System der Weltalter of 1827–8, where Schelling explains that ‘all being is just willing. There is no other being than willing [Es giebt kein Sein als das Wollen]’.55 Schelling sought to bring out a deeper meaning of the metaphor of creation in order to counter the rational systems of monism. His interpretation of God as beginning, and the philosophy of time that was developed out of it, was, Snow says, ‘an eVort to bring alive the relation between the human and the divine’. So too was his philosophical explication of the doctrine of man’s being created in God’s image. Appealing to ‘our intuitions about autonomy and individuality’, Schelling held, against rational pantheism, that ‘If man is created by God, and God is in the highest degree autonomous, how could that to which he most directly gives rise utterly fail to possess that which characterizes God so unmistakably?’ He tried to explain ‘the sense of burgeoning autonomy of both ideas and human individuals’, individuals who are ‘fu¨r sich fortwirkend ’, who take on a life of their own; this ‘forms an important basis for his concept of personality’.56 Not only must man be (Wnitely) autonomous, he must also be (Wnitely) creative, co-creative with God: However one may conceive of the procession of creatures from God, it can never be a mechanical one, no mere eVecting [Bewirken] or production [Hinstellen], in which the eVected [das Bewirkte] is nothing for itself; quite as little can it be an emanation, in which the emanating [das AusXießende] remains identical with that from which it is emanated, that is, nothing to itself [Eigenes], independent. The procession of beings from God is a self-revelation of God. God can, however, only become revealed in that which resembles him, in free beings whose actions spring from themselves; beings for whose being there is no other ground than God, but who are as God is.57

In the new ‘pantheism of a living God’, ‘all the other Wnite and limited lives’ are contained and grounded in God, ‘but still governed by their own inner laws’. Freedom requires a being’s independent life and action according to the laws of its own nature.58 Since this nature is also freely chosen, the existentialist focus— culminating in the Berlin lectures against Hegel—is not abandoned. Freedom is self-determination—not arbitrary, but somehow controlled by what is already an individual, intelligible character. Self-determination is for Schelling the determination of one’s acts as Xowing from one’s essential character quite as much as the determination of that character itself. It cannot be denied that some of Schelling’s formulations on freedom are hard to distinguish from Spinoza’s or

54 Schelling, Werke, vii. 350. 55 Id. System der Weltalter, 173. For central formulations on God as will related to God’s personality and God as creator, see pp. 74–8, 162–74. 56 Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 154–5, 196–7. 57 Schelling, Werke, vii. 346–7. 58 Ibid. 155.

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Hegel’s.59 In the pantheism of freedom, the Wnite being’s distinct position is characterized by ‘that higher necessity which is equally far removed from accident and from compulsion or external determination, which is rather an inner necessity which springs from the nature of the active agent itself ’. Schelling strongly revised the Kantian view of autonomy, so that when he held that ‘that is free which acts according to the laws of its own nature and is not determined by anything else either within or without it’, the laws of the inner being were given through a unique intelligible character which is not an ‘undetermined general’.60 The determinations that direct man’s temporal series of actions are given through a timeless, free, ungrounded act of will which precedes being and essence, while at the same time producing them, that is, the intelligible character, which then works as a higher necessity in temporal existence. Each freely creates the laws of his being, but is then bound by them, as the whole course of his temporal existence and the range of his real and possible acts Xow from and are determined by them. As Snow points out, Schelling’s position is closer to Aristotle’s than to Kant’s.61 Schelling’s complex yet sublime metaphysical view of character-formation explains for him not only the sense of persistent personal identity. It also explains the sense of our acts being neither wholly arbitrary nor wholly determined, our experience of our being responsible for our actions as springing from ourselves and our own free choice, while at the same time they are necessary and unavoidable for us in the present moment.62 The theory also seeks to explain moral evil as a reality, by the way it conceives of our division from God through an original self-positing: ‘That Judas became a traitor to Christ, neither he nor any creature could alter, and yet he betrayed Christ not under compulsion, but willingly and with full freedom.’ But the goodness of Cato, who ‘never acted justly in order to do so (out of respect for the moral commandment) but because he simply could not have acted otherwise’, was similarly a product of his freely chosen, but, in time, necessary character.63 At the same time, in the sense that knowledge presupposes actual being (in this case the being that is willing) there is no pure self-positing (despite man’s sharing in will as supreme) but rather, from the temporal perspective, self-apprehension with regard to this character.64 As we have seen, Schelling conceives of the limiting, conditioning factor which he sees as required for God to have actual, personal existence, as being within God. It is thus not something that God can set aside, since that would be to ‘set aside himself ’. God, however, ‘subdues’ the condition, whereas man ‘never gains control over the condition even though in evil he strives to do so; it is only loaned to him independent of him; hence his personality and selfhood can never be

59 60 62 63 64

Cf. Spinoza’s Ethics, part 1, def. 7 (The Collected Works, 409); Hegel, Werke, viii. 303–4. Schelling, Werke, vii. 383–4. 61 Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 171. Schelling, Werke, vii. 386; Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 172–3, 175. Schelling, Werke, vii. 386, 393. Ibid. 385–6; Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 169–70.

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raised to complete actuality’.65 This is Schelling’s way of expressing the common personalist theme that it is not God’s personality that is an illegitimate projection of man’s, but that rather man’s personality is less perfect than God’s. ‘All nature’, Schelling writes, ‘tells us that it is in no way there because of a mere geometric necessity; there is not pure reason in it, but personality and spirit.’66 One expression of the irrational Romanticism which entered into the whole of Schelling’s philosophical development and was present already in his philosophy of nature, is the use, emphasized by Snow, of the metaphor of procreation for the explanation of the manifest diversity of Wnite selves. This ‘preserves the emphasis on volition’, and, against Hegel’s ‘orchestrated parade of concepts’, points to ‘the spontaneity of creation, in that a genuinely unique individual is its result’. God now appears, Snow writes, as ‘an unspeakably proliWc author who is gazing in amazement at the antics of the characters with whom he has peopled the vast Wction of the world’.67 Another expression of Romanticism is of course Schelling’s assertion of the pure, irrational spontaneity of the will above rational thought and logical necessity. This was soon abandoned or revised by other personalists, yet many of his formulations about the primacy of personality in relation to the objective moral order clearly indicate the continuity with him of much later personalistic thought. These positions are all implicit in his formulations of God being no mere ‘logical abstraction’ from which everything proceeds with ‘logical necessity’, no mere ‘Supreme Law’ from which all derives, ‘without personality or consciousness thereof ’. They are also implicit in his formulations of creation being ‘not an event but an act. There are no consequences of universal laws; but God, that is God’s person, is the universal law, and all that happens happens because of God’s personality—not on account of an abstract necessity, which in action would be unendurable for us, let alone for God.’68 The measurement of man’s relation to other individuals and to God according to abstract thought, Kant’s practical reason, and the ideal world, can only satisfy the general in him, reason, not himself, the individual. We have to ‘penetrate above the general to personality [u¨ber das Allgemeine zur Perso¨nlichkeit durchdringen]’. For ‘reason and law do not love, only the person can love’.69

S P E C U L AT I V E T H E I S M Having taken over, with only minor modiWcations, the basic themes of Jacobi’s and Schelling’s criticism of abstract pantheism and idealism as well as the beginnings of a personalization of the absolute, the German speculative theists

65 Schelling, Werke, vii. 399. 66 Ibid. 395. 67 Snow, Schelling and the End of Idealism, 112, 155. 68 Schelling, Werke, vii. 394, 396. 69 Ibid. xi. 566, 569–70 and n. 2.

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followed them also in working out the implications of these positions with regard to the living, dynamic plurality of related selves, of freedom, and of will. As we have seen, reality is for the speculative theists ‘pervaded by an individualizing power’ which is ‘the source of freedom’ and identical with the will of God and his created beings. In turn, this power and will are identical with ‘the assertion of personality’.70 According to I. H. Fichte, ‘if God is in reality the absolute personality [die absolute Perso¨nlichkeit], if the world is therefore creation, a deed of the originally thinking reason and will in God [des urdenkenden Verstandes und Willens in Gott], if this is . . . to be taken seriously: then the whole dialectical circle [Umkreis] of Hegel is broken through’; ‘if God is person, if freedom is the root of all being, then all dialectical-rationalistic systems are seen to be inadequate’.71 Fichte insisted that only a philosophy of freedom, not a philosophy of mere concept, could be a Christian philosophy; thence, according to F. W. Graf, the ‘peculiar fascination’ of personality for those who sought an alternative to Hegel, for personality was for them ‘the primary locus of the experience of freedom’.72 And such personality was no mere temporary manifestation; its individuality was posited as eternal in God.73 The tendency of the speculative theists was to move away from the Romantic extremism of the later Schelling’s philosophy, although some preserved a few theosophical elements.74 The German speculative theists’ Kathederphilosophie did not display the spectacular or ostentatious features of, for instance, a Schopenhauer, or the originality of a Kierkegaard. But these facts easily obscure the real importance and novelty of the positions it defended. The important thing here is that it was representative and that, in broad outline, it stabilized emergent personalism in what were to become more standard forms of its unique development of traditional theism and modern idealism. It was by such modiWcations that the speculative theists contributed to the broader early and mid-nineteenthcentury movement’s ‘eVort to salvage the God of orthodox theism, whether through orthodox or ‘‘speculative’’ means’, which ‘was linked to a parallel eVort to preserve the personality of the individual, made in God’s image, against the corrosive eVect of Hegel’s allegedly anti-individualist system’.75 Breckman neatly captures the historically distinct features of the personalized analogism that was

70 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 53; Breckman refers to Weisse’s Grundzu¨ge der Metaphysik. 71 Fichte, Die Idee der Perso¨nlichkeit, 9–10, cited in Fuhrmans, Schellings letzte Philosophie, 66; see also ch. 2 in Fuhrmans’s book, passim. 72 Graf and Wagner (eds.), Die Flucht in den BegriV, 304–5. 73 Fichte, Beitra¨ge zur Charakteristik der neueren Philosophie, 381–2. 74 Even Lotze’s use of the term ‘Mikrokosmus’ in the title of one of his main works is striking; historically there is an obvious tension between the idea of the microcosm–macrocosm relation, prominent mainly in the esoteric tradition, and Christian personalism; Gregory of Nyssa remarked that man is not a microcosm, an image of the macrocosm, but an image of God, the creator of the macrocosm; see Danie´lou, ‘La Personne chez les pe`res grecs’, 119–20. 75 Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory, 42.

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central to the establishment of reality as a system of interrelated persons: ‘God gives His shape to the human person’ or ‘imparts the unity of conscious will to the human’. For the speculative theists, ‘human personality is not identical to that of God, because the personality of God comprises absolutely self-identical Being, or absolute unity of consciousness, and complete freedom requires this divine unity of self, for absolute personality experiences no limiting condition upon its will’. Human beings, on the other hand, ‘cannot abstract themselves either from their dependence on God or from the otherness of nature’; yet ‘despite these limitations on human freedom, the distinctness of the human person as a relatively self-identical being ensures the integrity of personhood both in this world and in the next’.76 SigniWcantly, Breckman observes that Fichte and Weisse did not primarily object to Hegel’s absolutizing and divinizing of Wnite being, ‘but rather that in asserting the absolute status of spirit, he sublated the speciWc reality of Wnite existent beings into a mere moment of spirit’s progress’.77 This clearly indicates the humanistic and liberal elements which personalism often shared with other forms of nineteenth-century idealism. Fichte, indeed, spoke of the necessity of broadening the speciWcally Christian theism to a humanistic theism.78 This was what contemporary critics like Kierkegaard rejected as an inadmissible compromise with secular culture, and what von Hu¨gel and Metz described in similar terms. It must be added, however, that personalism, because of its deWning criticism of pantheism, at the same time did react against absolutizing and divinizing immanentism as well.

Biberg The Swedish idealists of personality broke more emphatically than their German counterparts with Romantic theosophy, and at least the most inXuential among them, Geijer, insisted more sharply on the interrelatedness of persons. In this at least, it seems on the whole that it was they who took the next step in the development of personalism and pointed more directly ahead to the British and American development. The core themes were, however, the same. Apart from the epistemological and metaphysical ones we have already studied, and which are fundamental to or which lead directly to the distinct positions discussed in this chapter, the extent to which Biberg, Grubbe, Atterbom and Geijer all shared the orientation towards a priority of moral arguments that was prevalent in much idealism and liberal theology must be emphasized. Yet these moral arguments now take a new turn, and undergo a distinctly personalist transformation. Against Kant and Fichte, Biberg holds, with all speculative theists, that it is not enough to view God as a moral world-order; nor is it enough to consider him

76 Ibid. 51–2.

77 Ibid. 53.

78 Fichte, Vermischte Schriften, i. 114.

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merely as a moral world-governor. God must be understood as moral legislator. Already with this understanding it is possible to elevate God as a person, as pure and supreme spirit, above the world and above an impersonal, objective moral order.79 Biberg explained at length and in innovative terms how morality must in a sense be individualized, without losing its objective validity as issuing from the will of God. Thus from moral considerations alone he sought to establish the personal unity-in-diversity which was of the essence of the new personalism. Relinquishing the existentialist element in Schelling’s idea of the intelligible character, while granting an independent sphere of free action for Wnite persons based on the view of the freedom of the will as liberum arbitrium or the selectability of the grounds of determination, Biberg and the other idealists of personality sought to explain the possibility of a unity of autonomy and theonomy in the Wnite person, even when that person acted in accordance with his individual archetype, image, or idea in God. The partial independence of the Wnite person is explained by Biberg in paradigmatic fashion: Independent and with its own consciousness, with its own centre of life and personality, although maintained within [ha˚llet uti] and sustained [uppburet] by the intellectual principle and origin [upphov] of all life—thus man must . . . necessarily be conceived; what he thinks, feels, strives for and accomplishes, must be understood as issuing from a self, which despite all dependence, all sustainedness by a higher principle, is yet a real self; man cannot sink down or sink back into the original life [urlivet], he cannot be dissolved and dissipated in the Spinozistic or mystical all-life; and neither will he be wanting to do so. He will have God within himself, or Wnd himself within God, not in order to cease being man, but in order to be a truly living man, or in other words, in order to realize actively his potency given in the idea of creation.80

But Biberg’s version of Platonism strongly shapes his view of ethics too. It is through what he considers to be Plato’s understanding of God as a concrete spiritual reality and concrete reason in which human reason constitutes an idea or a moment, that religion and morality can be conceived as united in principle. For Biberg, man’s true nature is his divine idea, which is also an image of God. And because such an idea, an idea in God, is ‘not some empty abstraction, but a concrete principle, the moral norm has a content, which can be developed through a succession of actions’ and which can penetrate sensual nature.81 The realization of man’s own idea—‘the correspondence of realized being with the ideal’, the realization of ‘one’s own appropriated idea’—is thus the principle as well as the content of ethics:82 ‘My true being [va¨sende], the truly essential and properly potential within me, also gives me my destiny and mission [min besta¨mmelse],

79 Nyblaeus, Den WlosoWska forskningen i Sverige, iii/2. 256. 80 Biberg, ‘Inledning till etiken’, cited in Henningsson, Na˚gra frihetsproblem hos Nils Fredrik Biberg, 66. 81 Nyblaeus, Den WlosoWska forskningen i Sverige, iii/2. 208. 82 Biberg, ‘Inledning till etiken’, cited in Henningsson, Na˚gra frihetsproblem hos Nils Fredrik Biberg, 50–1.

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and not only half of them, but all of them, wholly and entirely.’83 In Henningsson’s words: ‘Instead of natural individuality a spiritual individuality must constitute a ground of determination for moral action.’84 Henningsson quotes from the ‘Introduction to Ethics’: In the moral complexus . . . which we symbolically call a moral kingdom, there is . . . no member who, awakened by the spirit of virtue, does not Wnd his own calling: and this . . . is . . . not . . . only an individuality of nature [naturindividualitet], which the spirit of virtue has penetrated and moulded [igenomtra¨ngt och igenombildat]: it is . . . quite as much and as truly a spiritual gift, which virtue’s own spirit has awakened and called forth to life, as it is a forming of something received. In this kingdom each member thus also exercises his own activity, and the unique character [egenhet] of this activity is determined as a unique character at least as much by the spirit itself as by nature. The spiritual love [in the manuscript, above the original text, Biberg has added the word ‘character’] has its own distinctive development in life.85

Henningsson remarks that what is ‘most important in man’s self-education [bildning] and ennobling’ is for Biberg the development of this ‘original content of the soul’. This, leading to the attainment of ‘participation in the super-sensual world’, and not the world-immanent ‘assimilation [of the spirit] with certain outer forms and organs, which are of a passing or temporary nature’, not ‘the forming of the outer diVerentiated manifold’, is the ultimate goal.86 Henningsson is right that Biberg is closer in this respect to J. G. Fichte than to Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher. But the decisive diVerences in relation to Fichte are evident also in Biberg. The culture and self-education which reaches only ‘the lower potency’, the animal and instinctual life, can gain coherence and unity through reXection, ‘and thus constitute an analogon of personality’, but ‘this is nothing moral as long as the idea of reason has not determined this cultivation’.87 There is no contradiction between the understanding of morality as the determination of will through the appropriation of God’s will (in Biberg’s words, ‘realization in action of the appropriation and incorporation of the divine necessity in the freedom of man’88), and the understanding of morality as the realization of man’s own idea or true being. For ‘man is in his true being an idea in or by [hos] God, in which God’s will or the divine necessity is revealed or manifested [uppenbarar sig]. The moral law is thus not a will that is alien to man, but a will that lies in the idea of his life.’89 Ultimately, it is God as ‘pure and supreme spirit’ who gives to man the moral law—only in this way can its ‘holy, 83 Biberg, ‘Fo¨rela¨sningar i WlosoWens historia’, cited in Nyblaeus, Den WlosoWska forskningen i Sverige, iii/2. 131 n. 1. 84 Henningsson, Na˚gra frihetsproblem hos Nils Fredrik Biberg, 23–4. 85 Biberg, ‘Inledning till etiken’, cited in Henningsson, Na˚gra frihetsproblem hos Nils Fredrik Biberg, 25–6. 86 Henningsson, Na˚gra frihetsproblem hos Nils Fredrik Biberg, 52, 54. 87 Ibid. 55. 88 Biberg, ‘Om fo¨rha˚llandet mellan religion och sedlighet’, cited in Nyblaeus, Den WlosoWska forskningen i Sverige, iii/2. 222. 89 Nyblaeus, Den WlosoWska forskningen i Sverige, iii/2. 222–3.

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absolute and unconditional’ character be explained. But at the same time it is ‘man himself, who in and through his ideal and spiritual being gives the moral law to himself, since this law is not an expression of a will foreign to man, but of a will lying in the idea of his own life’.90 The primary reality of the moral law is in the mind of God. But it exists there not only as an objective but as a concrete and fully determined reality, and as such it is communicated to man via his individual idea and ‘in a living manner . . . appropriated’ by his will. And ‘from this moral law as alive . . . in will there issue immediately moral acts as singular’. Only through reXection on them as such and by subsequent conceptualization, that is, by a movement ‘from the singular to the speciWc and from the speciWc to the general’, are ‘moral laws’ created by the understanding, whereby the ‘urge to actuality’ of the living idea is perceived as a continuous and consistent law. But just as general concepts do not in themselves constitute knowledge, the letter of the law, the formulae of moral rules, are not the source or cause of the good. They have no ‘vivifying power’, and cannot produce good or moral acts without connection to the spirit of the law or the virtue which they have sought conceptually to Wx, without ‘the spirit that is bound in the expression of the law [coming] alive in man himself ’. The letter, the formulae, are necessary but insuYcient. Actions springing from mere adherence to them are slavish, since they are ‘forcefully commanded through a conception which has acquired [a relatively] external power over the agent’; his actions ‘do not issue from a freely or independently living principle of freedom’. The more or less general laws, which can never capture the fullness of the concrete moral spirit, are unable to win a secure victory over natural desire. They are, furthermore, necessarily changing, whereas ‘spirit alone is eternally the same, self-identical but recognizable in its revelation in many diVerent expressions’.91 Through the strong symmetry or even unity between Biberg’s metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, a position thus emerges in the light of which Kant’s autonomous moral law appears almost heteronomous in its generality, and which reconceives ethics in terms of a spiritual individualism. If the moral rule is too general or undetermined, it cannot give any enlightenment. But if, on the other hand, it is made too speciWc or determined, it can become too narrow a limit, a fetter on the moral life. Only what must be described as a personalistic solution of this dilemma is possible. In Nyblaeus’s words: ‘Only he who is himself virtuous makes of the undetermined prescription a good and right use, whereas he who is not virtuous . . . bends the prescription to suit his desire, even with the strictest adherence to its letter.’92 The ‘spiritual character’ of the decision which lies at the basis of his use of the moral rules is ‘the only guarantee that man will enliven the letter with the moral spirit which lives in him; it is . . . the guarantee that man will

90 Nyblaeus, Den WlosoWska forskningen i Sverige, iii/2. 256. 91 Biberg, ‘Inledning till etiken’, cited in Henningsson, Na˚gra frihetsproblem hos Nils Fredrik Biberg, 93–6. 92 Nyblaeus, Den WlosoWska forskningen i Sverige, iii/2. 257–8.

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in every single case give the right interpretation of the law’. Such an interpretation can only spring from a ‘deeper spiritual life’ in man; ‘only the man who is driven by the spirit of morality is free in and under his obedience to the law’.93 To the extent that will appropriates from inside the spirit of the law and the nature of the idea, man becomes independent of the letter, ‘free from the discipline of the law without being free from its obedience [efterfo¨ljd]’. In morality realized as a unity of divine necessity and human freedom, there can be no categorical imperative. For ‘there is no obligatory command for one who himself wills only the good’. The purely moral constitution of mind makes immoral acts impossible and thus has the character of necessity, ‘yet the will obeys its own law, is a pure expression of autonomy, and is thereby still completely free’.94 Here Schellingian themes are recognizable amidst the strong Platonizing elements, which are in turn individualized in accordance with the needs of what could perhaps be described as a characteristically Evangelical Christian temperament.95 A speciWcally modern element of individualism which was not unrelated to liberalism in a broad modern sense entered into Biberg’s philosophy, yet he was in fact closer to the kind of conservatism described by Breckman and fought by the Young Hegelians than Grubbe and Geijer. The liberal element becomes more clearly manifest in the latter thinkers, in comparison with whom Biberg was certainly a conservative.

Grubbe On the questions of the relation between the personal absolute and the Wnite personal beings, Grubbe, like Biberg, remains largely silent. The reality and 93 Ibid. 259; cf. Henningsson, Na˚gra frihetsproblem hos Nils Fredrik Biberg, 22–3. 94 Nyblaeus, Den WlosoWska forskningen i Sverige, iii/2. 223, 259. 95 That the idea of man which determines the concrete, singular commands of the moral spirit is conceived by Biberg as individual is conWrmed by his typically ‘Platonizing’ development of Schleiermacher’s teaching on the ‘formal concepts’ of ethics, the third of which is the opus morale (the Wrst is virtue and the second duty). The truest concept of the opus morale, Biberg holds, is Plato’s; for him the highest good for man is his likeness to God: man should ‘shape, according to the divine idea which is communicated to him and which constitutes his potency, Wrst his inner self and then the outer world, to the extent that it is subject to his inXuence’: ibid. 315. In congruity with his theoretical modiWcation of Plato’s theory of ideas, Biberg also develops it in his practical philosophy: ‘That which in this way is shaped according to the pattern [fo¨rebild] of the idea by the human individual, constitutes . . . the opus individuale or singulare, which . . . is included as an organic link in the opus totale or in the kingdom of God, as far as this is constituted and organized through the acts of man. For it is only through the organically conceived linking up [sammanknytningen] of all bona essentialia singularia to a perfected unity of the good, that the opus totale, the summum bonum, the Wnis bonorum arises for man’: ibid. 315–16. As in Kant—mutatis mutandis—it is through the action of divine providence that in the opus totale the eVect of moral action coincides with the opus itself. But through his notion of the concrete determination of the idea, from which the moral imperative and the moral act always issue as unique, individuality does not only possess an intrinsic value in the idea, and thus in individual man as the expression of the idea, but also in the moral opus. The opus singulare is for Biberg necessarily something more than a mere means for the opus totale or the kingdom of God, ‘for it is also an essential part of them, and that which is an essential part of something else, is never merely a means for it’. Ibid. 318; cf. Henningsson, Na˚gra frihetsproblem hos Nils Fredrik Biberg, 100–5.

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independence of the latter is a presupposition rather than an argued conclusion. With the exception of the defence of freedom, which in itself has certain metaphysical implications, issues such as that of creation versus co-eternality were generally not considered by Grubbe to be susceptible of meaningful philosophical treatment. Although other early personalists ventured into this territory, and at least had strong views on what positions were incompatible with reality as given in experience, in time many came, with Lotze, to observe speculative restriction with regard to metaphysical explanation, insisting that the task of philosophy is rather the understanding of that givenness. But Grubbe’s speculative caution is already an expression of this attitude. Instead of theoretical exploits of this kind, it is primarily his moral philosophy that is of relevance for the new personalist view of unity-in-diversity. Grubbe’s ethical concern, like Biberg’s, was how to unite the newly deepened understanding of individuality with moral and axiological objectivity and theistic metaphysics. Grubbe rejects eudaimonism in the ordinary sense, as the goal of the merely prudential counsels of the understanding and the exercise of free will as guided by such deliberation, that is, as conWned to sensual grounds of determination. But he accepts the idea of ‘happiness’ in a higher sense, as part of the determination of and by the will in accordance with reason and the categorical demands, indeed commands, of its idea of the moral good and the moral law as manifest in conscience. Moral obligation presupposes this idea as a law for the will, and formal freedom as the potential to obey the law or not, that is, to determine the will in accordance with the idea of the moral good or not.96 This determination does not, however, necessitate a total rejection of the sensual grounds of determination and of the satisfaction of sensual desires. In another typical personalist, neo-humanist move, similar to that of Friedrich von Schiller and Schleiermacher, Grubbe turns against the one-sidedly negative ethics of Kant and J. G. Fichte, and endorses the acceptance of such sensual determinations to the extent that they are in accord with the idea of the good.97 As the idea has a positive content, the moral law has positive requirements. The self-actualization of the Wnite being includes the proper cultivation and development of his sensual nature. The will should not be determined by desire, but this does not mean that it must always be determined contrary to desire. The moral law itself may command the satisfaction of the desire, and the satisfaction is legitimate if the will is determined by the law and not the desire itself.98 As we have seen, the idea of the moral good, which we Wrst apprehend through moral feeling and its judgements, is not a rational, abstractive concept of the understanding, but an idea of reason, and from Grubbe’s deWnitions of ‘idea’ and ‘reason’ it follows not only that it is, with regard to its content, something higher than what is given in sensual reality, but that this higher content can never be 96 Grubbe, Skrifter, iii. 85–6, 130–2, 188, 237. 97 This had been strongly emphasized also by D. Boethius (see Introduction), who sought to modify Kantianism by means of moral-sense philosophy. 98 Grubbe, Skrifter, iii. 133–4; cf. 300–5.

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exhaustively rendered in abstract concepts. Philosophers have normally regarded the formulation of general rules or laws as suYcient, and been satisWed to Wnd a single principium moralitatis stated in such terms. Such formulations always contain some truth, but have also always been merely one-sided and partial. Even if a general principium which covers the various expressions of the moral life is found, this is not enough: the real problem of ethics, and indeed the real requirement of the principle it seeks, is, for Grubbe, to Wnd and express the basis of this formulation, the real source of the moral life, that which gives the moral law its binding force and validity.99 Kant’s and Fichte’s versions of the principium express well what Grubbe calls the negative or formal moment of the requirements of the moral law.100 FulWlling this requirement, I free myself from the instinctual bondage to sensual desires and experience myself as a freely reXecting, self-identical and self-determining person. I not only become aware of my ability to choose freely among diVerent sensual grounds of determination, but as the moral life progresses, there arises from the resultant existence on a superior personal level the demand that I lift myself beyond such determinations altogether to a still higher position of independence. Thus the moral imperative as formulated by negative morality is indeed the demand to respect personality, as the supremacy of the free will over the desires, in oneself and others, and to treat each intelligent being as a person in this sense and not as a thing.101 But as a principium moralitatis this is for Grubbe obviously insuYcient. Leaving out the positive stage of ethical development, it does not take into account the full content of the moral consciousness. The formal and negative stage, autonomy in the sense of freedom from sensual desires, is a conditio sine qua non of all morality. But respect for my own and others’ human personality is not enough to explain the sanctity of the moral law. At the higher, positive stage, human personality is not regarded as the ‘highest and absolute’, but as ‘the organ of the absolute personality or of the execution of the divine will in the world’. And it is because of this that, according to this higher view, it should be respected.102 It now chooses a higher determination according to the good thus understood; this is the higher use of its freedom.103 The lower view, although taken up into the higher as a necessary moment, does not allow ‘true and complete inner harmony’ in man’s being as a whole, and it misconstrues the relation between morality and religion.104 We might add—as in slightly diVerent terms Grubbe himself does, as we shall soon see—that it also does not do justice to the unique individualities of persons, but merely demands respect for personality in general. All of this can be corrected or

99 Ibid. 138, 142, 161–2, 278. 100 Ibid. 174–213. 101 Ibid. 208–9, 212. 102 Ibid. 213, 253–4, 285–7. 103 Grubbe argues that Jacobi neglected the necessity of formal freedom—the same freedom that is exercised on the lower level with the help of the guidance of Verstand—for the possibility of the substantial, higher moral freedom: ibid. ii. 452–3, 468–72. 104 Ibid. iii. 213, 254.

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supplemented only by the higher, positive view of ethics which results from the awareness and explication of the moral idea as given in reason. The errors of Kant’s and Fichte’s positions follow, according to Grubbe, from their merely subjective idealism, which yields a mistaken notion of the absolute. ReXection’s ‘return to and turning in upon itself ’ which characterizes philosophy ever since Descartes brought indispensable new insights with regard to the necessity of an investigation of the problem of knowledge, the nature of consciousness, the concept of freedom, and the nature of morality.105 These insights, it should be added, were indeed essential to personalism. But the characteristic use that personalism made of them was to temper the standard, one-sided, radical autonomist conclusions that were increasingly drawn from them by bringing them instead into relation with traditional and more timeless concerns of metaphysics, ethics, and religion. Instead of severing the connection to the tradition of philosophy, it sought to combine the new with the old.106 The view of the moral law as an expression of the divine and as grounded in the divine, is, as Grubbe notes, both the oldest and the most popular. Yet this, he insists, does not at all mean that it has normally been understood in its ‘full purity’. Among the common distortions are the views of the moral law as based on the arbitrary will of God, and as deriving its obliging force from outer sanctions in the form of rewards and punishments. In this connection, Grubbe also mentions the notion of radical monistic union as another distortion of this traditional idea of morality. Mysticism takes the presence of the divine idea, in all of its aspects, the presence of all of the manifestations of the divine in human consciousness which bespeak the reality of man’s participation in a higher world, as proof of strict unity with the divine. This confusion is due to ‘imagination heated and exalted by emotion’; it leads to the assumption of ‘the possibility of a kind of merging or fusing of the Wnite being with the inWnite, or . . . of the annulment of its Wnitude . . . to coincide with the divine being’. Rising to awareness of the higher idea of moral good given in reason in no way cancels free reXection or the free self-determination of will. Once awakened, these remain as of the nature of the Wnite intelligence: ‘Only the mysticism which misunderstands itself can dream itself into a cessation of reXection and free self-determination through the merging of the Wnite intelligence with, or its dissolution in, the divine being.’ It should be added that, as Grubbe was well aware, it was not in mysticism only, but also in mainstream German idealism that the distinction between the Wnite being and the absolute was never made clear and the whole issue was notoriously and permanently blurred. Grubbe makes the line of demarcation 105 Grubbe, Skrifter, iii. 214–15. 106 Even Fichte himself, Grubbe notes, tended to realize some of the shortcomings of his early system and to move in the direction of an acknowledgement of an absolute reality above the human subject, a reality which was also the basis of the moral law: ibid. 215–16. This, incidentally, was the path on which Fichte’s son, Immanuel Hermann, consciously chose to continue. Fichte’s moral worldorder, Grubbe held, tended to fail as left to itself; it required a higher support than mere human subjectivity, as this could not supply the harmony between its own freedom and the necessity of nature which the moral world-order presupposed: ibid. 216–17.

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sharp, not least by stressing once more that the reason of the Wnite being can never reach complete, absolute knowledge, that this is something only the absolute reason itself can possess, that the Wnite being can only indeWnitely approximate it.107 It was normally on the historical manifestation in German idealism of pantheistic vagueness and looseness in this regard that the idealists of personality focused, although in them as in other personalists, the problematic also prompted the introduction of wider historical perspectives, often extending to Oriental thought.108 The purpose of ethics is to bring the idea of the good as given in moral feeling to a higher degree of clarity, and in this, Grubbe insists against Jacobi, who, in comparison with Kant and Fichte, represented the opposite extreme, that general formulations of the principium moralitatis and general ethical rules are indeed necessary. But no more than the general rules of aesthetics can express the fullness of the idea of beauty, can such general rules fully correspond to the idea of the good. As ‘partially and successively developing its content’, they are valid merely on the condition that they are related to ‘the ideal present to our mind in immediate inner intuition [a˚ska˚dning]’, and that ‘through this intuition what is missing in the concepts is supplied, in order to achieve a complete expression of the pure and full content of the idea’. What this means is that the idea of moral good contains an individual content alongside the universal: ‘The idea of moral perfection, although with regard to its general determination it expresses something which is common to all subjects, is nevertheless with respect to its Wner nuances [Wnare drag] something speciWc [sa¨rskildt] for each speciWc subject.’ The universal aspects are expressed in terms of general positive and negative virtues and duties, ‘yet there are not two individuals for whom the virtue or duty is completely and in all respects the same’.109 If ethics has normally verged towards the one-sidedness of ‘rigid, abstract, formalist’ generalism, incapable of reaching the full, concrete, individual content, Grubbe’s rejection, with all subsequent personalism, of the opposite extreme of subjectivist individualism based on feeling and instinct, is equally strong. He regards it as normally the product of a ‘sickly sentimentality’.110 It is not just that the universal idea is always necessarily embodied in the concrete, individual person. The idea itself is both universal and particular, providing in itself the basis for the synthesis of the general virtues and duties and the ‘individual person’s consciousness and the life corresponding to it’. The individual aspect of the moral idea is pre-eminently what is related to the demand of self-actualization that the moral law and the idea require: ‘There is for each human being an ideal of cultivation [bildning], determined through the whole of his individuality, and 107 Ibid. 109, 118, 219, 229, 232. 108 They also, of course, presented a more speciWcally ethical criticism; for Grubbe on the principle of Spinoza’s ethics, ibid. 297–300. 109 Ibid. 139–40. 110 Ibid. 140–1; cf. 154. This particular formulation is not an accusation directed against Jacobi, whom Grubbe praises as free from Schwa¨rmerei, imaginative extravagance, and mysticism of the reprehensible variety: ibid. ii. 466.

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this ideal he feels required, through his moral consciousness, to realize as far as possible.’ This ‘organically cultivating [organiskt bildande] principle’ is a positive ideal, and a new insight of Christianity and modern philosophy, not suYciently grasped by the ancients.111 The moral idea or law, as manifest in feeling and conscience and clariWed by reXection, requires free self-determination of my will in accordance with the holy divine will, ‘so that the former will becomes a special expression of the latter, namely as that kind of special expression which is determined by all of what constitutes my individual nature and my whole relation to the world’. The moral imperative is thus correctly expressed as the demand to regard oneself in this speciWc way as an organ of the holy divine will.112 But this must be further expounded in order for Grubbe’s personalist meaning to be fully brought out. The speculative restraint notwithstanding, there are also at least some metaphysical positions underlying the speciWc features of Grubbe’s ethics. The idea of the Wnite being itself, as a concrete individual, is part of the divine mind: ‘each being must ultimately have its ground in an idea in the divine reason, and the purpose of the whole of its existence in the sensible world must be the realization of that idea.’ The divine will aims at nothing but ‘the complete realization of all the ideas that are expressed in all beings who belong to the universe taken together’.113 Grubbe here comes close to one aspect of Schelling’s intelligible character: An idea which in itself or as idea is outside of all time or merely given in the divine reason beyond all time and all Wnitude, can never exist in sensory reality bound to the forms of time and space in a manner perfectly corresponding to its own nature; its realization in the sensory world can never in its perfection be given in one single moment of time: the idea cannot be given by anything but the whole of its continuous existence in time, so that this existence constitutes its successive realization.114

It is against this metaphysical background, and on the basis of the whole of his previous argumentation, that Grubbe can Wnally present more precise reformulations of the categorical imperative: ‘strive through the whole of your life after the most complete realization possible of your idea, and advance, as far as you can, with regard to each being outside of you, the most perfect realization possible of its idea’; or, in short, ‘treat each being in accordance with its idea’.115 Elsewhere he expresses it thus: ‘Strive to develop, under the guidance of moral good will, all of your spiritual potentialities in perfect harmony with each other, but in the determinate [besta¨mda] manner that is indicated by the whole of your individuality.’116 If the question is raised how this idea is known, the answer is that in my own reason, and there alone, do I possess, if at Wrst only obscurely, the consciousness of my own idea, and through it of the ideas of others in the general feature which all such ideas share.117 My individual divine idea too is thus given in my reason, alongside the ideas expressing the nature of the divine. The distinctly humanist aspect of Grubbe’s philosophy is seen in the fact that the ideal nature shared by all 111 Grubbe, Skrifter, iii. 141, 151–2 (cf. 154), 253. 112 Ibid. 236–8. 113 Ibid. 280. 114 Ibid. 281. 115 Ibid. 281–2. 116 Ibid. iv. 177. 117 Ibid. iii. 283.

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individual ideas which he here has in mind is the ‘idea of humanity’ (as distinct from the ideas of things), an idea of which there are individually diversiWed instantiations; it is not the idea of an originally spiritual being, distinct from the human. He thus also renders the highest ethical principle as the demand that I ‘should live for the most perfect realization possible of the idea of humanity in my own person and that of all others in the sense that in this realization I conceive in each person of the unity of . . . the general and the concrete moment [momentet] of the idea of humanity, or that each constitutes at the same time a general and an individual, concrete expression [framsta¨llning] of the idea of humanity’.118 In the second part of his ethics Grubbe applied or related, in two main sections—one on virtues and the other on duties—his formulations of the principle to the many diVerent Welds of moral, social, and political life.119 Although partly expressed in modern idealist terms, his notion of the person as combining in itself universality and individuality was part of a long-standing tradition of Western thought about the meaning of personality. In Grubbe and other idealistic personalists, this tradition was creatively renewed. It is in connection with this metaphysical understanding of the positive moral good as self-actualization, in the sense of a realization of a divine idea in human life through rounded Bildung, which at the same time manifests the individual side of the potentiality of the idea itself, that the place of desires, discussed above, should properly be understood. Their ‘natural, ordered satisfaction’ can be part of the development of the moral life ‘purely and completely understood’ if it ‘belongs to the complete realization’ of the idea.120 The supplementation of the philosophical understanding of the ethical and religious signiWcance of this individual dimension in the self-actualization of the Wnite person and in the life of the society of persons, against the background of the arguments for the personal absolute and on the basis of speciWc epistemological considerations, must be considered the main thematic of Swedish idealism of personality. This distinct constellation of systematically elaborated positions sets it apart, together with emergent personalism as a whole, from other currents of contemporary philosophy and theology.

Atterbom Although not always set out in explanatory metaphysical terms, the main personalist themes of will, creation, and relation were all fundamental to the work of the early Swedish personalists, with the partial exception of Bostro¨m. Atterbom, as we will now have come to expect, expresses them more freely and uninhibitedly than the others. When he writes that the world is a ‘free creation of a divine Spirit and Loving Will [Ka¨rleksvilja]’,121 it is perhaps easy to forget how many new philosophical ideas are in fact hidden behind these perfectly orthodox words. 118 Ibid. 282–4. 119 Ibid. iv. 120 Ibid. 285. 121 Atterbom, Studier till philosophiens historia och system, 507.

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They have to be read in the light of his whole system for the divergence even from Thomistic rationalism to be brought out. Atterbom explains in almost Leibnizian terms (anticipating a stricter Leibnizianism in Bostro¨m), how reality is a society of partly independent Wnite persons that is seen as included in the original personality, who yet stands in relation to each of these persons: Since it implies [inrymmer] an indeWnite plurality [en otalighet] of personalities, the concept of personality necessarily reveals [uppdagar] one which is the very Wrst [en den allrafo¨rsta], which makes the existence of the others possible, or which allots [uppla˚ter] to each of them a sphere of action of a particular freedom [en sa¨rskild frihets verkningskrets] and duly [beho¨rigt] coordinates it with all other such spheres. For this reason every single personality, be it with or even against its will, mirrors [a˚terspeglar] the inXuence of the Original personality [Ur-personligheten] as ordering coherence [sammanha˚llning] and guidance [ledning].122

One of the most characteristic novelties in the context of theism is Atterbom’s adoption of the Schellingian theme of the necessity of introducing a time-element into the life of God and thus into God’s relation to human personality. Atterbom is plainly uncomfortable with the strict timelessness of Grubbe’s personal absolute. In his view it detracts from the absolute’s personality. Atterbom asserts that ‘the present earth-time and the present earth-space’ should not ‘be confused with the eternal time and the eternal space’.123 What Atterbom means is that eternity is neither mere inWnite prolongation, a ‘bad’ eternity, nor mere timelessness. But nor is his conception exactly the same as Schelling’s. What he seems to have in mind is time and space that are somehow qualitatively diVerent, and necessary for personal life in the sense that he has elsewhere deWned: ‘eternal time’ and ‘eternal space’ are necessary for the dynamic life of personality in God.

Geijer Geijer takes up this idea of time, undoubtedly for the same reasons as Atterbom, and adds some signiWcant further indications of its meaning. Just as one must be able to conceive of personality as compatible with inWnity,124 Geijer holds that one must be able to conceive of an ‘inner’ and ‘spiritual’ time and space in eternity. For Geijer, willing belongs to the actuality of the eternal life; potentiality as well as actuality belong to the eternal life, since this is a dynamic life beyond nature ‘with its merely outer time and outer space’.125 The relation of the perishable to the imperishable is ‘a vanishing relation, when time runs back into itself and is only within eternity’.126 In a footnote Geijer elucidates the last formulation:

122 Atterbom, Studier till philosophiens historia och system, 16. 123 Ibid. 507–8. 124 This was implied in Atterbom’s criticism of the opposite position; see e.g. ibid. 484. 125 Geijer, Samlade skrifter, i/5. 422 (my italics). 126 Ibid. 424.

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Namely as purely spiritual, inner time, animated only by spirit itself. For time is the form of spirit, or rather, time is spirit itself. Much could be said about the diVerent kinds of time. They are so disparate that they are partly incommensurable. If we wish to measure worldly time, or astronomical time, according to earthly time and its years, such immeasurable numbers are soon reached that they far exceed our power of comprehension; but the content of spiritual, inner time cannot be measured at all according to outer time.127

These formulations on time, to which corresponds, conceivably, with regard to the Wrst quotation—for Geijer as for Atterbom—a ‘spiritual’ understanding of space, are to some extent related to Geijer’s subtle understanding of historical consciousness. But the context shows that they must also be seen as a necessary consequence of Geijer’s emphasis on spiritual dynamics, on the ever developing content of the reciprocal life of personality. Time and space are pliable, and subservient to the life of personal relations. The remarks are rudimentary and do not constitute an elaborate philosophy of time and space, of course, but they indicate a new theme in the developing philosophy of personalism which was to remain important, albeit still not very much more clearly developed, in its later development. Geijer’s most important contribution, however, was his development of the philosophy of the I–Thou relationship. I have already pointed to this, but more of his formulations must be given here to substantiate the argument that it might have been Geijer who, developing Jacobi’s beginnings, gave the Wrst distinctly personalistic expression of it.128 Geijer clearly establishes personalism as distinct from any lingering elements of the Leibnizian non-interactive monadology as well as from the metaphysically precarious personalism of Fichte’s and Hegel’s relational Anerkennung. In Thorild, Geijer was already clear that in its striving for self-knowledge, consciousness requires the other: ‘not just an I, but a Thou.’ It needs ‘something other than itself, in the intimate unity [fo¨rening] with which alone [fo¨rst] it can feel itself whole [heladt] and satisWed’. Geijer argues that ‘all real unity [enhet] is unitedness [enighet], that is, it is . . . reciprocal [o¨msesidig]’. It is here explicitly a question of the relation between man and God, although he holds, much in the spirit of Jacobi, that there is also an element of reciprocity in man’s comprehension of nature.129 But it is in his later writings that we Wnd his most important formulations: ‘The highest opposite’, Geijer here writes, Wnds its true expression and meaning only in an I which extends itself to another, equally real I, to a Thou’; ‘As a person, God can only be understood as having from eternity posited his own counter-image as just as free as himself, and if God too did not have a Thou, no human being would ever have existed’.130

127 Ibid. 424 n. 128 This argument was Wrst set forth by Landquist, and, to some extent, already by Nyblaeus. Norberg investigates other German sources of Geijer’s version of the I–Thou relationship, Feuerbach among them. 129 Geijer, Samlade skrifter, i/5. 233–7, 275–6. 130 Id. Menniskans historia, 215, 182.

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Such a distinctly personalistic metaphysical background gives a clear sense to more general formulations, which could otherwise be taken as descriptive of Fichte’s or Hegel’s position, such as those about ‘the recognition of a Thou, which is as good as I, and of an I, which is as good as Thou; the acknowledgement of the moral relation as a personal relation, or of equal right and duty on both sides’,131 and about how there can be ‘no personality except in and through another. No Thou—no I. Whence also the highest opposite is not I and non-I, but I and another I, I and Thou.’ When Geijer explains that this is ‘a spiritual-organic relationship of personalities, of which each presupposes the other and can only Wnd itself in others’, it is clear that Fichte and Hegel are transcended, not least from Geijer’s insistence that, ‘This again refers to a common unity, which . . . can itself only be personal, which stands in a real spiritual relation to all other personalities and is their precondition’.132 It is only in and through the inclusion in God, the highest personality, that we are included in each other in the sense that while being diVerent, we are also a unity. At the same time that there is certainly a ‘radical diVerence’ between the persons, it is no less obvious that there is between them all an innermost commonality, so that they can all be said to be one intelligence or within one intelligence. Without this unity they would not even exist for each other: they feel themselves to be knowing only as a consequence of one, identical knowing; they feel themselves to be willing only as a consequence of one common will. This simultaneously clarifying reciprocal relationship between will and will is precisely the knowing, which expresses itself in con-science [samvetet].133

The personal diversity is thus held together by a personal unity. Explaining the relationship between personalities in greater detail, Geijer writes that it is, it would seem, not something outer that inXuences something merely outer; it is an inner that aVects an inner or recognizes itself in some other inner. It is as if in every outer communication between rational beings they immediately touched and recognized each other through one and the same double, reciprocal and yet simultaneous action. This mutual awakening and lightening of thought and thought, of will and will, is the only, eternal, and apparent [uppenbara] wonder in our whole life, which Wlls each moment, without therefore becoming less wonderful. Thus the mere analysis of the concept of personality discovers [konstaterar] at once the identity of the intelligence with itself and yet its inWnite duplicity or plurality, that is, the analysis itself must end with the recognition of an original synthesis—a real synthesis a priori of intelligence and intelligence, at once distinct and identical.134

This is how not only the understanding of the givenness of personality, which becomes the key to reality—the position which Knudson regards as central in personalism—but also its further, reciprocal and dialogical implications were in reality formulated in early personalism, apart from and in addition to Knudson’s historical lineage from the Greeks and Augustine, via Descartes and Leibniz, to Kant, 131 Geijer, Menniskans historia, 223. 133 Id. Menniskans historia, 211.

132 Id. Samlade skrifter, i/5. 133 (cf. 141), 400. 134 Ibid. 211–12.

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Fichte, Maine de Biran, and Lotze. Even at the end of that line, in Lotze, or even in Bowne, personalism as described by Knudson did not fully include this dialogicism. Geijer argues that ‘one sole personality’ cannot exist, ‘since consciousness and will demand a reXex of thought on itself through a counterpart of the same kind, through the relation to another intelligence and another will’. SigniWcantly, Nyblaeus rejects this argument—not because of the plurality that this socialrelational view defends, but because it displays ‘a remnant of the old understanding according to which consciousness is derived from its opposite, or is supposed to stand in need of an impression in order to become actual’.135 Against this understanding he defends the Bostro¨mian version of the substantialistindividualist view, in which all personalities or intelligences are originally given in the mind of God, and the very origin of Wnite personality thus hardly requires even the other that is God, or God as consciously experienced other.136 But these formulations of Geijer’s, as possibly also his formulations on creation, are, I believe, better regarded as a way of giving philosophical expression to his rich sense of the dynamic life of personal reciprocity, the living personal exchange, the concrete content and development of personal life in real personal relations. Geijer sought to construe spiritual life and eternity in dynamic terms in order to be able to include this dimension. Nyblaeus, with his Bostro¨mian categories, cannot do full justice to the presence in Geijer’s work of this kind of experience and its meaning, a presence which can hardly be fully explained except by taking Geijer’s own personal character and biography into account. With all of the early Swedish personalists, Geijer, in more markedly personalistic terms than either the speculative theists or Schleiermacher in Germany, not only modiWed Kantian ethics but also transcended what Nyblaeus described as Schelling’s simultaneously abstract and empirical idealism. Geijer follows Biberg and Grubbe in his criticism of the preponderantly negative and formal aspects of Kant’s ethics, and accepts the understanding of the demands of the moral law as positive and as having not only a substantial, but an individual content. The moral law places unique demands on the individual, not only with regard to the diVerent situations in which he is placed, but also with regard to his own unique individuality. The demands of the moral life must issue from the non-sensual content of God’s consciousness, as it is revealed in our conscience. The individual has his ideal archetype in this higher reality, and it is from this—together with the ideal, archetypal society of Wnite beings in God—that the ethical imperative issues to the will of man.

135 Nyblaeus, Den WlosoWska forskningen i Sverige, ii/2. 646–7. 136 The view that ‘all reality is personal’ (Lavely) was developed in its strictest possible form by Bostro¨m. Absolutely nothing but persons exists; reality is the absolute system of God, the supreme person, and the co-eternal Wnite beings in the mind of God (the system is described as an ideal organism and in terms of unity-in-plurality (unitas multiplex) ); as mentioned in the last chapter, phenomenal appearance is due only to the Wnitude of the Wnite being; it is the appearance for the Wnite person of what is in reality the system of Wnite beings as concrete, spiritual ideas in God’s absolute perception.

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But Geijer also accepts a moral law which can be described as common to Wnite beings and which is therefore trans-individual in the sense of superior to Wnite beings as individuals. Because of the harmonious consonance in the ideal archetypal world in God’s consciousness, the moral law, even as individually issuing from the individuality of our ideal beings, is still always unitary in its aims. In that sense its demands are common to all Wnite beings as empirical human beings. If each of us follows his ideal being and its ethical demands, we are united in this higher obedience as such. Despite the individuality of the ideal beings, the moral demands issuing from them are still a part of the ‘common knowledge’, the ‘conscience’. It is not the plurality in eternity which becomes opposition and contradiction in temporal existence137—the opposition arises only through temporal existence itself, or, more precisely, through the development in it of egotism, through the I that does not recognize a Thou. The I that recognizes both its own ideal being, its true self, and the ideal being and true self of the Thou, is according to Geijer united with others in a simultaneous unity and plurality, in a consonant oneness with preserved diVerence. But religion as life in God means, furthermore, that moral demands also issue directly from God. Geijer connects such moral imperatives, which do not issue from our own ideal essence in God, with the will of God, with God’s dynamic personal action. He establishes a central idea of personalism when he writes that the moral law ‘in general, as merely law’, is ‘unthinkable, if the questions for whom? and of whom? are left unanswered’. In Geijer’s view, the moral law presupposes ‘the moral ideal, not as merely possible, but as actual and as personal—whereby the relation to the moral law is also a relation to a lawgiver’. He then shifts the attention entirely from the question of the law as such to the question of the relation to the lawgiver. And this very shifting of the focus is presented and explained as the result and consequence of ‘a faithful analysis of the concept of personality’. In the understanding of the moral law as issuing from the individual idea of the Wnite being itself, Geijer’s conviction that the personal life is more important than the impersonal law as such is already revealed. But when he shifts the focus to God as lawgiver, this understanding is further reinforced. The lawgiver is superior to the law, and the personal life in relation to the personal lawgiver is superior to the observance of the impersonal law in itself. ‘Man’s relation to the moral law’ would ‘indeed be unthinkable without including also a relation to the moral ideal, and to this not as to a possible mental image, but as to a real-ideal being, which itself can only be a person and a pure and holy will.’138 In conjunction with the epistemological diVerences, the stress on the personal lawgiver rather than on the impersonal law leads to a view essentially diVerent from the Kantian. The ‘true human concept of personality’, Geijer explains, bringing in personalized analogy, ‘necessarily leads to the true concept of Godhead.

137 With temporal existence is of course meant here only existence in what Geijer calls ‘earthly time’. 138 Geijer, Samlade skrifter, i/5. 416–17.

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The concept of the God-man mediates both.’ In this mediation the good, ‘in its highest sense’, appears.139 God’s person as well as man’s are for Geijer originally given and do not arise through the processes of the world and of nature as they did even in Schelling’s philosophy of freedom. But their original relation, which according to Geijer is merely restored and reawakened through the process of atonement in history, when the freedom given to man is rightly used, is in itself a dynamic, reciprocal personal life in an inner, spiritual time and an inner, spiritual space. It is the distinctly personalist metaphysics that explains why God’s will and Wnite autonomy not only can be harmonized but must be harmonized. Freedom remains in the Wnite being’s true state of orientation towards God and towards his fellow Wnite beings in and through God. Knudson’s criticism of what he calls ‘personalism in the form of absolute idealism’ should clearly show why the inclusion of pure Hegelianism in this category is problematic. For these philosophies, ‘Wnite beings are parts of the InWnite and issue forth from its being by a kind of logical necessity’, there is ‘no creation in the proper sense of the term’, no ‘metaphysical otherness’, nothing of the ‘more or less of separateness of being’ which creation implies. A few words should be said in this connection about Bostro¨m, since Knudson’s description would hold also for his philosophy, with the exception of the formulation that the ‘parts’ of the inWnite ‘issue forth’ (this, in his view, they do not really do at all). Knudson goes on to say that in absolutistic personalism the Wnite individual’s inclusion in the absolute is stressed above his separateness, and that there is thus a tendency to ‘break down the exclusiveness of personality, to erase the boundary lines between personal beings, and to make the Wnite person simply a part of the Absolute. The consequence is a weakening of both the metaphysical distinctness and the unique worth of personality’, and that ‘The Absolute, even though a self, includes all other selves and is in a sense identical with them. The Wnite self has nothing that it can call entirely its own.’ This too could be considered descriptive of Bostro¨m’s system, but the ‘stress’, ‘tendency’, and ‘weakening’ which Knudson mentions are less pronounced there than in Knudson’s absolutist personalists. The diVerence is accounted for by metaphysical peculiarities so pronounced as to warrant the characterization of Bostro¨m’s system as one which represents a third position between Hegelian absolute idealism and personalism strictly deWned, and which thus best merits Yandell’s designation ‘absolute idealistic personalism’ and Lavely’s ‘absolutistic personalism’. In this perspective, Hegel is seen to belong rather to the category of absolute idealism proper which cannot be identiWed with ‘absolutistic personalism’, together with Bradley and Bosanquet; and Edward Caird and (the early) Royce, for instance, are then seen to constitute yet another category, somewhere between Hegel’s and Bostro¨m’s, in which there exists, strictly, only one, absolute ‘person’. Although he is reluctant to admit it, it is in fact evident from Knudson’s own discussion of ‘personalism in the form of absolute idealism’,

139 Ibid. 419.

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which largely corresponds to this further category, that the term personalism is here not really warranted at all.140 This is important, since it makes it clearer why personalism, when it appears to verge towards absolute idealism, cannot be seen merely as a marginal diVerentiation within the same general idealism, as historians have been inclined to see it. The existence of Bostro¨m’s system, which is as strictly personalist as it is absolutist, shows that although early personalism is certainly in important respects a kind of idealism, the distance between it and absolute idealism is greater than commonly assumed. Although other personalists may not be satisWed with his version of personalism, Bostro¨m is quite as insistent as they on the nature of reality as a personal unity-in-diversity, that only persons have substantial existence, and that all impersonal Wnite reality is phenomenal, dependent—in Bowne’s words, a ‘process of an energy not its own’.141 It is thus possible to move rather close to a stricter form of idealism without relinquishing the unique, distinctive features of personalism. Even if they certainly do not go as far as Bostro¨m, both Pringle-Pattison and Bowne sometimes, or in some respects, approach such a stricter form in a way that has given rise to a misleading classiWcatory vagueness in the normative historical accounts. Bostro¨m certainly thought of himself as an absolutist, but his whole eVort was directed against what he considered to be Hegel’s impersonalistic pantheism—which Knudson regards as itself semi-personalistic in comparison with Bradley and Bosanquet. There is, in other words, a broad spectrum here, which comes to light only in the deeper historical perspective. Within this spectrum, personalism clearly stands out as a much more independent form of idealism than has hitherto been acknowledged.

Lotze Lotze’s view of the givenness of the essence of individual personality prior to the entry into social relations—as emphasized by the Historisches Wo¨rterbuch in its ranging of him in the line of the ‘substantialistic’ personalism with its focus on the ‘spirit-gifted individual’—and of the imperfection of human personality in comparison with divine personality did not prevent him from being sensitive to the diVerential I–Thou aspect of personalism, although he did not develop further the dimension of dialogical reciprocity: ‘If thought was the whole nature of the Wnite spirit, from where would he himself come in his individual uniqueness and in his diVerence as an I from Thou, the thought being only one?’142 Not only accepting personality as the ultimate reality, but inclining towards the position that only persons exist, he writes on the perorational Wnal page of his Mikrokosmus that ‘the truly real, that is and should be’, is ‘not matter and even less idea, but the living personal spirit of God and the 140 Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 30–7. 141 Bowne, Theism, 204. 142 Lotze, Geschichte der Aesthetik in Deutschland, 207, cited in Piche´, ‘Hermann Lotze et la gene`se de la philosophie des valeurs’, 513.

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world of personal spirits, that he has created. They alone are the place in which there is good and good things; for them alone there exists an extended material world, through the form and movements of which the thought of the cosmic whole makes itself intelligible to the intuition of every Wnite spirit.’143 Lotze also insisted on interaction of these partly independent personal Many only through the coordination and mediation of the personal One. By the time of Lotze, the compatibility of personal relations and the absolute was no longer a problem: Lotze was clearly driven by a motive similar to that of other personalists when he rejected the ‘bad’ inWnite and replaced unchangeableness with a dynamized absolute. He simply pointed out the untenability of personal identity being given exhaustively through relation, a position to which Geijer in some of his formulations seems to come close, although it is hardly in accord with his overall view. For Jacobi, as we have seen, personality is at least primarily individuated by the relation to God, before it enters into relations with other persons and is further determined by those relations. In many respects Lotze followed the earlier personalists closely in his statement of the philosophical prerequisites of the worldview of a personal unity-indiversity. The personal absolute is for Lotze dynamic, volitional. His dynamic reinterpretation of the attributes of God is a precondition of the dynamic understanding of the personal unity-in-diversity. Rejecting unchangeable substance as both explanatorily and religiously worthless, Lotze demands, with Jacobi and Schelling, ‘a living God’: by God’s ‘ ‘‘unchangeableness’’ nothing further is meant than the consistency with which [his] inner states proceed from a nature that remains the same’. While infinity is defended, it is also reconceived: God’s omnipresence is not ‘an inWnitely great extension in space’, but the presence of God’s activity and ‘the negation of all restrictive signiWcations of space for the action of God’. Time, like space, is ‘not to be thought of as though it were a somehow self-existing form, and as though God had only the capacity of Wlling it up by his existence, however far it may extend’, and ‘inWnite duration’ is held rather to signify only God’s ‘perfect independence of all those conditions that change in time, by which Wnite beings are constantly conWned within a deWnite tract of their possible existence’. The dynamized absolute is still the absolute; the pantheistic idea of the world as a necessary development of God’s own nature, being true insofar as it ‘endeavours to exclude a God who rules without principle in blind arbitrariness’, is untrue insofar as it leads to predetermination. As God’s will to create is ‘an absolutely eternal predicate of God’, and bound by law, creation is to be conceived rather as the ‘absolute dependence’ of the world on God’s will than as a deed. Also the ethical aspect of Lotze’s general view of the relation of personality to impersonal essential orders is connected with his position that the will of God ‘no more follows from his nature as secondary to it, or precedes it as primary to it, than in motion—say direction can be antecedent or subsequent to velocity’.144 143 Lotze, Mikrokosmus, iii. 616. 144 Id. Grundzu¨ge der Religionsphilosophie, 32–3, 35, 47, 49 (cf. 50, 61), 87.

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Even with Lotze’s view of creation as dependence rather than deed, the dynamism of creation and freedom is preserved in the creatures, as in Schelling: ‘the creative power of the absolute . . . bring[s] it about that a being is produced which not only, in accordance with universal laws, produces and experiences eVects and alterations [wirke leide und sich a¨ndere] in connection with others, but which also, in conceiving [vorstellend], feeling, and striving, separates itself from the all-encompassing ground, and becomes a relatively independent centre.’145 This is a given fact of experience, which reXection must take as a point of departure, its task being ‘to understand the inner connection of the world that is realized already [den innern Zusammenhang der verwirklichten]’, even though it may not be able Wnally to answer the question how it all happened or how it is possible. It is necessary to accept the ‘limiting idea of the absolute and its inner creation [Erzeugung] of countless Wnite beings’ as an ‘ultimate fact [einer letzten Thatsache]’.146 Again, these Wnite beings have the distinct freedom generally accorded to them by personalists: something new must also happen in the world,—something that is not a mere consequence of what has gone before, and there must exist in the individual spirits precisely this capacity to initiate new series of events; and therefore, in brief, a freedom of acting or primarily of willing, by which they separate themselves from the universal substance [von der allgemeinen Substanz] in a still more decided manner than by their mere ‘being for self ’ as relatively independent beings.147

Individual Wnite spirits are not ‘products of nature’ but ‘children of God ’; actuality is not ‘a mere course of the world’, but ‘a kingdom of God ’.148 Ultimately, in Lotze’s view, the normative values are superior to the laws of nature, and deWne the telos of the natural world; the interest of the unique course of events of the world is due to its relation to these values, centering around the value of the moral good.149 Again, it is important to see how his distinction between facts and values diVered from the Humean and positivist one; although, as continuing the Kantian tradition, he of course did not uphold the traditional understanding of the objective reality of ‘values’ in the factual world. When he argues that the real and the ideal in nature are never an identity, that their relation is teleological, this is an argument against Spinoza’s and Schelling’s monisms. The Kantian tradition which Lotze modiWed sought a new way of saving the values from relativism. Although Lotze gave priority to practical philosophy or ethics, his original contribution was the use he made of aesthetics—transforming Kant’s critique of judgement in accordance with his own metaphysics—in his defence of the status

145 Lotze, Metaphysik, 487. The passage is cited by Pringle-Pattison—in Bosanquet’s English translation—in The Idea of God, 287. 146 Lotze, Metaphysik, 488. 147 Id. Grundzu¨ge der Religionsphilosophie, 63; cf. 61–2. 148 Ibid. 86. This unqualiWed notion of the Kingdom of God is clearly a secular, liberal one. 149 Piche´, ‘Hermann Lotze et la gene`se de la philosophie des valeurs’, 506.

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of the free individual against the various determinisms that sprang from abstractive rationality. In this, as in his general metaphysics, he built on Weisse, whose aesthetics Lotze commended as the foremost contribution of modern idealism in this Weld.150 Due to his eVorts to grasp and to defend the ‘ ‘‘individuation’’ of the real and its historical becoming’ against Hegelian universalism, Piche´ even thinks that it is Weisse who is the initiator of the philosophy of values.151 Beauty, Lotze thinks, is a special value, or something that allows us more clearly to understand the nature of value in general, since in its concept it is more clearly the unlimited manifold of its irreducibly singular manifestations that is thought. Although Kant’s exposition of the faculty of aesthetic judgement was in Lotze’s view too narrow and formal, it contained the fundamental insight that the aesthetic judgement, while claiming universality, does not subsume its subject as an instantiation under an abstract concept as predicate, but is an indication of its emotional eVect. Aesthetic judgement teaches us that values are apprehended only through their concrete, historical manifestations.152 For Lotze, ‘the aesthetic judgement becomes the paradigm of the axiological judgement in general’.153 Sentiment is the criterion of all value-judgements, that is, the determination of all values is by sentiment, not conceptual mediation. Undoubtedly, in his elaboration of the importance of sentiment, in his rejection of Kant’s explication of aesthetic judgement through the interplay of the representative and cognitive faculties, and in his substitution of fantasy for imagination, Lotze does move in the direction of the later, irrational forms of life-philosophy. Sentiment as the organ of value-determination leads in Lotze to a moral intuitionism which, in the rejection of the abstract and formal in Kant’s categorical imperative, goes beyond the carefully balanced coordination of reason and understanding of earlier idealistic personalists. Piche´ argues that the Baden Neo-Kantians’ aversion to the aesthetic understanding of values as expressed by Nietzsche explains their silence with regard to the fact that they took over decisive parts of their philosophy from Lotze; against it, Rickert sought to return to J. G. Fichte in his eVort to establish the universality and unconditionality of values on the basis of moral philosophy.154 Lotze clearly belongs to an era in which Jacobi would not feel at home—although he could certainly foretell much of its spiritual character.155 At the same time, Lotze was not followed in this tendency to irrational immediacy by his leading British and American disciples. But values are still, for Lotze, universal, although, as we have seen, they only have ‘validity’, and do not ‘exist’ apart from their concrete phenomenal manifestations. This was another solution to the problem of abstract universalism than the one proposed by the earlier speculative theists, who emphasized the 150 Ibid. 497; Lotze, Geschichte der Aesthetik in Deutschland, 211. 151 Piche´, ‘Hermann Lotze et la gene`se de la philosophie des valeurs’, 513. 152 Ibid. 504, 514. Piche´ notes that Lotze, in preferring the beauty of events to static beauty, represents the Christian and the modern historicist rather than the classical Greek position: ibid. 506. 153 Ibid. 505; cf. 509. 154 Ibid. 512, 515–18. 155 See Su¨ß, ‘Der Nihilismus bei F. H. Jacobi’.

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concreteness of the ideas (values) as determinations of the personal, divine nature. Yet, since values can have validity only in and for the persons that constitute actuality, Lotze’s new value-philosophy is directly linked to his personalism. Values can exist only for persons. The only ‘real and substantial [selbsta¨ndigen] ‘‘Good’’ ’, Lotze holds, the purpose which is ‘Wnal and in itself of absolute value’, and by their contribution to which we designate ‘things, states and events as ‘‘Good’’ ’, ‘exists only in the pleasure of some sensitive spirit [eines gefu¨hlsfa¨higen Geistes], and would vanish with the world of spirits [der Geisterwelt] completely from the realm of actuality’; ‘A value, which is valued by no one . . . is . . . an essentially self-contradictory thought.’156 The order of values is thus constitutively linked to personality on the level of man as well as on the level of God. In this respect as in others, Lotze remained close to the centre of the emergent current of personalism, and forged a Wrm link between the earlier continental development and personal idealism in Britain and America.

B R I T I S H P E R S O NA L I D E A L I S M Pringle-Pattison not only took over some of the central tenets of Lotze. Many of the characteristic themes of the personal unity-in-diversity in the pre-Lotzean development of speculative theism and personalism also found their way into his work. The later Coleridge had already insisted that modern rationalism, with its Spinozistic and idealistic consequences, had been shown to be incongruent with the idea of creation, and the idea of a creation of distinct, productive forces. He had strongly defended freedom and will against naturalism. He had insisted on ‘the Will ’ as ‘the supernatural in Man and the Principle of our Personality—of that, I mean, by which we are responsible Agents; Persons, and not merely living Things’.157 Will is the ‘condition’ and the ‘principle’ of man’s personality.158 The ‘ground work of Personal Being is a capacity of acknowledging the Moral Law (the Law of the Spirit, the Law of Freedom, the Divine Will) as that which should, of itself, suYce to determine the Will to a free obedience of the Law’, and ‘a Will perfectly identical with the Law is one with the divine Will’. Which in turn implies that there is no law without a lawgiver—which would be a mere abstraction.159 Among the many quotes from Jacobi in Mansel’s notes to The Limits of Religious Thought was one of the I–Thou passages.160 SigniWcantly, even the respective personalisms of the Unitarian Martineau and of the later social Trinitarians among the personal idealists overlapped and converged in central respects, and the latter even leaned on the former. It is not diYcult to understand 156 157 158 159 160

Lotze, Grundzu¨ge der Religionsphilosophie, 74, 85. Coleridge, Aids to ReXection, 44, 305–6. Ibid. 91, 212; Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore, 63. Coleridge, Aids to ReXection, 213, 227, 307. Mansel, The Limits of Religious Thought, 360.

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why, when we Wnd core personalist themes Wguring so prominently in the work of the Unitarian: ‘Love—knowledge—where persons are not: can there be a greater contradiction?’161 For all of the diVerences, shared personalist themes held all of these thinkers together in a unitary current as personalists.

Pringle-Pattison and Seth Turning both against pantheistic emanation, evolution, or blind development, and arbitrary Wat or eYcient causation (the ‘mechanical manufacture of a separate article’), both against fatalistic determinism and pure contingency, Pringle-Pattison employed a remarkable metaphor of procreation which is in fact much closer to Schelling than to Lotze. The creation of a soul, PringlePattison holds, is more like ‘the addition of a child to a family’, but even more intimate because of the remaining ‘Wlaments’ between creator and creation in their unique personal relation.162 Characteristically returning to the speculative theists’ and Lotze’s modiWcation of Schelling, however, this metaphor, and the sense of the kind of freedom enjoyed by the Wnite souls that it conveys, is seen by Pringle-Pattison as wholly consistent with law and system more rigorously conceived.163 In line not only with Lotze but with all of the earlier personalists in the insistence on the givenness of reality in experience, Pringle-Pattison rejects the attempts of monists to explain away the characteristic features of the fact of the ‘relative independence and separateness’ of such created souls. Creation is a ‘creation of creators’, of the otherness of selves with independent status and wills of their own: ‘the character, the spiritual will, is the concrete personality. It is as such a will that man is independent. To be a self is to be a formed will, originating its own actions and accepting ultimate responsibility for them.’164 These selves are ‘real centres of existence and not points of intersection or radiating centres of a single force’: if the individuals are simply pipes through which the Absolute pours itself, jets, as it were, of one fountain, there is no creation, no real diVerentiation, and, therefore, in a sense, no mystery. A self which is merely the channel or mouthpiece of another self is not a self. It is of the very nature of a self that it thinks and acts and views the world from its own centre . . . No supposed result of speculative theory can override a certainty based on direct

161 Cited in Upton, The Bases of Religious Belief, 349. 162 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 255, 315; cf. 405. 163 It is in connection with the problem of the explanation of the Wnite world and its independence of the divine self-consciousness that Pringle-Pattison mentions ‘the turning-point of [Schelling’s] philosophical career’ marked by the doctrine, set out in Philosophie und Religion, of the Fall or, as Pringle-Pattison writes, ‘apostasy or revolt’ from God. SigniWcantly, however, he disapproves of its irrational radicalism and, interestingly, Wnds it similar to the Bo¨hmean elements in Hegel: Hegelianism and Personality, 176–7, 177 n. 3. 164 Id. The Idea of God, 285, 288, 292.

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experience . . . We are not simply an ideal (i.e. an imaginary) point through which the forces or ideas of the universe cross and pass.165

Rejecting the metaphysics of substance, in the Spinozistic sense, as inadequate to the explanation of the relation of Wnite individuals to the absolute, Pringle-Pattison also complains that absolute idealism reverts to the Greek, pre-Christian view according to which personality, ‘however spiritual’, was ‘a restrictive characteristic of the Wnite—a transitory product of a life which as a whole is impersonal’; Christianity ‘regards the person and the relations of persons to one another as the essence of reality’. Modern absolutism also repeats the one-sided intellectualism of the Greeks. (In a footnote, Pringle-Pattison here refers to his teacher Fraser’s Philosophy of Theism, where he speaks of ‘the profound personalism of Christianity’.)166 In defending, in the main line of modern idealism, the unorthodox position that God is cause only in the sense of ground or ratio,167 and that creation is an ‘eternal act . . . grounded in the divine nature and . . . coeval with the divine existence’, Pringle-Pattison signiWcantly leans on the authority of the leading German speculative theist Ulrici, who had already formulated the position which Lotze took over: ‘The creation of the world’, says Ulrici, ‘is certainly to be understood as the free act of God. But his freedom is nowise an arbitrary freedom (Willku¨hr) which at its mere good pleasure might act so or otherwise, might act or refrain from acting . . . In truth God is not Wrst God and then creator of the world, but as God he is creator of the world, and only as creator of the world is he God. To separate the two ideas from one another is an empty and arbitrary abstraction, aYrming in God a meaningless diVerence which contradicts the unity of the divine nature.’ ‘Hence,’ he concludes, ‘just as God does not become creator of the world but is from eternity creator of the world, so the world too, though not eternal of itself, exists from eternity as the creation (or act) of God.’168

Ulrici, Pringle-Pattison reports, holds that ‘God is known to us as creator of the world; we have no datum, no justiWcation whatever, for supposing his existence out of that relation’. And creation ‘cannot be understood unless in reference to the subjects or conscious existences in which it terminates’.169 Pringle-Pattison returns in The Idea of God to his criticism in Hegelianism and Personality,170 seeking to show how the main line of modern idealism fails to account for the manifold of Wnite beings. Accepting J. G. Fichte’s disclaimer that he is merely giving a logical analysis of self-consciousness, Pringle-Pattison nevertheless continues a polemic that had been central to the speculative theists, insisting that it involves a misleading, indeed an impossible, ‘start with an abstract

165 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 288. 166 Ibid. 291 and n. 2. 167 Ibid. 302. 168 Ibid. 304–5. 169 Ibid. 309–10. 170 His argument against Bosanquet in the famous debate at the Aristotelian Society, printed in its Proceedings as ‘Do Wnite individuals possess a substantive or an adjectival mode of being?’ (the whole of the symposium was later reprinted in Carr (ed.), Life and Finite Individuality), cited in part in an appendix to the second edition of The Idea of God, repeats, mutatis mutandis, the arguments against Hegel in Hegelianism and Personality.

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One, and the persistent attempt to make it posit its own other and thereby generate all the multiplicity of the world ‘‘out of the unit of itself ’’ ’. It returns in ‘Hegel’s start with the pure Idea which ‘‘passes over’’, or ‘‘lets itself go’’, into Nature in order to return thence and be at home with itself as Spirit’. Hegel is right that, ‘if we start reXectively with a One, we Wnd that it inevitably involves a Many, for it is only as the unity of a multiplicity that you know it as one’. Likewise, ‘the idea of subject implies an object of which it is conscious—through which alone it can be a subject’. But this means that ‘In the world of reality . . . there is no possibility of a start with a mere One or a mere subject, for these are the abstractions of reXective analysis’. With the speculative theists, Pringle-Pattison is convinced that Hegel failed to recognize this. Hegel’s formulation suggests ‘the old conception of a succession of stages in the divine reality’, from absolute oneness through diVerentiation to reconciliation. Thence the fundamental error, which fails even to describe the given reality of multiplicity: the hypostasization of the philosophical reXection on the implications of thought into an actual process generative of reality. Pringle-Pattison accepts the Schellingian view that ‘the ‘‘otherness’’ of the Wnite is not a logical transparency, but brings with it a real diVerence and important consequences’.171 Yet, with some of the speculative theists, he diVers from Schelling in accepting Hegel’s logical implication as such as somehow adequate for the expression of the idea of eternal creation. What Pringle-Pattison does is to try to make this compatible with the kind of freedom and independence of the Wnite beings which historically originated with Schelling and his rejection of Hegel. Will is for Pringle-Pattison, as for Jacobi, related to intelligence in the ‘larger, directer form’. As thus related, it is not ‘a meaningless freedom of choice’ nor a ‘groundless act’, bare, abstract, ‘contentless will’. It is a continuous ‘aYrming and possessing one’s experience, which is the characteristic, or at least the ideal, of the self-conscious individual’. This understanding of will, expressed in terms redolent of Schelling’s, applies also to God. Without such will, Spinoza’s necessity of the divine nature, denying absoluta voluntas, suggests ‘not the inwardly aYrmed movement and rhythm of a concrete experience of life, but a kind of abstract destiny imposed on the universe. It is the idea of the divine necessity as a selfaYrmed life, and not as a blind force acting within the universe like a fate which it undergoes, that constitutes the diVerentia between a theistic and a non-theistic doctrine.’172 But in order really to be taken beyond Aristotle’s unchanged and self-suYcient eternal thinker, the conception stands in need of being supplemented by the understanding of God’s perfection as including a divine life of activity, of ‘movement to the Wnite and the realization of the inWnite in the Wnite’, of ‘relation of the time-world and its process to the divine totality’ as the ‘eternal purpose’ of God. Without it, God is ‘no more than the Eternal Dreamer, and the whole timeworld becomes the illusion which many absolutist systems pronounce it to be’. The

171 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 311–12, 415.

172 Ibid. 339–40.

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concept of creation emphasizes against this the fundamental distinction within the whole, which goes beyond what can be rendered in terms of substance and mode.173 As we have seen, Pringle-Pattison’s development of the understanding of time in relation to God, in direct continuity with the preceding continental development of personalism, introduces further modiWcations into the elements of Hegelian and Spinozistic absolutism that he retains. Here he uses selectively appropriated elements of Bergson’s philosophy, the contemporary psychological insights of James Ward, the idea of the ‘specious present’,174 and a development, much in the spirit of Jacobi and Schelling, of the analogy of a work of art, a symphony, or a drama.175 As Lovejoy showed, the new mode of experiencing time which culminated in some respects with Bergson and which to some extent was also applied, by some personalists, to God’s experience, developed in the nineteenth century out of the Jacobian emphasis on the broader faculty of Vernunft as a personal intuition. It is noteworthy, however, that for the personalists the intuition remained largely supra-rational, whereas in Bergson, as in the later Schelling, it tended to become subrational. In Bergson, the transcendental and objective, classical and Christian counterweight of personalism was submerged in the irrational side of Romanticism; and in that direction, as the speculative theists saw from the beginning, personalism would sooner or later surely be lost. In the whole that is a plurality in unity of personal selves, neither God nor the universe is evolving or growing: against William James, but also against Schelling, Pringle-Pattison holds with speculative theism that only Wnite beings undergo development. Our awareness of the ideal attests to its reality and actuality in original transcendent completeness, ‘the very note of moral and religious experience’. Pringle-Pattison’s view of time makes it possible for him to understand the process of relativity and Wnitude itself as being complete as an eternal deed, as a continuous act which is ‘perpetually being accomplished’, rather than as a ‘Wnished fact’. In this unWnished completeness the conXicts and struggles of the Wnite perspective are not reduced to mere illusion or make-believe and the issue to a foregone conclusion. The absolute is ‘the perpetual reconstitution and victorious self-maintenance of the spiritual whole’; it is ‘in and through Wnite individuals that the divine triumph is worked out, and each of our actions and choices is therefore integral to the total result’.176 There are many more expressions in Pringle-Pattison’s work than the ones already mentioned of his—in broad outline at least—strikingly Schellingian notion of creation and its results: ‘belief in the relative independence of human personalities and belief in the existence of God as a living Being are bound up together. Thus I interpret the meaning of creation. The process of the Wnite world means the actual origination of new centres of life and agency, not created by a

173 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 340–1, 414. 174 This idea seems to have been particularly prominent in American philosophy during its ‘golden age’; see Sprigge, ‘The Absolute Idealism of Josiah Royce’, 154. 175 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 351–78. 176 Ibid. 373–4, 382–3, 412–13.

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magical word of evocation, but given the opportunity to make themselves.’177 Or again: we . . . cannot understand the method of our own creation any more than we can fully reconcile to ourselves the separateness and moral independence of the status achieved with the relation of creaturely dependence which is involved from the beginning and persists to the end. But the process goes on daily before our eyes in every case of the growth of a mind, and my contention is that it is to be accepted, not as an unexplained and puzzling exception to an otherwise intelligible scheme of things, but as itself the illuminative fact in which the meaning of the whole Wnite process may be read.178

Hegel ‘adroitly contrives to insinuate that, because it is indeWnable, the individual is therefore a valueless abstraction’. By merely ‘naming the diYculty’—‘Contingency’ as opposed to the ‘necessity of the Notion’—‘he seems to think that . . . he has got rid of it’. It is signiWcant that Pringle-Pattison indicates the right conclusion by quoting the often exceptional British absolute idealist Bradley: ‘The real is inaccessible by way of ideas . . . We escape from ideas, and from mere universals, by a reference to the real which appears in perception.’ Hegel, Pringle-Pattison concurs with the earlier critics, treats ‘notions as the ultimately real, and things or real beings as their exempliWcations’, and the ‘process of existence’ as the evolution and realization of the notion of self-consciousness, of subject or spirit. But ‘if we start thus with an abstract conception, our results will remain abstract throughout’; ‘where or in whom the realisation takes place, of this nothing is said, or can be said, along these lines’. What is of interest here is less the personalists’ understanding of Hegel’s position with regard to the real or existence in general than this focus on the status, or lack of status, of the Wnite individual subject or spirit in his system. Never really discussing divine or human self-consciousness or spirit but merely self-consciousness or spirit in general, Hegel fails to see that this is an abstraction, that ‘only spirits or intelligences are real’; ‘Absolute spirit is said to be realised in art, in religion, in philosophy; but of the real Spirit or spirits in whom and for whom the realisation takes place we are not told.’179 By his notion of spirit or the concrete idea Hegel intended to do justice to the unity of as well as the distinction between God and man by rejecting Spinozistic identity of substance and without the one being reduced to the other. He also intended it to overcome the opposites of individualism and universalism. But the solution fails since his spirit is not concrete ‘in the sense of designating an actual existence; it is concrete only with reference to the ‘‘logical Idea’’ which preceded it’; it remains the mere ‘notion of knowledge hypostatised’. As thus remaining abstract, it unites God and man only by eviscerating the real content of both. Both disappear or are sublimated into it, but simply because it represents what is common to both, the notion of intelligence as such. They disappear, not indeed in a pantheistic substance, but in a logical concept. If we scrutinise

177 Ibid. 427–8. 178 Ibid. 428. 179 Id. Hegelianism and Personality, 136, 138, 143, 159–61.

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the system narrowly, we Wnd Spirit or the Absolute doing duty at one time for God, and at another time for man; but when we have hold of the divine end we have lost our grasp of the human end, and vice versaˆ. We never have the two together . . . 180

In the monistic view, the formal distinctness of Wnite selves is an appearance or a predicament incidental to the weakness that is their Wnitude, and unimportant in itself. It follows that merging the distinct selves in the absolute experience is either the result of their temporal striving or the eternal truth which the appearance of such striving somehow imperfectly expresses. Against these positions PringlePattison insists that formal distinctness is ‘part of the fundamental structure of the universe’ and is the ‘fundamental method of creation’. Although Wnite centres may overlap in content, ‘they cannot overlap at all in existence; their very raison d’eˆtre is to be distinct and, in that sense, separate and exclusive, focalizations of a common universe’. The diVerentiation in space and time ‘may be regarded ultimately as only a mode of expressing the general fact of individuation—the fact that there are Wnite centres at all’. The conXicts between individualism and organicism, nominalism and realism, and pluralism and monism can be overcome only by an Aristotelian emendation of the understanding of the concrete universal which establishes the equivalence and balance between the universal and the individual as interdependent and realizing themselves only in each other.181 Bosanquet’s formulations about the ‘contribution’ of the Wnite self to the absolute experience seem to imply that it is a mere ‘contribution of an ‘‘element’’ or quality, some peculiar Xavour or tang’. As ‘the world is dissolved into a collection of qualities or adjectives which are ultimately housed in the Absolute’, the Wnite self disappears, reduced to a mere ‘conXux of universals or qualities’.182 With regard to the Wnite individuals, the question is whether, in Pringle-Pattison’s terminology, they ‘possess a substantive or an adjectival mode of being’. Here, the diVerent meanings of the term substance turn out to be decisive. What Bosanquet argues is that ‘the Wnite individual is not a substance in the Spinozistic sense, not ‘‘wholly independent and self-subsistent’’, not a ‘‘true individual’’, not, in short, the Absolute’. But for Pringle-Pattison the question is whether the Wnite individuals are ‘substances in the Aristotelian sense of
æ PÆ, that which cannot stand in a judgement as predicate or attribute of anything else, the individual thing or being, in short, of which we predicate the universals which constitute its nature’.183 Both Bosanquet and Bradley use substance in a Spinozistic sense, but according to Pringle-Pattison ‘every real individual must possess a substantive existence in the Aristotelian sense’. Bradley insists on the primacy of the immediate experience of Wnite, separate, exclusive, individual selves. But since he too mistakenly thinks that an outright pluralism of wholly independent, self-subsistent and unrelated selves is the only alternative to his understanding of substance, he joins 180 Pringle-Pattison, Hegelianism and Personality, 163–64. 181 Id. The Idea of God, 258, 261, 264–7. 182 Ibid. 269, 271, 282. 183 Ibid. 272.

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Bosanquet in his view that the Wnite selves, being relative, must ultimately merge as adjectives of the one absolute reality. In this way ‘the unity with which the system concludes tends to abolish the plurality of centres from which it starts’. It relegates the centres to the status of appearance, unreality, and error, which is overcome only by transmutation and absorption in the ultimate experience.184 As the mere ‘denial of unrelated reals’, Pringle-Pattison has no problem with the adjectival theory. But against its full metaphysical signiWcance in Bradley’s system, he adduces timeless arguments against all philosophies of radical monism: ‘There cannot be illusion or mere appearance, unless souls or Wnite selves really exist as such, to be the seats or victims of this illusion.’ If what Bradley calls an ‘all-pervasive transfusion’ is the goal or even the eternal reality, ‘the existence of Wnite centres at all seems . . . inexplicable and . . . uncalled for. Why should the blessed harmony of the perfect experience be disturbed even in appearance?’ Against such monism, Pringle-Pattison holds that the existence of Wnite centres ‘is a fact as true and important ‘‘from the side of the Absolute’’ as from the point of view of the Wnite beings themselves—nay, that this diVerentiation or creation (according as we name it) constitutes the very essence and open secret of the Absolute Life’.185 Pringle-Pattison is here equally far from the modern absolute idealists and the classical theism of Aquinas. Of the former he reminds us that ‘it is a trite observation that no number of abstract universals Xocking together can give you the concretely existing individual’, and in the sequel he implicitly rejects the Thomistic view of essence and existence, holding that substance and quality, that and what, are an indissoluble whole in the concrete individual existent, the active, living reality of the Wnite being. Bradley’s position in fact comes close to ‘the old associationist dissolution of the self into atomic states or ideas’, which Bradley himself famously had sought to refute.186 In a footnote to one of the Wnal lectures of The Idea of God, Pringle-Pattison takes the opportunity to answer the criticisms against his formulations in Hegelianism and Personality about the nature of personality as ‘impervious in a fashion of which the impenetrability of matter is a faint analogue’.187 The contrast between this formulation and the explanation in The Idea of God is one of the things which have been taken as evidence that Pringle-Pattison moved closer to absolute idealism and tended to give up his earlier, distinct personalism. But what Pringle-Pattison actually says about the early formulation in the later work is that, although he grants that the expression was crude and that he had emphasized too strongly the exclusiveness of the self, and although he now wants to do more justice to the shared content of the selves, if he had ‘many times regretted’ the formulation this was because of ‘the interpretations put upon it and the applications made of it’. His main point is that

184 Ibid. 276, 282. 185 Ibid. 274, 277, 282. 186 Ibid. 282–4. 187 Id. Hegelianism and Personality, 227. Knudson cites the famous and controversial passage in its entirety: The Philosophy of Personalism, 187.

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the obnoxious term has to be understood in the context in which it occurs. The argument was directed against the fusion of real selves in a logical universal or (to put it in a frankly spatial metaphor) the identiWcation of all selves at a single point of being. What I emphasized, as against this attempt, was the uniqueness of each self. I took the self, and I still take it, as the apex of the principle of individuation by which the world exists. Hence the phrase that each self is ‘impervious’—not, it may be observed, to all the inXuences of the universe but ‘to other selves’. . . In other words, to suppose a coincidence or literal identiWcation of several selves, as the doctrine of the Universal Self demands, is even more transparently self-contradictory than that two bodies should occupy the same space . . . this still seems to me obvious, and it may be considered to underlie the argument in several of the preceding lectures.188

If Pringle-Pattison thus explicitly says that the essential insight that the formulation in Hegelianism and Personality had aimed at conveying still underlies the argument in the later work, the assertion that he relinquished his earlier position and approached in this respect the absolute idealism of Bosanquet and Bradley is hardly warranted. Between Hegelianism and Personality and The Idea of God, Pringle-Pattison had published, in 1897, Man’s Place in the Cosmos, which included his most elaborate criticism of Bradley in the essay ‘A New Theory of the Absolute’, which shows no sign of an incipient rapprochement. That such a change did not take place should be plain also from many of the other formulations I am here discussing. Construing Pringle-Pattison’s later work as an abandonment of his earlier position in favour of an approximation to absolute idealism is to misunderstand the nature, the meaning, and the history of the kind of personalism that he defended. When, in the central personalist line, Pringle-Pattison turns against the notions of ‘a metaphysical fate behind God’ and ‘an impersonal system of ‘‘eternal truths’’ ’,189 insisting on intrinsic necessities as part of God’s own nature from which his will cannot be separated, it is again, I believe, mainly due to the prominence that the category of personality has attained and the new meanings it has assumed. This thematic, which had been developed at great length by all the previous personalists, was at this time being restated, through the impulse from Lotze, in terms of the value-philosophy the substance of which was a terminological variation of Kantian positions connected with Lotze’s reinterpretation of the central Platonic forms in terms of values. The speciWcally personalist version of this philosophy was characterized by the insistence that values are not impersonal or transcendent in relation to personality, not even on the level of the Wnite being. In substance, this insight, with regard to moral values, had been present in a developed form in the individualized yet objective ethics of Biberg, Grubbe, and Geijer. And, when the terminology of value had been introduced, it was to become the main concern of Sorley in Moral Values and the Idea of God (1918). If, as some asserted, truth too is a value, and values are always realized only in persons, eternal truths can only be personal truths, not in the sense of relative, subjective truths, but in the sense of truths manifested by persons. 188 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 389–90 n. 3.

189 Ibid. 404.

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With true poetic elevation of style, Pringle-Pattison appeals to the same ‘great experiences in life’ which Bosanquet invokes as support of impersonal transcendence, in order to prove the opposite, ‘the absolute necessity of what I . . . call ‘‘otherness’’ ’: ‘It takes two not only to make a bargain’,190 but it takes two to love and to be loved, two to worship and to be worshipped, and many combined in a common purpose to form as society or a people. Surely, as the poet says, sweet love were slain, could diVerence be abolished; the most self-eVacing love but ministers to the intensity of a double fruition . . . Selfhood is not selWshness . . . Surely the better the society . . . the more pervasive the spirit of membership . . . the more fully does each member realize and enjoy his own individuality. It is in individual foci that the common life burns: it is reXected to us from the countenances of our fellows.191

Schleiermacherian recognition of dependence—if it is accepted as the deWning element of religion—cannot take place unless there is ‘a certain independent status’. Without individual diVerentiation, religion becomes ‘a puppet show, and we fall back on the vulgar pantheism which makes the Absolute the direct agent in everything that is done’: The religious attitude—all that we mean by worship, adoration, self-surrender—is wholly impossible, if the selves are conceived as telephone wires along which the Absolute acts or thinks. As it has often been remarked, the system of Spinoza has no room in it for Spinoza himself and ‘the intellectual love of God’ with which he closes his Ethics. That sublime acquiescence, that ardour of self-identiWcation with the spirit of the universe, is possible only to beings who are more than mere modes of a divine Substance—whose prerogative it rather is to become the sons of God.192

The external, impersonal forces of the universe, although acting on the individual person, do not determine his moral action, since he always makes his response and is thus transformed only according to ‘his deliberate choice’.193 The mystery of the personal absolute is such that while remaining the absolute, God can also be a member of the society of persons. We cannot ‘ascribe to the Absolute . . . the self-centred life, the contemplation of His own glory, which spells moral death in the creature’; ‘under pretext of exalting the divine’, we would in fact place it ‘lower than the best we know’ if we denied of it ‘that giving of Himself and Wnding of Himself in others, which we recognize as the perfection and fruition of the human life’. The balance between the social, relational and dialogical form of personalism and the substantial, individualist one, is restored in Pringle-Pattison’s ‘world of self-conscious personalities’.194 He even accepts Howison’s view of ‘the mutual recognition of all minds’, including God’s, as ‘practically identical’ with his own conception of creation, although God is not for Pringle-Pattison a primus inter pares, ‘one individual mind among a number 190 Pringle-Pattison, of course, still shares the Hegelian criticism of atomistic individualism. 191 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 289–90. 192 Ibid. 290–1. 193 Ibid. 292. 194 Ibid. 294–6. According to Pringle-Pattison’s liberal-theological interpretations, this is ‘the Civitas Dei, described by St. Augustine and by Leibnitz’, ‘the Kingdom of the Spirit of which theologians speak as the great consummation’: ibid. 295.

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of equally self-subsistent individuals’, and although the relation for him cannot be stated ‘in terms of the relation of one Wnite individual to another’. With the latter positions, Howison approaches Wnitism and the positions of Rashdall and even McTaggart.195 William James’s pluralism is to a great extent a result of his rejection of the misconceived idea of the absolute as ‘purely cognitive, not the doer and suVerer in the world’s life, but an eternally perfect spectator of the play’, the mere ‘Allknower’ for which Wnite beings are mere objects.196 James asks why the imperfect perspectives of Wnite spectators should be allowed if the spectacle is already perfect in the eyes of the absolute, why—in his own words—the absolute should ‘ever have lapsed from the perfection of its own integral experience of things and refracted itself into all our Wnite experiences?’ James’s concept of the absolute is, according to Pringle-Pattison, characterized by the same ‘antemundane selfsuYciency’ and self-centredness, ‘eternally realizing a bliss ineVable in the contemplation of his own perfection’, as the God of traditional theism, ‘a self-contained Person’ who gives himself the cosmic spectacle ‘out of his mere good pleasure’. Such a conception, Pringle-Pattison thinks, comes close to Bradley’s absolute which enjoys ‘the balance of pleasure distilled, as it were, from the delights and agonies of Wnite agents’.197 But pluralism is for Pringle-Pattison an opposite and equally untenable extreme. It is for him, as we have seen, not a question of rejecting the concept of the absolute God; but this concept must be transformed in order to make possible a more plausible theory of the relation between God and man.198 He too Wnds the absolute described by James, with its abstract perfection, morally repellent. EVort, diYculty, and pain are parts of any conceivable moral world or ‘any world which is really worth having’. For the Wnite being, good is found in conquering evil, and the end of the latter is the making of souls.199 The clash of Wnite wills, which Schelling described in terms of the Fall, and the contingency and accident which result from them but which exist also in physical nature apart from them, are not mere defects, as for Plato and Aristotle, but contribute to the soul-making, the nursing and shaping of character. Self-sacriWce, dying to live, losing the self to Wnd it—this is the ‘deepest insight into human life’ as well as the ‘open secret of the universe’. But the emphasis is on man’s Wnding of his true self through the process of Wnite life. God shares the life of his creatures, so that the divine must be interpreted ‘on the analogy of what we feel to be profoundest in our own experience’. And this—together with Pringle-Pattison’s modern liberal 195 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 319–21, 391–3. 196 Knudson notes that Bowne is considered to have introduced the term ‘pluralism’, although, as Knudson notes, personalism’s pluralism is ‘distinctly limited in character’ and ‘presupposes an underlying unity, and that in a more direct and intimate sense than is implied in the Leibnitzian monadology’: The Philosophy of Personalism, 189–90. 197 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 397–9. For James, however, who went further in his pluralism than Renouvier, the Wnite selves were dissolved in their individual thoughts, so that it was not really them that he defended against the absolute. 198 Ibid. 399. 199 Ibid. 406–7.

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sensibilities—implies that ‘the omnipotence of God will mean neither the tawdry trappings of regal pomp nor the irresistible might of a physical force. The divine omnipotence consists in the all-compelling power of goodness and love to enlighten the grossest darkness and to melt the hardest heart.’200 The individual selves in a monism which reduces them to ‘the channels through which a single universal consciousness thinks and acts’ are compared by Pringle-Pattison to ‘masks . . . of the one actor who takes all the parts in the cosmic drama’. For Pringle-Pattison, as for Schelling, reality can certainly be likened in some respects to a drama—but for him, as for Schelling, there are many actors. The Wnite selves’ real otherness, which is ‘most conspicuous when regarded from the side of will’, does not, however, imply the opposite view— which, it seems, is in reality the Hegelian and the Spinozist—according to which the only divine self-consciousness is the one realized in the Wnite individuals and the Wnite selves are alone real, and God is no more than an abstract universal. The ‘comprehensive divine experience’ is ‘other than, and inWnitely more than, that of any Wnite self or of all Wnite selves collectively, if their several contributions could be somehow pieced together’.201 Despite his acceptance both of the latter position and of Keats’s ‘vale of soulmaking’, Bosanquet, however, cannot conceive that the end of the absolute is, as he puts it, to ‘give rise to beings such as I experience myself to be’. On PringlePattison’s analysis, since the desire for immortality as ‘the perpetuation and stereotyping of my present self in all its poverty and meanness’ is unworthy and irreligious, Bosanquet thinks that the only alternative is the desire for immortality as our incremental fashioning in the likeness of a perfect, God-like humanity, which is not a desire for personal continuance at all but for an ‘identiWcation with perfection . . . in the sense of merging our own personality altogether in that of the Perfect Being’. Against this, Pringle-Pattison argues that ‘Because I desire to be made more and more in the likeness of God, I do not therefore desire to be God. The development of a personality in knowledge and goodness does not take place through conXuence with other personalities, nor is its goal and consummation to yield up its proper being and be ‘‘blended with innumerable other selves’’ in the Absolute.’202 Against both Bosanquet and the monistic mystics, Pringle-Pattison holds that the latter idea ‘depends entirely on material analogies’ inapplicable to selves, such as the one of the drop of water that rejoins the ocean. This was how God, in the words of the French Pietist Labadie, engulfed the soul ‘in the divine abyss of His Being’. Pringle-Pattison objects that such engulfment of a spiritual being means nothing but loss, ‘the extinction of one centre of intelligence and love, without any conceivable gain to other intelligences or to the content of the universe as a whole’. A union of ‘knowledge and love and conscious service’, he insists, is ‘closer and more intimate by far than any which can be represented by the fusion of material things’. It is in the ‘personality of the worshipper’ that his value to God lies:

200 Ibid. 410–11, 415–16.

201 Ibid. 433.

202 Ibid. 428–9.

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The existence of an individual centre of knowledge and feeling is in itself an enrichment of the universe, and the clearer and intenser the Xame of the individual life, the greater proportionally the enrichment. To merge or blend such centres is simply to put out the lights one by one. In the society of such individuals, and in their communion with God, the supreme values of the universe emerge, and it is not personal vanity which suggests that for the Absolute such communion must possess a living value which no solitary perfection or contemplative felicity could yield.203

Only false mysticism implies what in Bradley’s philosophy is described as the dissipation and vanishing of the personality in the absolute, or the disappearance of the distinction between the subject and object, as in the idea of oneness with Brahman. The individual Wnite being is not ‘fused or commingled’, not ‘merged in the divine essence’, not annihilated and ‘absorbed into the substance of that which it contemplates’. Absorption cannot mean ‘being sucked under, as it were, and physically incorporated in the being of the object’. Such talk is ‘completely illusory’. Schleiermacher’s attempt to comfort a mourning widow by ‘telling her that ‘‘melting away into the great All’’ should be thought of as ‘‘a merging not into death but into life, and that the highest life’’ ’, is meaningless ‘unless the living self survives to realize the fruition of the union’. He is guilty of the ‘confusion between the conscious identiWcation of our private will with the divine will and the cessation of the individual consciousness altogether’.204 Pringle-Pattison dismisses in strikingly strong words what has often been considered the apogee not only of spiritual experience but of speculative sophistication, and hints again at the inner connection between radical monism and pantheistic speculative systems on the one hand and materialism on the other: ‘with the less speculative and less truly religious minds the material metaphor becomes more and more dominant. We never know how deep our materialism goes.’205 In ‘the higher mysticism’,206 however, the Wnite being is absorbed in the sense of being concentrated on ‘the all-satisfying vision of God himself ’. The ‘joys of heaven for the genuinely religious man’ are ‘a continuation and intensiWcation of the communion he has already enjoyed’. The time-form cannot be wholly discarded, since ‘Duration is an essential element in any notion we can form of reality; and we must clothe the thought of immortality in the language of time, if the meaning is not to evaporate altogether.’ But eternal life is not mere prolongation, the ‘bad’ inWnite, it has ‘nothing of the exhausting suggestion of the endless progress’, an ‘aimless heaping up of merit’, since ‘each moment has its own 203 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 429–30. 204 Id. The Idea of Immortality, 116, 130, 163–5. The anecdote with Schleiermacher and the widow is cited from Martineau, and it had been used also by Upton and Seth. 205 Ibid. 160–2. 206 N. So¨derblom had distinguished between a ‘mysticism of inWnity’ and a ‘mysticism of personality’ (‘Uppenbarelsereligion’ (1903), printed separately as Uppenbarelsereligion (1930), and translated as The Nature of Revelation (1933)). The more general distinction between personal and impersonal religion was central also in his GiVord Lectures, The Living God: Basal Forms of Personal Religion (1933), which were read by Webb for Oxford University Press while he was at Uppsala in 1932 to deliver the Olaus Petri Lectures.

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eternity’, ‘an ever deeper appreciation of what, in principle, we already enjoy— ‘‘the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God’’ ’; ‘the successive leases of life are not put forward as valuable in themselves, but only for the further opportunities they aVord of laying hold on the life eternal’.207 The soul-making of the Wnite being must have the same value for the absolute as for the Wnite soul itself, and ‘Unless the souls are conserved as souls, it is hardly intelligible to speak of their moulding as in any sense the end or meaning of the world-process.’ For Bosanquet, ‘ ‘‘values’’ survive in the Absolute, but not persons’—a very diVerent version of the new value-philosophy. What has value, Bosanquet says, is ‘the contribution which the particular centre—a representative of certain elements in the whole—brings to the whole in which it is a member’. But again, for Pringle-Pattison, our contribution lies precisely ‘in being ourself, our particular, imperfect, but developing, self, the unique individual whom it has taken such pains to fashion’; its ‘contribution cannot lie in any of the qualities of the individual taken separately, for these are all universals, and as such must be already fully represented in the perfect experience of the Absolute’.208 The absolute idealist view of the contribution of the Wnite being was captured in a parable in Royce’s early work, which Pringle-Pattison rightly characterizes as ‘strangely heartless’—indeed it expresses and preWgures in its strange naivety the most sinister aspects of absolute idealism and its historical consequences. The Wnite being is likened to a child who has come to the palace of the King on the day of his wedding, bearing roses as a gift to grace the feast. For the child, waiting innocently to see whether the King will not appear and praise the welcome Xowers, grows at last weary with watching all day and with listening to harsh words outside the palace gate, amid the jostling crowd. And so in the evening it falls fast asleep beneath the great dark walls, unseen and forgotten; and the withering roses by and by fall from its lap, and are scattered by the wind into the dusty highway, there to be trodden under foot and destroyed. Yet all that happens only because there are inWnitely fairer treasures within the palace than the ignorant child could bring. The King knows of this, yes, and of ten thousand other proVered gifts of loyal subjects. But he needs them not. Rather are all things from eternity his own.209

Changing the parable, Pringle-Pattison uses it to express his own view: ‘it is not Xowers, gifts out of the common stock of nature, which the child brings to the King, but the gift of himself, an oVering which only he can make, and which, we would fain believe, is precious, as nothing else can be, in the eyes of the King.’210 As we have seen, Pringle-Pattison stands by his early position in Hegelianism and Personality, and indeed remains emphatic about the uniqueness of the individual and his experience, about his apartness or otherness, and about his independent action. His analyses of the status of individual personality and its eternal life in the philosophies of Spinoza and Aristotle, and of the problems with Platonic generality, are identical in central respects and often in detail with those 207 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of Immortality, 139, 145, 152–6, 202–6. 208 Id. The Idea of God, 278–9. 209 Ibid. 279. 210 Ibid. 280. The parable had also been criticized by Seth in Ethical Principles.

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we have found in the earlier development of European personalism.211 ‘Uniqueness’, he writes, ‘belongs to the very notion of a self or consciousness’, none of my experiences, ‘in the sense in which it is my experience’, can be that of another. Restating his early position in terms of undiminished strength, Pringle-Pattison agrees with Rashdall that it is meaningless to speak of ‘one consciousness as ‘‘included in another’’, or . . . of ‘‘a Mind which includes all minds’’, and of man as, in that sense, ‘‘a part of God’’ ’.212 There is even a tension between the Keatsian soul-making by means of the shared content of the universe as immanent manifestation, on the one hand, and a more Platonic, spiritual, ‘daimonic’ individualism of the kind that Schelling, Biberg, and other early personalists developed diVerent versions of, in which an intelligible character was already somehow either given in the mind of God or chosen outside of time.213 The diVerentiation of persons was partly understood by Schelling in terms of a life history, including a Fall and a return or reconciliation, in which the destiny of the individual is worked out yet only partly formed, since the intelligible character, freely chosen in a pre-temporal act, is revealing itself and is appropriated by itself in temporal existence as given with its own inner laws. It is this process of the combined soul-making and soul-Wnding, more or less related to the social and the substantial views of the person, and which is at the basis of most personalism, that is described in similar terms by Pringle-Pattison as a drama in which the supreme artist, the person that is the absolute, also somehow takes part as one of the actors. Accepting the characteristic personalist emphasis on ‘the history of a life’, Pringle-Pattison at the same time writes, for instance, that ‘to take it as ‘‘pure history’’ is to rob it of all signiWcance’, that we ‘involuntarily regard it as the unfolding of a speciWc nature, the moulding of a mind and character in the play of circumstance or the stress of passion’.214 No attention is given here to what must be considered the considerable diVerence between unfolding and moulding. Pringle-Pattison rejects the idea of a necessary, inherent indestructibility and immortality of the Wnite self, as taught by the pre-Kantian dogmatic metaphysics of what he calls an ‘indiscerptible’ underlying soul-substance; with Lotze and some of the earlier speculative theists, he holds that the designation of the soul or Wnite self as substance is due only to the identity experienced in self-consciousness.215 The important thing about the use of the term ‘unfolding’, however, is that it shows that PringlePattison too was inclined to accept that soul-making was not, so to speak, exclusively an existentialist construction, but also an essentialist manifestation taking place through the life history of the Wnite person.216 211 See e.g. Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of Immortality, 151–2. 212 Id. The Idea of God, 433–4. 213 These things were brieXy discussed also by Jacobi. 214 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 362. 215 A strong formulation of this position is found in ‘Do Wnite individuals possess a substantive or an adjectival mode of being?’, in Carr (ed.), Life and Finite Individuality, 110–11. 216 The metaphor of the drama and the actors as expressing a personalistic understanding which accepts unfolding as well as moulding is of course imperfect, but it is intended to illustrate merely one

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For all his adoption of immanentist positions from Hegel (and to some extent modern biology), the complexity of Pringle-Pattison’s philosophy is evidenced not least when it becomes clear that it still to some extent ties in not only with the sublime yet Romanticized Platonism of Schelling’s idea of the intelligible character—as when he speaks about the destiny of a self-conscious spirit as committed to itself and depending on a personal choice—but also, remarkably enough, with the stricter Platonism of some of the Swedish idealists of personality. Pringle-Pattison almost approaches a personalistic form of anamnetic reappropriation when he speaks of ‘the informing spirit of a beloved life—its ‘‘idea’’, as Shakespeare calls it—lighting up the signiWcance of individual acts or sayings, half-forgotten, as glimpses of a single soul’, and of ‘a human mind and life to be realized as a divine idea or an individual purpose in the Absolute’.217 The criticism of the various forms of impersonalistic pantheism and idealism which cannot accept the ultimate reality of the Wnite persons and their individual life histories, or the absolute as in its own constitution related personally to the Wnite beings, is identical in its central themes, often indeed in its precise formulations, from Jacobi, Schelling, and the speculative theists through PringlePattison and the other personal idealists. The ‘accusations of pantheism and Spinozism’ of the pantheism controversy of the 1780s not only ‘had lost none of their force’ in the 1840s, and not only ‘helped shape the language’ that was then ‘applied to Hegel’, as Breckman describes. They become a ‘permanent theme’ throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, and their language was applied to a number of other thinkers, notably the British absolute idealists. Pringle-Pattison’s formulations neatly sum up arguments that had been polemically set against impersonalism since the 1780s. For his positive alternative he employs, as did his predecessors, the resources of modern idealism, to which he adds those of more recent philosophies. Yet, with the deWning and original move of personalism, he focuses them all in the exposition of the significance of a concept of personality which, while distinctly modern, yet manages to reinforce many of the positions of the Christian tradition. Something should be added in this chapter on the contribution to British personal idealism of Pringle-Pattison’s brother, James Seth, not only because his work supplements his more metaphysically oriented brother’s in the Welds covered in this chapter, but because this supplementation is abundantly aspect of it. It is, however, intimately connected with the etymology of the term person itself, which was originally the term for the mask of the actors in the theatre (persona), and the remarkable historical development of the meaning of the term is not unrelated to the personalist stress on unfolding. Trendelenburg, in an inXuential, posthumously published article, described the trajectory of the shifting meaning from the Wrst stage, where it signiWed an externally adopted illusion, to the nineteenth century, when it had come to mean the opposite, ‘the innermost moral nature’, ‘the most private core of man’: ‘Zur Geschichte des Wortes Person’, 3. 217 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, 362–3.

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illustrative of the continuity of personalist themes from the early nineteenth century.218 As I have remarked in the Introduction, British idealism in general transplanted much of the German culture of neo-humanism and its ideals of Bildung. But Seth’s work shows clearly how much better the positive, individualist elements which were stressed not least by von Humboldt, and which, were taken up and integrated in a personalist metaphysical setting by the speculative theists, were preserved by British personal idealism than by absolute idealism. The central principle of Seth’s ethics is self-realization, and the ethical position based on it, which he develops partly by drawing on the legacy of Plato, Aristotle, Christianity, and Butler, he calls ‘Eudaimonism, Or the Ethics of Personality’,219 distinguishing, needless to say, this personal eudaimonism from the hedonistic variety.220 Man’s true self is his total self; its rational, emotional, and active or volitional elements are to be symmetrically developed, ‘each in its perfection’, ‘all in the harmony of a complete and single life’. The moral imperative is: ‘Be a person; constitute, out of your natural individuality, your true, ideal, or personal self.’ Through harmonization and subordination, sensual individuality becomes ‘an element in the life of personality’. Moral character is not achieved through the ‘continual repression’ which ‘the mere rigorist or negatively good man’ is prone to exercise. It is characterized by spontaneity, freedom, naturalness, like the life of ‘original impulse’. In line with the personalists’ criticism of Kant, the sensual has a positive as well as a negative signiWcance. It can be subjugated only ‘with its transmutation into the enthusiasm of some great end’, when it has become ‘organic to reason’, ‘the dynamic of the rational life’.221 It is for this ideal state that Seth uses the term self-realization, or happiness in the Aristotelian sense, but with distinctly modern personalist additions. Seth accepts Hegel’s and Green’s criticisms of the abstract and formal nature of Kant’s ethics, but further develops their concrete-substantial ethical supplementation in the characteristic personalist direction, beyond the position of the absolutists. In his formulations on concrete universality there is thus the typical stronger stress on the ontological primacy of individuality, for which his brother had provided the epistemological and metaphysical arguments.222 Freedom is defended against materialist and absolute idealist monism, both as the postulate of morality and as conWrmed by the demands of the moral consciousness. Man is free because he shares in supernatural life, and ‘the moral 218 Only a selective summary of his personalist themes will be given here. For a more extensive discussion of Seth’s moral, social, and political philosophy, see my ‘ ‘‘Sweet love were slain, could diVerence be abolished’’ ’. 219 This is the title of the third chapter of the Wrst part of A Study of Ethical Principles. Seth continuously made changes and amendments; I use a late edition, the seventeenth, in fact: the work was successful, and must have been much used as a textbook. Other relevant works by Seth are Freedom as Ethical Postulate (1891) and Essays in Ethics and Religion (1926). 220 Seth was not alone among European personalistic idealists to use the term eudaimonism in this sense. 221 Seth, A Study of Ethical Principles, 199, 201–3, 252–5. 222 Ibid. 198–9.

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problem of freedom is . . . the problem of personality itself ’. The acceptance of free and partly independent Wnite persons implies the recognition of real and positive evil.223 But Kant’s position is deWcient; it conWnes freedom to an empty, unreal noumenality, the freedom of the rational self only, apart from the necessity of sensual individuality. For Kant, ‘Good alone is the product of freedom, evil is the product of necessity’. Against this, Seth asserts the personalist position: ‘freedom . . . must mean freedom in choosing the evil equally with the good; only such a double freedom can be regarded as the basis of responsibility or obligation.’ Freedom is even ‘that which makes evil evil, and . . . that which makes good good’. Freedom can only have real moral signiWcance if it is realised in the concrete life of motivated activity, in the apparent necessity of nature, which is thereby converted into the mechanism of freedom; not apart from this actual life of man, in the life of sheer passionless reason, which is not human life as we know it. By . . . constituting for it a purely rational sphere of its own, Kant has reduced freedom to a mere abstraction. What is left is the mere form of the moral life without its content. The content of human freedom can only be that life of nature and mechanism, of feeling and impulse, which Kant excludes as irrational.224

Hegel’s alternative to this dualism was reached only through the impersonalism of the closed—if dialectical—immanentism which sacriWced the reality of man’s moral life with his freedom. The Wnite self and its freedom are resolved into the absolute and its higher necessity, while apparent evil is resolved into real good, or ‘rather, both good and evil are resolved into a tertium quid ’; they are both mere entia imaginationis, in Spinoza’s term. This, for Seth, is ‘too rapid an explanation’, a false uniWcation which, instead of explaining the experiential facts, negates them: Such an unethical uniWcation might conceivably be a suYcient interpretation of nature, and of man in so far as he is a natural being, and even in so far as he is an intellectual being; it is not a suYcient interpretation of man as man, or in his moral being. The reality of the moral life is bound up with the reality of human freedom, and the reality of freedom with the integrity of the moral personality. If I am a person . . . I am free; if I am not . . . a person . . . I am not free.225

Only if I am a person, only if I have a full experience of the moral life and of freedom, can I reach not only the highest conception of union and communion with God, a union ‘not only of thought with Thought, but of will with Will’, but the highest conception of God himself—and this turns out to be crucial to ethics. Kant’s theory of autonomy must be completed; ‘Behind the actual there is the ideal self, and behind the ideal the real or divine Self ’. What we really do as self-legislative, Seth writes, is that we ‘re-enact the law already enacted by God; we recognise, rather than constitute, the law of our own being. The moral law is the echo within our souls of the voice of the Eternal, whose oVspring we are.’ For the moral ideal is no mere ideal, Wction, or human creation. It must also be real;

223 Ibid. 372.

224 Ibid. 397.

225 Ibid. 400–1.

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the supreme reality must be the realization of the ideal.226 From this it follows that morality is inseparable from the idea of the personal God. Since ‘the moral ideal is an ideal of personality, must not the moral reality, the reality of which that ideal is the after-reXection as well as the prophetic hint, be the perfection of personality, the supreme Person whose image we, as persons, bear and are slowly and with eVort inscribing on our natural individuality?’227 As in the other British personal idealists and indeed in all personalism, the arguments for the knowability of God, for the personality of God, and for the reality of free, independent, Wnite beings are closely intertwined and interdependent.

Upton, Illingworth, and Webb Theoretical reason alone, Upton asserts, can Wnd no basis for the independence and causality of the human self, as distinguished from the absolute and divine self. The view of a merely intellectual relation between the soul and God is the reason why the pantheisms of the East as well as of the West ‘furnish no foundation for real moral and aVectional relations between the soul and God’. Greek philosophy was one-sidedly theoretical and ‘eager to discover in all phenomena but the manifold expression of one fundamental unity’. Thus it did not understand the ‘real dualism’ between the separate wills of man and God, and tended, in Stoicism, to deny the freedom of the will. Spinoza’s and Hegel’s view of the human mind as ‘simply a necessary mode of manifestation which the Eternal Thought assumes when, as Green says, it ‘‘reproduces itself ’’ under the organic conditions of the human frame’, is related to the fact that their systems are ‘actuated with’ this one-sided spirit of the Greeks. Such philosophy cannot take sin seriously as a reality, but reduces it, as does Bradley’s, to an appearance. Absolute idealism’s view of man and nature as mere moments in the ‘self-existing thought principle’ deprives both man and nature of the independence that is necessary both for a scientiWc account and for the explanation of man’s moral and religious consciousness. As others had complained about Hegel’s Geist, Upton complains about Green’s confused use of consciousness in a double sense, how he cannot consistently distinguish individual human self-consciousness from the eternal self-consciousness.228 This, for Upton, is not a German error, but a problematic legacy of the Greeks. Philosophers in this tradition, as well as scientists (who are of course to a considerable extent products of the same tradition), may object that with the introduction of that independence and freedom a complete and ‘exhaustively intelligible’ account of the universe is not possible. Instead of pointing directly to the ultimate irrationality of the absolutism and determinism that spring from the 226 Seth, A Study of Ethical Principles, 402, 434. 227 Ibid. 434. Here, clearly, spiritual individuality is again suggested. 228 Upton, The Bases of Religious Belief, 28, 58–9, 282 (cf. 302), 300, 309.

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kind of rationalism he has in mind, Upton argues that the attainment of such intellection cannot be considered to be the purpose of the universe. An ‘occasional hiatus’ in the logical exposition is, Upton holds, compensated for by the ‘inWnite gain both to God and to humanity’ of the acceptance of the allegedly incomprehensible independence. With other personalists, Upton rejects gnostic omniscience, and, as became clear already in the previous chapter, the hiatus of freedom is for Upton the only rational alternative, in view of the ultimate purpose of the cosmos: ‘if the Wnal cause of the eternal creation of the cosmos is not primarily the present satisfaction of the full demands of man’s questioning intellect, but rather the institution of the highest personal relations between the Absolute and His rational oVspring, then it is indeed inconceivable how this end could have been gained save by imparting to man a measure of real moral freedom’.229 Upton turns not only against determinism in general, but also, for instance, against Green’s version of ‘soft’ determinism, with the peculiar manipulation of the traditional terminology of ‘motives’ and ‘solicitations of desire’ which disguises it.230 Not just philosophical pantheists, but also extreme mystics and pantheistic theologians like Schleiermacher ignore or deny the possibility of a ‘genuine antagonism’ between human and divine will. But the moral consciousness, in revealing God’s immanence and our universal moral nature, ‘just as clearly protests against the total absorption of our human personalities in the Divine’. The divine self must ‘by his own act’ have ‘delegated to the Wnite soul an adequate degree of independent reality and moral freedom’ in order for him to be ‘in any true sense a real other than God’; ‘apart from such otherness, there can be no genuine moral responsibility, no justiWcation for that sense of personal relationship and consciousness of dependence which are indispensable factors in all genuine religious experience’. It is the recognition of the validity of the testimony of moral consciousness that separates theism from pantheism.231 But our moral consciousness is not exhausted by an autonomous awareness of the ‘ought’ of the moral law. The moral imperative ‘can never be wholly dissociated from a belief, in fainter or more vivid form, in an objective Reality corresponding to this inner divine voice’.232 What we are conscious of is rather ‘that the Ultimate Ground of all reality is asserting itself ’ in the revelation of the moral law, and this is what accounts for the sense of its universality and unique authority. The absolute being is revealed or manifested as the originator both of ‘the soul’s dependent existence’ and of the law which is gradually apprehended with growing moral insight. And this being is ‘the Supreme Good in whom all ideals are realized’. When the full content of the moral consciousness is grasped, its given facts ‘demand for their adequate explanation a theistic view of the ultimate ground of Being’, and they are attended ‘by the feeling of direct personal relation

229 Ibid. 291–2. Upton in this connection cites James contra ‘soft’ determinism, Lotze on freedom, Martineau on freedom versus determinism, and Seth: ibid. 290, 291 and n. 1. 230 Ibid. 309–11. 231 Ibid. 28–9, 48, 286–7. 232 Ibid. 37–8, 53–4, 337–8.

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to the Source of the moral law’; we are ‘directly aware of the reality of an objective and ultimate source of authority which stands in personal relationship to ourselves’. Realizing ‘the presence and the absolute worth of an Ethical Ideal’, the soul ‘spontaneously conceives the source of this inspiration, and of the spiritual support which accompanies self-surrender to this inner authority, under the form of Personality’. It becomes plain that ‘our life and our selfhood is no mere phase of the Eternal thought and life, but that God, in calling into existence our Wnite souls, provides a real and not merely an apparent other than Himself as an object of His thought and His aVection’. Upton always emphasizes the signiWcance of the ideals as given in our consciousness, and of the moral imperative to realize them as far as possible. In us, the ideals of truth, goodness and beauty ‘are a revelation of the perfection which ought to be realized’, whereas in God ‘they are eternally realized in His essential being’; ‘what is the Ideal in us is the eternally Real in Him’.233 God as revealed in our consciousness, as immanent in it, is in a general way in union with us in our reason and ideals. This is the universal side of our nature, which we have in common with other Wnite beings and which links us to the whole. Finite persons can interrelate because of the fact that together with their individuality, there is a side of their being which is ‘in continuous union with that Eternal Ground out of whose self-diVerentiation they arise’.234 But although Wnite beings are thus held together by their universal nature, and although the ideals, as reXections of the absolute, are universals in the minds of the Wnite beings, the ultimate reality of the whole with which they are united is not an impersonal one, or mere impersonal thought: it is a personal unity-in-diversity. The dynamic view of nature which personalism had assimilated ever since Schelling, if not since Leibniz, implies that the finite beings can interrelate with nature only because of the personal whole in which they participate.235 The personal whole, God, for all the bonds and indeed the identity of universality, ‘withdraws Himself from identity with our Wills’, so that we ourselves are ‘in some measure free to determine our degree of essential community’ with him. In will is revealed most clearly our individual side, without which ‘there could be no sin, no moral heroism, no sense of estrangement from God, no joy of reconciliation with Him’. Ethics must therefore ‘recognize, and do justice to, both sides of our nature—the universal side, in which God reveals Himself in our self-consciousness, and the Wnite or individual side, in which consists that special selfhood or ours, that Will, which is delegated to us by God that we may freely make it His’.236 The experience of independent free will is closely related to the experience of a corresponding duality of causality, which further strengthens the case against 233 Upton, The Bases of Religious Belief, 37–8, 47, 52–4, 286–7, 337–8, 357. 234 Ibid. 285; cf. 59. This view of Wnite persons as arising from the self-diVerentiation of the eternal ground is exceptional in personalism. 235 The presence of ‘force or energy’ in nature makes it clear that nature is not just ‘a form of God’s thinking’; its reality is only explicable by ‘God’s willing . . . dynamic energy cannot be resolved into simply a mode of thinking’: ibid. 211–12. 236 Ibid. 47, 287.

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pantheistic illusions and the reduction of man to a mere passing phase of the eternal unity. Absolute idealism denies what Upton calls the causal self and regards as something that is plainly given in each person’s experience. Without it, the Wnite individual self is deprived of real existence, and our self-consciousness is reduced to ‘simply knowing’—and this merely as a vehicle of the timeless and eternal self-consciousness of the absolute. And with the denial of distinct, real and permanent individuality and causality, ‘any eVective distinction between God and the world of matter and mind’ is also eVaced.237 Not only the Wnite individual, but ‘all that we Wnd most interesting’ in him, ‘his moral struggles, his gradual growth of character’, are in Upton’s view lost from the philosophical perspective of Spinozism and Hegelianism: viewed sub specie aeternitatis they are reduced to parts of ‘an endless series of transient illusions’, ‘a process which appears to the human mind under an illusory temporal and successively developing form, but which is related as a completed whole to the timeless Idee’. Using formulations identical with those of the earlier European criticism of Hegel, Upton speaks of ‘a timeless consciousness’ of an ‘alternate positing and cancelling of illusions’.238 The personalist view of the meaningfulness and the value of the Wnite being’s temporal existence, not only to himself but to God, is explained in the typical personalist manner: Were that which Mr. Bradley calls ‘chance’ wholly eliminated from the universe, and man so constituted that adequate psychological insight would give an exhaustive explanation in every case why one man becomes a saint or a hero and another man a hypocrite or a scoundrel, I venture to maintain that not only would all ethical terms have to be emptied of their now recognized meaning, but the drama of individual life and of human history would be deprived of all that makes it most interesting to the mind of man, and, so far as we are able to see, to the mind of God also.239

If God waits to see the issue of that moral freedom which He has conferred on us, and at every moment out of the reserved possibilities which He keeps in His own hands neutralizes as eVectually as possible the temporary disorder that our misused freedom may occasion, then the relation between the individual soul and God is of perpetual and ever new interest to the eternal as well as to man; and instead of the Hegelian idea of God’s self-consciousness as an eternal cancelling of illusions, we have the Christian idea of God as taking an inWnitely varied interest in the history of the plurality of real individuals whom His creative love calls into existence.240

There is in Upton a strong emphasis on the personal relations as ‘responsive and reciprocal’,241 which sets his kind of personalism clearly apart from all absolutist ‘personalisms’ which conceive ultimately of only one, absolute person. This is 237 Ibid. 303–4, 312, 322. 238 Ibid. 306, 322. 239 Ibid. 320. 240 Ibid. 306–7. This involves the defence of the reality of time even in some sense in God’s experience; in support of this Upton cites James contra the ‘block-universe’, and Lotze: ibid. 307 n. 1. 241 Ibid. 303.

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essential also in the argument for the immortality of the Wnite being: ‘If Divine Love has called into existence these human individualities that they may be able in a measure to understand His essential character, and so of responding in an ever-increasing degree to His inWnite Perfection, then surely these individualities . . . are ends in themselves of God’s Eternal energizing, and the preservation of their separate reality must be a matter of quite inWnite importance in the cosmical economy.’242 This concern with the question of the nature of the immortality of the Wnite being, and its elucidation from the perspective of the new personalistic positions, became a characteristic feature of British personal idealism, Upton’s version preWguring much of Pringle-Pattison’s later writing on this topic. The present life, ‘the soul’s connection with its present physical organ’, is but a preliminary or propaedeutic stage of a ‘progressive intimacy’ and ‘sympathy’ with God, which is to be eternally enjoyed and in which the soul’s ‘capacities and aspirations will Wnd increasing exercise and satisfaction’.243 In this context, Upton again insists on the rationality of the philosophical acceptance of partly independent individuality. It is ‘the rational presumption’ of the theist’s reply to the pantheist who holds that ‘at death the eZux from the Eternal Self, which appears for a short season as a personal Ego, will Xow back into the ultimate Unity out of which it arose’, that ‘personalities, characters built up by long years of patient loyalty to the Ideal, of self-surrender to Divine guidance, are inWnitely too precious both in the view of each other and in the view of the Eternal to be allowed to perish’.244 Similarly, it is not irrational that ‘the Eternal has been willing to sacriWce to a large extent the lower good of unvaried personal ease and comfort’, since only ‘through the indispensable path of trial, temptation, suVering and sorrow’ can the ‘voluntary choice and eVort’ of man, the ‘free and persistent response of the human will’, be exercised, which, combined with God’s ‘freely proVered’ grace, attains the highest blessedness, the ‘highest good of conscious union’ with God in the sense of ‘harmonious inter-communion’.245 In Upton’s Hibbert Lectures most of the worldview of personalism was thus presented in broad outline. Yet it was not elaborated and reWned on the level of philosophical precision that we Wnd in Pringle-Pattison. Theologically more orthodox than both of them, Illingworth came to perceive more clearly the problems not only with pantheistic immanentism, but also with progressive evolutionism—two things that often went together and were closely related. The First World War made a profound impression on him, and in the face of the reality of evil he turned against facile progressivism.246 But already in

242 Upton The Bases of Religious Belief, 303. 243 Ibid. 341, 347, 358. 244 Ibid. 348 (my italics); cf. 352–3. 245 Ibid. 358. 246 In 1909 Illingworth speaks in a letter about the connections between pantheism and socialism. The old German opposition that is the main subject of Breckman’s book recurs: ‘First they deny the right of property (which we have always maintained to be a necessary part of the person or self), and now I Wnd they are going to deny self; making it only a kind of temporary thing.’ A. L. Illingworth (ed.), The Life and Work of John Richardson Illingworth, 195; Hoskins, The Doctrine of the Trinity, 49.

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Personality Human and Divine, twenty years before the war, we Wnd an adjustment of British personalism in this regard.247 As we have seen, Illingworth’s interpretation of the concept of the absolute is very much in line with orthodoxy. God’s absoluteness is ‘perfectly compatible with His relation to His creatures, precisely because they are His creatures, or in other words, the result of His own free will. In fact our chief need of the term ‘‘Absolute’’ is to protect the doctrine of the divine freedom.’248 In his insistence on divine freedom and free will, however, Illingworth seems to go somewhat beyond at least the traditional scholastic view of the identity of God’s will and action with his nature. Shunning all ‘modalistic determinism’, Illingworth ‘makes divine freedom the doctrine from which all other divine attributes have been revealed to us’.249 Especially if we consider the polemical situation, this kind of emphasis on God’s freedom at least looks like a distinctly modern, Schellingian streak in Illingworth’s theology: ‘The Being . . . who has called this freewill into existence must, a fortiori, himself be free . . . freedom could never have existed as an eVect, in the world, if it had not already existed in its cause.’250 The modern, Schellingian context of Illingworth’s view of freedom might be conWrmed by his adoption of the organic view of the universe: for Illingworth, ‘freedom within this organic whole is essential to the notion of personality’.251 God is not, in Hoskins’s words, determined in his creating by any a priori constraining nature, ‘a hidden or underlying nature, which determines God’s actions’, which we risk taking to be an ‘essence behind, or beyond, the three persons of the Trinity’, and which then determines ‘how God is both ad intra and ad extra’.252 This is of course the strictly orthodox view: the essence does not exist apart from the existent hypostases. But the reason why Illingworth insists on it in his historical context is of course the prominence of pantheistic and absolute idealistic views which do elevate such a nature, an impersonal absolute, or an impersonal moral order, diVerent from the divine nature in the orthodox sense, above the personal God. This becomes clear when he argues that the view of God acting out of necessity is Spinozistic and pantheistic.253 Such limitation of God is incompatible with personalism, whereas the one which is compatible with it springs precisely from the dualist requirements of a personal relation of love: God ‘does not love because it is His nature to limit Himself, but He limits Himself because it is His nature to love’.254 Combining the individual-substantial and the social strands of personalism, Illingworth explains that ‘Though a person is, on the one side, an independent centre of being, he is, on the other side, much more than this, for he is essentially and constitutionally social’. As social, ‘he can only grow and develop through

247 248 250 251 253 254

Illingworth, Personality Human and Divine, 159–60. Id. Divine Transcendence, 15. 249 Hoskins, The Doctrine of the Trinity, 116. Illingworth, The Gospel Miracles, 142; Hoskins, The Doctrine of the Trinity, 54. Hoskins, The Doctrine of the Trinity, 49. 252 Ibid. 116. Illingworth, The Gospel Miracles, 3; Hoskins, The Doctrine of the Trinity, 54. Illingworth, The Gospel Miracles, 157, 161–2.

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relationship to other persons, to whom he is bound by the mutual interchange of sympathy and service’.255 This, signiWcantly, is true of both God and man. But as applied to God, it does not imply that God is not the absolute and that his personality is, like man’s, essentially Wnite and relative. For dependence on others is not dependence on a not-self (which is a mere negation), since, Illingworth argues, others are, in a certain sense, potential parts of myself. We are indeed Wnite and imperfect, and need a relation to the inWnite and perfect person. But a ‘complete and perfect Person would be one for whom there was no essential notself, because all essential experience was His own; an inWnite fulness or Pleroma’. As later for Webb, however, the personality of the absolute is for Illingworth social also in itself, that is, Illingworth accepts the social Trinity. The analogy of the Pleroma ‘would . . . not preclude such internal relationships within the Godhead as the Christian doctrine of the Trinity involves; but rather points . . . in their direction’. Illingworth even interestingly writes that ‘Sociality is . . . of the very essence of personality as we know it, though limitation is not’.256 Because of the distinctly theological inspiration of Illingworth’s idea of personality as constitutionally social, that is, his social view of the Trinity, the modiWcation of Lotze which this implies is in no way by means of a purely Hegelian version of social personality. The same is true of Webb’s position. Illingworth’s view of the person is idealistic in the broad sense that he holds that personality, in Hoskins’s words, ‘belongs to the spiritual order, the only region in which self-consciousness and freedom can have a place’. Humans are ‘spiritual beings, and spirituality is synonymous with the supernatural’. This ontology is Platonic in its tendency, more in line with the modern Platonism of Jacobi and Biberg than with Christian orthodoxy, notwithstanding the Christian inspiration of the focus on personality. And in the same way as in the earlier personalism, the ontological distinction is experientially ascertained: ‘Necessity or determination from without is characteristic of the material world, one event producing another in endless continuity of causation; whereas I am directly conscious of being self-determined from within—a source of original activity, a free agent, a will’; ‘Self-consciousness dictates to our bodies’.257 This brings man ontologically close to God; and at the same time God’s immanence in man is stressed. Yet Illingworth is, signiWcantly, careful to balance such modern, liberal elements by an equal emphasis on the orthodox distinction between man and God. Christ did not reveal ‘the latent divinity of man’,258 and ‘The Christian conception of the divine immanence in man is the extreme opposite of the Vedantic identiWcation of the inmost self with God. Man at the centre of his being is not God, but is capable of receiving God (capax deitatis), while, as the result of that reception, his own individuality, his own ‘‘peculiar diVerence’’ is not

255 Illingworth, The Gospel Miracles, 191. 256 Id. Divine Transcendence, 45–7, 49–50. 257 Id. Personality Human and Divine, 45–7; cf. 103. 258 Id. Divine Transcendence, 74.

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pantheistically obliterated, but divinely intensiWed.’259 In his focus on the personality of Christ, Illingworth, with other personalists, also transcends the late nineteenth-century liberal theological interpretation of Christianity as merely a set of ethical ideals taught by Christ; although theirs is not always the kerygmatic focus on what Christ did as a person, it is clearly Christ himself, as a person, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. As an aspect of self-consciousness, freedom implies moral obligation, and free will is the same as self-determination, free decision of motives, not ‘mere indeterminism, or liberty of indiVerence’.260 The freedom man possesses is ‘conditioned or constitutional’, so that he is capable of cooperation in the creation of his own motives, ‘free to determine his own character, between poles of sin and sanctity which are immeasurably apart’.261 This may perhaps be said to be a characteristic, orthodox rendering of the themes of idealistic personalism with their roots in Jacobi’s opposition to pantheism and Schelling’s emphasis on freedom in relation to evil. Illingworth considers ultimate freedom, a truly free character, to be achieved only through free submission and obedience to the will of God; but, as could be expected, he stresses that this will is made our own through ‘the highest form of self-determination’, so that it is no longer an external law, an ‘alien restraint’, but ‘incorporated with the self ’.262 Equally characteristic of early personalism is Illingworth’s insistence that the obedience, the surrender of freedom which is its culmination and the ultimate self-determination, is not only obedience to an impersonal moral law, but primarily to a person. Sin is ‘not only the breach of a law, but . . . also disobedience to a Person’. We are ‘under the obligation of a moral law, which can only be conceived of as emanating from a personal author’.263 The ethical themes we have seen formulated by the idealists of personality, the themes of individuality, concretion, self-actualization, and moral obligation implying a lawgiver and not just an impersonal moral order, are indeed characteristic of almost all of the British thinkers who can be described as belonging to the personalistic movement, as is the more general emphasis on the interconnection between freedom, will, and personality. As in the treatment of Pringle-Pattison, and indeed all of the other personalists here covered, it was necessary in the case of Webb to deal with many of the formulations about the society of persons in the previous chapter, since one whole strand of personalism deWnes personality primarily in social terms and the personal absolute thus cannot be understood without reference to its relations with Wnite persons. It is indeed not least because of the Wnite person’s experience of these relations that it is understood as personal. As we have seen, the personalists accept neither that ultimate reality is impersonal reason, nor that it is personal unreason: despite the novel elements in their concept of personality, they do not see any conXict or insist on any diVerentiation 259 Ibid. 17–18. 260 Id., Divine Immanence, 195. 261 Id. Personality Human and Divine, 107; The Gospel Miracles, 18. 262 Id. Divine Transcendence, 211. 263 Id. Personality Human and Divine, 103, 121.

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between personality and reason. Ultimate reality is personal reason or rational personality. In Webb’s case, it is through the notion of creation which, as we have seen, the personalists defended—as understood by means of typical analogies— against the absolute idealists, that the two are harmonized: ‘In the creative activity of the artist’, Webb writes, ‘we seem to see Personality and Reason no longer contrasted but reconciled and at one.’ Of course, the personalists also distinguished between diVerent kinds of reason. According to Webb, ‘the Intelligence which is manifested in the world-process must be thought of rather after the analogy of the dramatist than after that of the geometer’. The created Wnite beings are not wholly independent, nor do they exist outside or alongside their creator, the personal absolute: ‘the activity in which the Absolute is known or worshipped is not and cannot be something which falls outside of the Absolute, for if it were this, the Absolute would not be the Absolute’. It is ‘nothing less than an integral factor in the very life of God himself ’.264 Persons and the society of persons are primary in relation not only to rational truths, but to other impersonal entities, to ‘principles, causes, or communities for which persons sacriWce themselves’. This theme had been dwelt upon in a similar manner by Seth, but Webb makes further elaborations and applications, and provides new illustrations. The truths and principles cannot be conceived as ‘actually existing otherwise than as they are embodied in persons, are carried out by persons, or consist of persons’: ‘we shall hardly fail to Wnd ourselves profoundly dissatisWed if we are convinced that the object to which persons have sacriWced themselves is never and nowhere realized except as an aim unfulWlled in any personal life as real as that which has been surrendered in its service.’265 Not even the preference for an impersonal system of law over personal caprice implies ‘an ultimate preference for the impersonal over the personal, which we must needs carry over even into our notion of divine justice’. For ‘there are persons to whose discretion one would commit oneself with far more conWdence than to the generalities of a legal rule’. ‘The truest Justice’ includes mercy, and ‘Mercy in the highest sense’ vindicates for itself ‘the name of Justice’. But this union can best be represented ‘as realized in a personality than after any other fashion’.266 Webb still states in terms of ideals what by this time was systematically explained by Sorley in terms of values: ‘the only fashion in which ideals can survive or live at all’ is ‘as included in a personal experience’.267 Neither on the level of the absolute nor on that of the Wnite being could ideals, or values, be conceived as impersonal or as transcendent in relation to personality. But again, values being ultimately realized only in persons does not mean that they are relative or subjective ; the objectivity insisted on (in their own way) by the Baden Neo-Kantians was also defended by the personalists. Even the British personal idealists who were not inXuenced, as

264 265 266 267

Webb, God and Personality, 154–5, 268, 270. Id. Divine Personality and Human Life, 243. Id. God and Personality, 257–8. Id. Divine Personality and Human Life, 246.

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was Sorley, by Baden Neo-Kantianism, come close to this view of values. Linking the new value-philosophy, or the corresponding insights, to their own personalistic theism—thereby reconnecting it to Lotze, as it were—it was of course clear to them that the Wnite beings manifest the values only fragmentarily and relatively. Their ultimate ground is the absolute person, but precisely because this person is absolute, universality is not lost: it is just that there can be no universality beyond that manifested in and by the absolute as personal. The primacy of individuality in relation to social wholes is stated by Webb, as by other personalists, against the background of an epistemological and metaphysical discussion of the relation of individual personality to impersonal orders. But Webb relates the conception of impersonal orders, as well as the partial truths of modern idealism, in a more thorough and systematic manner to the tradition of natural theology. Modern philosophy had been swinging between the voluntarism of Ockham and the rationalism of Leibniz. Analysing the classical option of elevating an impersonal, rational order above the personal God, Webb notes that philosophy had departed from the balanced, orthodox solutions of Augustine and Aquinas. With the other personal idealists, Webb returns to the orthodox position, but with a new and speciWcally modern emphasis on the concept of personality and with new, modern meanings added to it. From this personal view of the absolute—a conclusion both of metaphysics and ethics—follows, again, the deepest ethical divergence of personal idealism not only from Hegel, but also from Kant. The personal idealists cannot accept human rational autonomy alone as the Wnal word in ethics. Against Kant’s application of his distinction between noumenal and phenomenal man as an explanation of the paradoxical appearance in his moral philosophy of ‘the judge on the bench’ being identical with ‘the prisoner at the bar’, Webb holds with Martineau that, in the latter’s words, ‘in the act of Conscience we are immediately introduced to a Higher than ourselves that gives us what we feel’, and that ‘It takes two . . . to establish an obligation . . . The person that bears the obligation cannot also be the person whose presence imposes it . . . Personality is unitary and in occupying one side of a given relation is unable to be also on the other.’ The recognition of ‘another than I’, Webb continues to cite from Martineau, ‘another greater and higher and of deeper insight’, who is ‘not merely superior to us but supreme over us’, a personal God, who is immanent as well as transcendent, and with whom is possible the relation which Kant’s epistemology cannot admit and which can only be described as personal intercourse, is implied in our experience of the authority of the moral law, or of the moral law as the object of our veneration.268 This does not mean for Webb that the moral law does not have its own intrinsic authority. We may even speak of it as self-imposed, inasmuch as our reason unconditionally accepts its obligation. This disinterested recognition is indeed precisely how we know a command to be God’s. Kant’s fear of religious fanaticism based on pious fancy was in itself commendable in Webb’s view. But there was

268 Ibid. 122–4, 126, 132.

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also in Kant ‘a defective sense for the speciWcally religious factor in human life’, which led him to conclusions which Webb also Wnds philosophically untenable:269 ‘We must acknowledge in obligation . . . an aspect not only of autonomy, but also of a heteronomy, which turns out on inspection to be really a theonomy. Such a heteronomy, however, is not a heteronomy in Kant’s sense; for . . . it is involved in our notion of God that he is immanent in our reason and will, which notwithstanding he transcends.’270 Our recognition of the obligation is at the same time a recognition of its source ‘as the supreme and absolute Lawgiver over all rational beings’. This recognition does not ‘impair my freedom’, Webb argues, ‘since it is only through my free choice of the right that I am conscious of his demands upon me’. The development of historical criticism and the comparative study of religions in the nineteenth century had, in Webb’s view, averted the risks of fundamentalist literalism that, in Kant’s days, this position would have increased.271 With this development of Kant’s ethics, Webb thus still insists on the value of Kant’s recognition of authority, ‘the correlative of the notion of Obligation’. Importantly, he sets this against the weakening of that recognition in Green’s demotion of obligation and the consciousness of duty to a position secondary to that of the common good, and in his linking of autonomy to Rousseauan democracy. By this move the Kantian idea of the disinterested nature of obedience to the moral law was abandoned. Yet at the same time Kant’s own considerations, which made it impossible for him to admit the kind of heteronomy defended by the personalists, precluded the only way to forestall a Rousseauan use of autonomy. Since democracy and political self-determination tend to become the political principles corresponding to the insuYcient pure autonomy of Kant’s ethics, there is needed in politics too a supplementation of Kantianism. The need is, indeed, even greater in this sphere. Although Kant, according to the view Webb shares with the earlier personalists, exaggerated the frequency of the conXicts between duty and pleasure, the reality of such conXicts is still obvious in the individual’s life. It is less obvious in political life. For the pursuit of general happiness may, in Webb’s view, ‘be so plausibly represented as the whole content of public duty, the sole end of public action, that it is especially easy here Wrst to think of a ‘‘common good’’ rather than of a ‘‘common obligation’’, and then to interpret this ‘‘common good’’ in terms which really in the end are terms of individual happiness and pleasure’.272 Webb not only dismisses utilitarianism, and perceives how absolute idealism in its politics could easily move into its vicinity (it is important to note personalism’s tendency, in Yandell’s words, to be ‘nonutilitarian in ethics’, not least since J. S. Mill, who dominated much British philosophy and represented much of what the idealist movement turned against, also included the emphasis on free personality and self-actualization in terms which could otherwise easily be seen to be more similar than they actually are). He also discerns the speciWcally 269 Webb, Divine Personality and Human Life, 129, 132, 137. to the German theologian J. Mu¨ller. 271 Ibid. 131–2, 137–8. 272 Ibid. 131, 135–6.

270 Ibid. 132. Webb here refers

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modern, Rousseauan element in the ‘new liberals’, how theirs was no longer the classical, aristocratic concept of the common good traditionally taught at Oxford, but a subtly, or sometimes not so subtly, reinterpreted one. Against this, Webb defends monarchic government, which ‘may rest as well as any other on the consent which is necessary to give to the community . . . the character of freedom or self-determination corresponding to the autonomy of the individual moral choice; while it is perhaps especially well qualiWed to bring before the imagination that other character of authority, in which it is representative of God’.273 Webb was a pioneer of the study of medieval thought at Oxford; it is therefore a little surprising that he restricts himself in this discussion to the modern doctrines of the divine right of kings and the social contract, and does not mention the diVerent attempts to reconcile the principles of authority and consent in the Middle Ages. Webb’s defence of authority and monarchy is indeed reminiscent of the early German arguments that Breckman analyses. As such, it is proof as good as any of the continuity between the early nineteenth-century personalism and the later British one. Yet Webb’s politico-philosophical application of personalism, like that of most other early personalists, typically conjoins this conservative and traditionalist side with a defence of freedom, self-determination, and consent, in what is in reality the distinct—indeed the deWning—personalist manner. Autonomy and theonomy are united in Webb’s view of both individual and political morality. Mention should again be made of Sorley, who, uniquely in Britain, connected the themes of British personal idealism with the value-philosophy of the Baden NeoKantians. This project also seems to have been rare outside Britain. Normally, personalism simply added the terminology of values, which Neo-Kantianism had itself taken over from Lotze, to the statement of its own philosophy. It was against the whole background in personalist epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics that there Wnally developed the distinctly personalistic philosophy of values, according to which values are personal in the sense that ultimately they exist only in persons. In many ways it was merely a question of the old insights being restated by means of the new term. Sometimes the import of the earlier considerations may of course have been gauged more fully, as in Webb’s reXections on how it is only in persons that not only values like the true, the good, and the beautiful, but all kinds of principles, causes, and communities, have their true reality. But in substance, all of these insights hark back to the origins of the worldview of personalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. When, after the First World War, a new wave of non-naturalist humanism came to dominate philosophy for a while, reasserting a normative moral order and a hierarchy of values, the long-standing personalist tradition, alongside NeoKantianism,274 became part of it. But alternative perspectives on the philosophy of values were at this time prominent due to the inXuence of Dilthey and Nietzsche, 273 Ibid. 143. 274 Neo-idealism, including Neo-Hegelianism, was also prominent in this period.

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the Neo-Kantian eVorts to save the ‘validity’ and the epistemological signiWcance of values was soon challenged,275 and relativism again came to dominate both continental and—in the form of Humeanism and neo-positivism—AngloAmerican philosophy. It could be argued that the philosophy of values was tenable only as part of early personalism and its special way of transcending Kant. In the work of the British personal idealists no less than in that of Bowne, personalism was joined to the spirit of Victorian idealism at its best—a digniWed spirit, free from sentimentality, and Wttingly expressed in an unpompous and modestly ornate style.

275 The Baden Neo-Kantians’ version of value-philosophy and the problems it encountered are discussed at length in Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism.

5 Early personalism and its meaning The point of departure of this book was the fact that, on the whole, it is the American school that is perceived by scholars to deWne personalism. Because of the importance of this school, and the fact that it still, in modiWed forms, has living representatives, it has seemed all the more important to investigate its origins.1 In the context of twentieth-century personalism, the American school, at least as established by Bowne, hardly seems typical. Twentieth-century European personalism developed, not least, the dialogical, I–Thou thematic, but it did so largely apart from the idealistic and often also the theistic context of the earlier tradition of personalism that I have discussed. As mentioned in the Introduction, there are forms of French nineteenth-century personalism that display similar features, and it would certainly be worthwhile to compare such older French philosophies with the current of personalism I have traced here. Yet it seems to be mainly the personalism that developed in France between the older school and that of Mounier, and that was more directly inspired by Christianity, represented by thinkers like Laberthonnie`re and, later, Ne´doncelle, that comes close in its central themes to the early personalism here analysed. Le Senne’s and others’ connection of personalism to the philosophy of values also resembles in some respects the positions of Lotze’s personalist followers. Much twentieth-century personalism remained caught, however, in the kind of pantheistic positions that it had been the deWning task of early personalism to free itself from: witness the work of Scheler and Stern. The personalism of Troeltsch, mentioned in the entry in Historisches Wo¨rterbuch der Philosophie, was rightly regarded as spurious by Pringle-Pattison, inasmuch as it was at odds in central respects with the main themes of early personalism, although Troeltsch was certainly part of the German mandarinate with its general insistence on the importance of Weltanschauung and Perso¨nlichkeit.2 The post-Bownian American school also repeated or paralleled some of the exceptional developments in the earlier European personalism: the Wnite and developmental God, with its/his background in European Romanticized esotericism, reappeared in Brightman.3 1 Its two most important recent manifestations are the collections of essays edited by P. Deats and C. Robb, The Boston Personalist Tradition in Philosophy, Social Ethics, and Theology (1986), and by T. O. Buford and H. H. Oliver, Personalism Revisited (2002). 2 Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of Immortality, 166–7; cf. Chapman, Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology, 2, 82, 158. 3 The close connection with the early German development can also be studied in the early work of Charles Hartshorne. Gerrish points to Hartshorne’s use of the designation ‘The New

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A closer look at American personalism in its early, Bownian form in the light of the argument and the evidence presented in this book, however, should make it clear that it is a continuation of the main, anti-pantheist line of the earlier European tradition of personalism. The themes of this tradition are reassembled and restated by Bowne in a more systematic and sometimes more reWned and further developed form. Yet it is no mystery that when Bowne was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1906 and later, the argument for not awarding him the prize,4 penned by the president of the Swedish Academy, the powerful poet and critic Carl David af Wirse´n (who was himself inXuenced by Swedish personalistic idealism), was that Bowne, although certainly a Wrst-class thinker, did not possess the requisite originality.5 In three chapter headings of this book, ‘Personal ‘‘reason’’ and impersonal ‘‘understanding’’ ’, ‘The personal absolute’, and ‘Personal unity-in-diversity’, the main themes of what I suggest should be regarded as the relatively unitary and continuous early development of the worldview of personalism have been summarized. Most of these themes were present, at least in ovo, in the earliest sources of what can reasonably be called modern personalism. These sources, understood as the origins or at least the proximate origins precisely of this personalism, have as yet been largely unrecognized in the history of philosophy and in historical theology. Likewise, the continuous development that has here been traced has heretofore, as a whole, been overlooked. Knudson’s characterization of the Lotzean current of ‘typical theistic personalism’ for the most part reads like a summary of my expositions of early European personalism, as does his description of personalism in the stricter, Bownian sense. Selecting representative thinkers, I have suggested that personalism is the name by which the whole movement that they represent, and that in reality led up to Lotze and Bowne, can best be designated. Bowne chose the name at a late stage of his career, but in most important respects the worldview of personalism had already been developed in Europe and was being developed parallel to American personalism in Britain. The themes of personal ‘reason’ and impersonal ‘understanding’, the personal absolute, and personal unity-in-diversity, the themes of the worldview of personalism, were thus to a considerable extent present in Europe already in

Pantheism’ for his own position in the title of an early programmatic essay: ‘He pointed out the advantages of the old pantheism over traditional theism and then tried to show how the new pantheism could dispose of the disadvantages of the old, which were its inability to secure either human freedom or divine personality and its apparent implication that God must be, on one side of his nature, material and lifeless. The new pantheism denies an absolute dualism of matter and spirit and proposes that God is related to the world as a human person is related to the living cells of her or his own body. God is the whole of things, and the whole is personal.’ ‘The Secret Religion of Germany’, 452–3. 4 At this time, and later, too, philosophers did receive the prize; the German personal idealist Eucken, for instance, received it in 1908. 5 Svense´n (ed.), Nobelpriset i litteratur (The Nobel Prize in Literature), i. 115, 119–20.

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the Wrst half of the nineteenth century. They remain essentially the same in the very diVerent historical contexts of early nineteenth-century Germany and Sweden and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and America. The current accounts of the history of personalism suggest that the distinct themes of the kind of idealistic personalism that American personalism represents—the kind that still according to the standard reference works deWnes personalism as such—were taken over directly from the great masters of Western philosophy referred to by Knudson: Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, and Hegel. The main historical argument of this book has been that they were rather, or primarily, taken over from the continental European movement, extending far beyond Lotze back to Jacobi, Schelling, and the general philosophical and theological reaction against Hegel which Wrst developed and formulated them. The key positions described in the deWnitions of personalism bear, on closer historical scrutiny, the characteristic stamp of the distinctly post-Jacobian and post-Schellingian tradition of speculative theism which Lotze concludes rather than initiates. The fact that an independent British school of personalism could emerge parallel to and concurrently with the American bears witness to the strength of the continental European personalist background on which both schools drew. The typological opposition of pantheism and personalism, which still determines the work of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and American personalists, was established by the late eighteenth-century Pantheismusstreit.6 It is highly indicative that Illingworth, alluding to the divide in the Hegelian school in Germany, wrote that he associated himself with what he called the ‘Greenites of the Right’. As I have pointed out, the Hegelian Right often merged with early personalism. Pringle-Pattison was certainly the leading ‘Greenite of the Right’. When he criticized the positions of Bradley and Bosanquet, the thinkers whom Illingworth presumably regarded as representing the ‘Greenites of the Left’, he did so from the same personalist position that he had held in his earlier criticism of Hegel and Green; on both occasions his basic arguments were in large measure such as had been developed by much earlier personalists. Deeply established in a distinct personalist worldview, he in no signiWcant way adjusted his position to Bradley’s and Bosanquet’s. In the overall picture which the thematic chapters of the book together present, the structure of this personalist worldview can be seen to have emerged. In the course of the exposition and explanation of the characteristic themes of early personalism and of the unity and continuity of their development, we have seen that there were overlappings between the theistic personalisms of all of the representative personalists here studied, from Jacobi and Schelling, via the speculative 6 The pantheistic side of the opposition was of course a very old phenomenon, existing in various forms through the ages; even the personalistic side had been prepared in some respects by the polemic of classical theism against pantheism ever since the early Church; as I have argued, however, the distinctly personalistic features, and thus this precise typology, are in important respects comparatively recent phenomena.

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theists in Germany and Sweden, to the British personal idealists and Bowne. It has become clear to what extent the various positions, analyses, and criticisms of the earlier continental personalism—not only Lotze’s but that of Jacobi, Schelling, and the earlier speculative theists—returned or were continued and developed as personalism was replanted in Britain and America. It is this earlier European tradition that should be seen as the proximate development that produced, and perhaps culminated in, the American school of personalism. The European philosophical movement deserves to be designated as personalistic in the American sense, and to be regarded as containing the origins and Wrst developments of personalism as currently deWned. In connection with Knudson’s broader account of the sources of personalism, I have briefly indicated that, the early continental European background aside, at least the extent and the depth of another general inXuence on the formation of personalism—an inXuence of the kind that Knudson traces—has been largely ignored, namely that of the Scottish school of moral sense and common sense. Jacobi and some of the speculative theists were inXuenced by it from the beginning, and the fact that Pringle-Pattison restated personalism not only under the inXuence of Lotze and his representation and development of the earlier continental tradition, but also as Fraser’s student and as a scholar of Scottish philosophy, conWrms the original constitutive impact of this philosophy on personalism. This impact may have extended somewhat beyond philosophy in a narrow sense to shape part of the general spirit of personalism. In addition to other religious inXuences mentioned in Chapter 1, personalism’s closeness—in comparison with some of the absolute idealists—to Christian religion as traditionally understood, may to some extent be due to this inXuence, especially among the British personalists. More obviously, the inXuence might be traceable in many personalists’ views of society and politics. German idealism in its early phase can be perceived in central respects as an adaptation and a new kind of theorization of the French revolution. This means that it was at this time, apart from the added, distinctly German elements, also a version of the Enlightenment thought that incorporated the kind of radical proto-Romantic elements which were also part of the revolution and which emanated primarily from Rousseau. Also in its British form, absolute idealism is in many ways an expression of this legacy of thought, albeit modiWed, most obviously perhaps in Bradley, by characteristic British elements. Not least, the strong tendency to conceive of a new whole of society and state held together by a civic religion of humanism is plainly visible in the thought of Bosanquet. Contrariwise, personalism, while assimilating other aspects of German idealism, seems often to have been decisively inXuenced by the distinctly Anglo-Scottish version of the Enlightenment, which in central respects is incompatible with the French version and its revolutionary corollary. Even German personalism was shaped to some extent by this alternative Enlightenment, for which reason it seems to me wrong to identify, as does Breckman (in the footsteps of the Young Hegelians), the Christian personalism in Germany in the Wrst half of the nineteenth century merely with the reassertion of monarchical absolutism and Christian orthodoxy. The similar personalism in Scandinavia

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clearly had a strong liberal side, and despite its often distinctly German Romantic elements, speculative theism’s special kind of defence of individuality sometimes makes it seem, also in other forms, not only distinguished by its Christian inspiration but in some respects at least to be closer to the spirit of von Humboldt, who was at the time an exceptional German. Introducing some larger perspectives, I have further suggested that the broad Augustinian-Franciscan tradition should be added to Knudson’s general history of personalism. Not only do the personalists take a distinct position, which in some respects comes close to that of Augustine, in the debate between Wdeism and rationalism which has shaped so much of philosophy and theology in the West, due to the particular identity of Hellenic philosophy and its subsequent coexistence with an equally distinct religious revelation. There are also strong echoes of the medieval debates between nominalists and realists, about essence and existence, and much else, echoes which do not seem to have been systematically investigated by historians or by the personalists themselves.7 The most important result of such an investigation, I think, would be the discovery of parallels between modern personalism, as I have described it, and not only Augustine’s thought but that of the semi-Platonic and Franciscan tradition that followed, from Anselm via Bonaventure and the school of St Victor to Duns Scotus. The notion of the higher reason, the understanding of the soul’s knowledge of God, the revision of Plato’s theory of ideas, the reconception of form as the principle of individuation, the denial of real distinctions between the soul’s faculties, the insistence on concrete, individual reality on various levels against abstract conceptual realism, the emphasis on the personality and God, on God being such that man can stand in a personal relation to him, and on individual providence, and Wnally, the philosophical defence of will—personalistic philosophy, from Jacobi to Bowne, can be said to present modern and often developed versions of all of these positions. Rather than to any single one or any group of the past masters that Knudson mentions, it is in my view to this older Christian tradition that personalism, for all of its modernizations, is in many respects closest. In point of fact, if not of actual historical inXuence, it was the biblical, Greek, and Roman motifs as developed in the speciWcally medieval tradition of AugustinianFranciscan philosophy and theology that were here given a new twist by means of modern thought and other modern cultural impulses. I need scarcely comment here upon the diVerences between modern personalism and the Augustinian-Franciscan tradition. What gives the former its distinct character is quite as much the speciWcally modern innovations. Yet on the whole, personalism tended to embrace the Enlightenment and Romanticism in moderate forms which were susceptible of and more conducive to reconciliation with older Christian traditions of thought. Idealistic personalism was also mainly a Protestant, north European and American phenomenon. It wouldhardlyhave been possible without Protestantism’s 7 As we saw in Ch. 1, the Historisches Wo¨rterbuch mentions, alongside Augustine, Richard of St Victor and Duns Scotus, but only in connection with the ‘role’ concept of the person.

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historical emphasis on the individual’s sin and salvation, on human action, and on morality as based in the individual. It shares some of the emphasis on that side of religion which has to do with practical ethics of action, of self-control on the part of the individual moral subject. Lutheran, Puritan, and Pietist elements are all clearly recognizable in the respective German-Scandinavian and Anglo-American developments of personalism. Still, these developments also echoed, mutatis mutandis, themes of the older form of Christianity represented by the Augustinian-Franciscan tradition that were contrary to Reformation theology. Personalism clearly rejects, for instance, not only pure Wdeism, but Lutheran radical nominalism and Calvinist predestination as well, reconnecting instead in these respects to pre-Reformation theism. As we have had many occasions to note, personalism was related to the broadly liberal theological current which eventually emerged out of the culture of Protestantism, but in this connection too, it stands out by going against its typical pantheistic and immanentistic drift. Catholic personalism is not only a twentieth-century phenomenon; taking up Jacobi’s criticism and joining it to their own theological tradition, Catholic theologians also contributed forcefully to its early development. Even if it did not, of course, succeed in reversing the historical trajectory of secular humanism, moralism, and liberalism, personalism managed, within its modern setting, signally to modify and redirect their standard philosophical versions. Kierkegaard was a deeper religious character, a subtler analyst of the modern mind, and a better writer than most of the personalists. But it is not obvious that he was a greater philosopher, and the fact that many of the distinct personalistic arguments, even as set forth from within the conWnes of these modern currents, can be found also very far beyond them, in the AugustinianFranciscan tradition and even in theistic Vedanta, conWrms in my view that personalism is not quite as secular humanist as some critics have thought. In the preceding chapters, it will have become clear how and to what extent personalism transcends such humanism. Since my purpose has been to demonstrate the existence of a fully developed personalism long before the American school, and to present in outline its worldview, there has been no place to attempt here a systematic situating of personalism in the broader intellectual and cultural contexts of its period and to relate it to their transformations. Orthodox theism and liberal theology, Enlightenment and Romantic individualism, the political ideologies, historicism and the progressive view of history, rationalism and irrationalism as broader, cultural phenomena, other philosophies than the ones discussed here, contemporary science—there are many such elements of the intellectual culture at the time of personalism’s early development that have only cursorily been touched upon. Yet if we want a deeper understanding of early personalism’s historical, cultural, moral, and spiritual meaning, it is crucial to see it in relation to all of this. Philosophers and intellectual historians have long focused on the achievements of the age that saw the rise of personalism, such as the development of the historical consciousness, the understanding of the role of the categories and

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the creative syntheses of the mind in knowledge, the Xourishing of the humanities, the beginnings of hermeneutics, the deepened view of language and culture. What has not at all been understood to the same extent is the nature and implications of the new, larger, pantheistic and closed immanentistic worldview, with its hidden, esoteric roots, within which all of these new insights were almost invariably set in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The reason for this is that modern thinkers and scholars of the dominant intellectual currents still share this basic worldview, for all their disagreements and all the further changes and diversiWcations it has undergone; they cannot understand it because they cannot attain a vantage-point at a suYcient critical distance from it. Personalism seems to me to be the only current of thought which, to a considerable extent, was a product of the culture of neo-humanism and idealism, while being at the same time opposed, at least to a signiWcant degree, to this side of it. This, I think, holds out some hope, for those who agree in important respects with the personalist criticism, that its insights can be disengaged from their current metaphysical setting to the extent it is problematic, and connected with a diVerent philosophy and theology. At the basis of personalism’s achievement in relation to secular humanism was its success in breaking through, in crucial respects, the limitations of the immanentist worldview, the closed system of nature either as inspired by classical physics or as conceived by its Romantic transmutation. It not only asserted in general the spiritual and qualitative against the sensual and quantitative, but also sought to refute the various underlying impersonalistic presuppositions of Western modernity shared by its rationalistic and its Romantic wings. It is because of my perception of the need to establish the historical priority of this neglected and deeper context that I have not focused here, for instance, on personalism’s relation to historicism. Although this is certainly important, and not unrelated to my prioritized analysis, it is not central to the definitions of personalism that were my point of departure. Modern, secular, liberal man appeared on the scene of history with the rise of the new radical Enlightenment and subsequently Romantic worldviews, a being set against the cosmos and the logos, guided increasingly by his own interests, primarily the interest of self-protection and secondarily the interest of maximizing pleasure, or, alternatively, by his individual feelings, instincts, and ‘genius’. Morality became gradually the defence of secular freedom as such, abstract and absolute, without any higher limiting order, moral or other—freedom as free action and thought not bound to selection, with evil being perceived simply as that which impeded such freedom. It became identical with mere self-assertion— ‘self-actualization’ as quite normless, either as the process of the satisfaction of the interests and desires, the attainment of purely quantitative goals, under the guidance of calculating reason and a positivistic epistemology, or, in the Romantic variation, as narcissistic expressionism. The worldview of personalism, rejecting such liberalism and individualism and drawing instead on the classico-Christian legacy, on idealism (if only selectively), and on what could perhaps be called the ‘higher’ elements of the common- and moral-sense tradition, contained at least some basic principles of a distinct, alternative liberalism, seeking to refute with

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their help individualism both of the utilitarian and the Romantic variety. At the same time, re-emphasizing the religious sources of individualism and liberalism, it preserved their partial, more general truths, averting the threat to the individual posed by the Romantic and idealist doctrine of an impersonal absolute, and, not least, its either radical or reactionary corollary, the view of society and the state as an organism of the kind that resulted from the hypostasization of the abstract set of relations between their members. Rejecting atomistic, quantitative liberalism, it became possible, by understanding even the metaphysical whole as personal, to conceive of wholes on all levels in a manner which did not do violence to individuality, and thus to honour the personalism of the Great Commandment, which, saying nothing about impersonal wholes between or beyond God and our neighbour, does not endorse undue priority being given to them. Classical liberalism’s individualism, as much of Romanticism’s, was normally a shallow one; in reality it often turned out to be inseparable from the underlying dynamic of the impersonalistic and pantheistic revolution of modernity. In addition to the dialectic of rationalism and Romanticism, modernity is caught in another dialectic which displays the interdependence of problematic individuality on the one hand and the assertion of various equally problematic larger impersonal wholes—social, natural, and metaphysical—on the other, a dialectic preWgured in many ways by Rousseau. The Jacobins had already asserted Universal Man, Humanity, alongside the Individual, and thus a simultaneously atomistic and universal order, but such idealism, admixed with Romanticism, soon collapsed under the pressure of the crass material forces unleashed by the revolution. The ‘ideal of humanity’ cherished by the Romanticized classicism of neo-humanism could not long hide the extent to which real modern man failed to live up to it. With the old social identity and order collapsing or receding, the free play of the interests of the individual necessitated the counterbalance of new collectives or of the state apparatus, which did not provide any real check on egotism. More generally, the individualistic narcissism, ego-inXation, and Faustianism of the Romantics—poets or other—typically coexisted with an assertion of the impersonal nature of reality; it was complexly related to an only superWcially opposite striving or longing for absorption and even extinction in the Organic Community, the Volk, the Nation, the State, the hen kai pan, the inWnite All-Ego, the Weltgeist, Nature, the Mother-goddess, the hazy mistiness of the impersonal Godhead, the Un-Ground, the Void, or Death. Jacobi was the Wrst analyst of the inner nihilistic nexus of Promethean egotism and impersonal totalism which is so deeply embedded in the modern mind. As early as the 1770s, when the symptoms of this particular psychology Wrst became widely visible, he diagnosed its nature and meaning with sometimes startling clarity and depth.8 Liberal individualism often conWrms rather than disproves an analysis of the whole of modernity in 8 Timm, Gott und die Freiheit, 160–84, 337–8. Some aspects of this psychology have been studied by Izenberg in Impossible Individuality, and by Viereck. Babbitt shows how—regardless of philosophical connections—the inevitable disillusionment of the pseudo-idealistic ‘beautiful soul’ could also lead to the reaction of cynical naturalism.

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terms of an impersonal, pantheistic revolution. Rising out of a problematic Romanticism, secular existentialism would continue throughout the twentieth century to bear out Jacobi’s analysis. It is perfectly consistent that personalism, in turning against the new individualism, turned at the same time against the new dubious wholes. Only through the focus on personality, it held, was it possible to preserve, in qualiWed forms, individuality and the common order to which it belongs. The fact that not only in standard liberalism, but also in existentialism and humanistic psychology, individual self-actualization and individual morality have been developed into something quite diVerent from what they were in early personalism, indicates clearly the balancing act involved in the simultaneous appropriation of modern ideas and retainment of traditional ones often achieved by early personalism. In the twentieth century many of its central themes were restated—often directly in the line of Left Hegelianism—in unambiguously secular and, I suggest, increasingly unrealistic versions. The roots of this development were present already in the nineteenth century and before. But early personalism somehow managed to avert or at least restrain it, and to connect the new ideas to traditional conceptions of the moral order and of transcendence. It was only in the twentieth century that the ‘dethroning of the self ’, eVected, according to Breckman, by the Young Hegelians, came to dominate Western culture. The onset of high modernism in literature, art, and music, of psychoanalysis, Marxism, neo-positivism, structuralism, systems theory, the broad current of thought leading from Nietzsche and Heidegger to postmodernism—these and other related ideas contributed to the decline of personalism, of the personalistic mode of thinking about man, God, morality, values, and society, in the twentieth century. In the totalitarian systems the concomitant social changes led to brutal and barbaric repudiation, of an order previously unthinkable. More generally in contemporary society, impersonal structures tend increasingly to dominate: state, corporate, and other organizational bureaucracies, markets, technology, vegetative pleasures and entertainment, and the vicarious pseudopersonality of celebrities. The radical, critical intellectual currents of the twentieth century have done little more than to set some version of the Romantic wing of modernity against the rationalist one, or to seek some new synthesis of them. Thus personalism could not be saved on the path of adaptation to radical modernism trodden not only by European but also by American personalists in the twentieth century. They lost their moorings in the earlier tradition, from the perspective of whose problematic alone the adverse nature of radical modernism could have been clearly perceived.9 Focusing increasingly on secular humanism, autonomism, rights, socialism, and the body, they succumbed to the pantheist cultural dynamic of which early personalism’s Left Hegelian opponents had been such a clear expression.

9 This adaptation can be followed in Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology, ii, and in some of the articles collected by Deats and Robb.

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This is not to deny that personalism in the twentieth century has some admirable and noble dimensions.10 Unhistorical rejection of the realities of modernity is hardly in the spirit of personalism; modernity and its various new resources can be and have, in many individual cases, been harnessed to the cause of a value-centered, relational life of the kind held up by personalists as the goal of morality and religion and as implied by philosophical reXection. The prospects of a renewal of the values defended by personalism would seem to depend rather on the conWnement, to some considerable extent and in some central areas, of the comprehensive modern dialectic of rationalism and Romanticism, and on the emergence of cultural forces and intellectual currents with the power to temper or redirect the modern impersonalistic dynamic. In the context of, and in dialogue with, such congenial forces, the study of early personalism’s distinctive, alternative modernity and creative traditionalism should be perceived as relevant. The twentieth century is over, and the way ahead is widely perceived to require a critical, selective reappropriation of some pre-twentieth-century positions, values, and insights. Renewed attention is today being given, within philosophy and theology, phenomenological and other, to the meaning of the subject and the person for the understanding of reality and of values. Also apart from the later, explicit personalisms mentioned in the Introduction, the importance of intersubjectivity and the meaning of the other person have been important themes in twentiethcentury thought,11 but in this connection especially, a greater familiarity with the historical origins and early development of personalism seems desirable. In idealism studies (including the study of its Anglo-American versions), a Weld which has lately been growing considerably, a closer investigation of the idealistic side which distinguishes early personalism from later versions, and of early personalism’s debates with absolute idealism, should clearly be relevant.12 But even more importantly, early personalism—the outline of a larger personalistic worldview that it presented, its fundamental intuitions, the basic proWle of its positions—should be pertinent to some of the deeper critical analyses of the cultural dynamic of modernity that have been forthcoming in the twentieth century and which are today increasingly inXuential.13 In turn, such analyses

10 Such dimensions we Wnd, for instance, in personalism as linked to the American civil rights movement and the man who, alongside Pope John Paul II, remains the best-known of all personalists, although personalism is not what he is best-known for: Martin Luther King, Jr. 11 See Theunissen, Der Andere, E. Le´vinas, Totalite´ et inWni and Autrement qu’eˆtre ou au-dela` de l’essence, and B. Waldenfels, Das Zwischenreich des Dialogs. 12 For suggestions of the place and meaning of personalism in the context of contemporary idealism studies, see my review article (‘Idealism Revisited’) on Mander (ed.), Anglo-American Idealism. 13 Among such analyses, not least the work of E. Voegelin and his school should be mentioned, since, introducing new, compelling perspectives, it challenges some of the same currents of modernity as the early personalists. I brieXy discuss its relation to personalism in the Introduction to my Swedish translation of Voegelin’s Wissenschaft, Politik und Gnosis (Vetenskap, politik och gnosticism). Voegelin’s analysis is of particular relevance with regard to the sources of modern immanentism. For conWrmation

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are not unconnected to the larger, distinctive themes of early personalism; as we have seen, early personalism’s criticism of pantheism was not limited to theology, metaphysics, or even ethics, but concerned its wider cultural, social, and political implications. In the light of these analyses of modernity, but also in the light of early personalism itself, the use of personalist themes in twentieth-century philosophy can often be seen to be set within a framework of thought that is in other respects problematic, and the consequences of which we have expiated for a century.14 It may well be that it is only through reconnection with the older tradition, with its moral, metaphysical, and theological dimensions, that the possible reWnements of twentieth-century personalistic thought, phenomenological or other, can be made lastingly fruitful. However, also in the deeper critical analyses of modernity, the historical presence and meaning of early personalism in a crucial transitional period are often missed or misunderstood. Early personalism’s insights could, it seems to me, supplement, correct, or moderate their sometimes too unnuanced criticism of modernity. Modern personalism in its early form is a cultural product of lasting interest, and, I venture to suggest, in important respects also of lasting validity, a movement of modern Western thought the historical reality and proWle of which have hitherto been insuYciently perceived, and whose intellectual and cultural meaning have been imperfectly grasped and assessed. The past studied in intellectual history normally, albeit not always obviously, reaches into and shapes the present, and the scholar is situated in history, formed by its ongoing dialogue or conXict of intellectual positions and perspectives and its unceasing play of other forces. In this sense the theoretical perspectives of the humanistic scholar and the historical objects of his study do not belong to diVerent spheres or levels. The truths that the study of history always carries with it a change of our understanding of ourselves, and that the latter colours our view of history, are non-trivial in the sense that they are not commonly understood in their full implications. The objectivity that is attainable is reached only through a subtle process of interpretation, into which valuational elements—in turn determined by the process—inevitably enter. In the typological opposition of worldviews at the centre of this study, I am in sympathy with the personalists; other scholars—some of whom I have cited—write about the period and its thinkers from a perspective determined by the broadly pantheistic position and its further development. This has not been a critical study of early personalism, but an attempt at an exposition of the basic aspects of its worldview in the context

of some of Voegelin’s analyses, see Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition. The still more inXuential analysis of L. Strauss and his school is problematic in several respects, not least because of the possible ‘esoteric’ side of Strauss’s thought, but deserves to be mentioned here since Strauss wrote his doctoral thesis on Jacobi (under Cassirer), ‘Das Erkenntnisproblem in der philosophischen Lehre Fr. H. Jacobis’, and is to some extent in agreement with him on religion. 14 This is, of course, not always the case; signiWcantly, Pope John Paul II, perhaps the greatest twentieth-century personalist, has successfully linked phenomenological personalism to the classical tradition of Christian theism.

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of a historical argument. It has been motivated by and has conWrmed a preliminary conviction that early personalism, properly understood, is well worth renewed scholarly attention, due to a number of intrinsic qualities of lasting relevance in many respects. The criticism of reason represented by Jacobi, and the interpretation of nihilism he proposed, were to become leading themes of modern philosophy. But none of the later philosophies determined by this problematic has done justice to Jacobi’s positive alternative—except personalism. The most obvious achievement of personalism in Jacobi’s line may well be its demonstration that philosophy which does not properly take into account the reality of the person, however elusive and diYcult it may be, ultimately yields strange and unacceptable results, and that the varieties of such philosophy are more similar as varieties of impersonalism than diVerent as materialisms and idealisms. But the obverse of this insight, the positive personalist alternative, deserves our attention as well. From the beginning, personalism suggests some solutions to the problems posed by the crisis of Enlightenment reason and the challenge of Romanticism—solutions that do not remain within the conWnes of their modern dialectic, but become possible because they creatively draw also on the older traditions of the West. It partakes essentially of both modernity and the older traditions. Modern ideas are selectively appropriated and reconnected to a revised traditional agenda of theology and moral philosophy. The Cartesian legacy of scientiWc epistemology is transcended in favour of a Christian humanistic philosophy centred in a deepened understanding of the moral and religious subject and its historical existence. The insights of modern idealism into the nature of consciousness, subjectivity, and moral autonomy are combined with a renewal of a more genuine Platonism and Christian theism. Kant’s theoretical subject is not only subordinated to his practical subject, but his whole conception of subjectivity is transformed into a ‘transcendental empiricism’, individualized, and, while preserving the truths of humanism, forced into the vicinity of a spiritual and religious subject of Augustine’s kind. The concept of personality replaces that of the subject. The upper, idealistic layers of classical reason, cut oV by modern rationalism, are restored. Voluntarism is refocused on the exclusive defence of moral will. One-sided abstractionism is rejected, but rationality is retained as systematically explicative of the intuitive experience of concrete reality. Against rational as well as Romantic pantheists, the Christian insistence on the transcendence of God is preserved, and the personality of God, the value and signiWcance of the individual personality of man, and the personal relations between God and man are asserted in a developed and clariWed form. Joining post-Kantian idealism in the eVort to overcome the dualism of scientiWc epistemology, the personalists seek to retain many of the older moral and religious dualisms. Drawing selectively on the Enlightenment and Romantic innovations, and balancing them against classico-Christian insights, they assert simultaneously, and combine, qualiWed individuality and qualiWed social, ethical, and metaphysical wholes. They analyse and reject modern impersonal pantheism, with its vast and various ramiWcations, as not only a product of a combination of modern rationalism and modern

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Romanticism, but as having deep roots in the history of impersonalist metaphysics, monistic mysticism, and esotericism. At the same time they support the broadly liberal project against unhistorical, pre-modern reaction. Such new insights as are deemed to be congruent with, and even to have the capacity to enrich and reWne, the older traditions are thus reinserted into a reformulated traditional framework. Deeply involved in the complexities of a crossover period, when the inXuence of traditional culture was not yet eclipsed by radical modernism, idealistic personalism evinces many of the ambiguities of the nineteenth century. But this cultural climate was also fertile and resourceful, with new creative possibilities. The new importance placed on personality, even when it emphasized the classical and Christian precedent, was clearly a concomitant of the whole new development of the consciousness of individuality and subjectivity ever since the Renaissance. The relativistic consequences of the modern project had been visible from the outset, but it was perhaps only in the nineteenth century that their full extent was revealed, as the new impersonal wholes failed convincingly to assert objectivity. In this situation, the early personalists addressed the decisive and pressing question of the possibility of reconciling moral and axiological normativity and theistic metaphysics with the deepened understanding of individuality. They sought a way to keep the faith in both God and reason that retained an objective conception of truth, goodness, and beauty while at the same time doing justice to the dynamic, historical character of personal life and the dialogical reciprocity between persons. In doing so, they revealed needed alternative potentials of the modern Western mind. There are good reasons to give them a fair hearing again.

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Index Concepts to which one of the chapters or the sections of the chapters are devoted, and/or which appear very frequently throughout the book, such as ‘the absolute’, ‘God’, ‘idealism’, ‘person’, ‘personal relation (I-Thou relation)’, ‘pantheism’, ‘reason’, and ‘understanding’, are either not entered at all or entered only in some aspects. absolute idealistic personalism (absolutistic personalism) 20 nn. 58 and 61, 31, 35, 50 n. 63, 52, 63–4, 130, 159, 235–6 abstract and concrete personality (Hegel’s concepts of) 46, 88, 142–3, 187 action (act, active consciousness, agency, deed, self-activity, That) 57, 58, 59, 61, 68, 84–5, 89, 99, 114, 126, 143, 216, 237–8, 241 God’s 133, 161, 170, 173, 202, 217, 218, 234, 243 see also self-determination aesthetics 227, 238–9 agnosticism 123, 126, 180 Ahlberg, A. 14 n. 40 Alcott, B. 54 n. 76 Alston, W. P. 74 n. 23 analogy 45, 94, 134, 136, 139–41, 151–2, 162, 174 n. 152, 182–4, 194–7, 210, 213, 218–19, 234–5, 250 Anerkennung 46, 88, 208, 231 Anselm, St 275 anthropomorphism 127, 139, 141, 145, 152, 173, 177, 214 antinomies 58–9, 69, 77, 129 apophaticism 120, 126, 131, 170, 181–3, 200 appearance 32, 37, 41, 109, 124, 134, 157, 180–1, 201 apriorism 57, 135 Aquinas, St Thomas (Thomism) 34, 55–6, 63, 65 n. 116, 140, 170, 214, 230, 247, 267, 273 Arnold, M. 24, 123 Aristotle (Aristotelianism) 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60 n. 101, 69, 77, 124, 125, 132, 133, 154–6, 172, 188, 216, 243, 246, 250, 253–4, 256, 273 atheism 70, 77, 86, 112; see also pantheism

atheistic personalism 20 n. 58, 31, 51 Atterbom, P. D. A. 10–12, 107–109, 162–4, 229–30 and Biberg 11 and Grubbe 11, 107, 159, 163–4, 230 and Jacobi 11 n. 33, 47 n. 59, 86 and Leibniz 230 and Schelling 11, 108, 162–4, 230 Augustine, St (Augustinianism) 34, 55–6, 59, 65, 74, 131, 170, 207, 214, 232–3, 267, 273, 275–6, 282 authority, moral and religious 56, 69, 75, 106, 108, 267–9 autonomy 44, 47, 106, 135, 139, 142, 209, 215–16, 225, 267–9, 279, 282 and heteronomy 222, 268 and theonomy 220–3, 226, 235, 257, 268 Baader, F. von 5, 35, 146 n. 60, 184 Baggesen, J. 15 beautiful, the (beauty) 98, 122, 187–8, 212, 227, 239; see also idea; values Bergson, H. 14 n. 40, 32, 183–4, 244 Berkeley, G. 18, 32, 49–50, 51–3, 57–8, 62, 64 n. 112, 134, 273 Bernard, St 65, 188 Bertocci, P. A. 20 n. 61, 31–2, 63, 65–6 Biberg, N. F. 10–13, 95–7, 119, 153–6, 180, 196, 219–23, 248, 264 and Aristotle 154–6 and Cudworth 153 n. 86 and Fichte, J. G. 96, 219–20, 221 and Hegel 10–12, 96–7, 156, 221 and Jacobi 10–11, 95–7, 110–11, 155, 156 and Kant 96, 97, 219–20, 221, 222, 223 n. 95 and Plato (Platonism) 96–7, 153–6, 220, 223

298

Index

Biberg, N. F. (cont.) and Plotinus 154 and Schelling 10, 96, 153–6, 220, 223 and Schleiermacher 96, 221, 223 n. 95 and Scottish philosophy 96 and Spinoza 96–7, 220 see also Geijer; Grubbe Bildung (bildning) 9 n. 27, 11–12, 23, 24 n. 69, 45, 111, 221, 227, 229, 256 Boethius 34, 131, 137, 198 Boethius, D. 9, 224 n. 97 Bo¨hme, J. 5, 89, 108, 145–6, 166, 177–8, 184, 241 n. 163 Bonaventure, St 275 Borelius, J. J. 14 n. 40 Bosanquet, B. 36–7, 39, 123–4, 188, 189, 194, 197–8, 201–2, 235–6, 246–9, 251, 253, 273, 274 Bostro¨m, C. J. 10, 13, 50 n. 63, 130, 157, 158, 159–60, 165, 167, 229, 230, 233, 235–6 Bowne, B. P. 1, 20–22, 31–2, 34, 39, 42, 48–53, 58–60, 63, 157, 203, 232–3, 236, 250 n. 196, 270, 271–2, 273–4, 275 and Bergson 32 and Berkeley 32, 49, 62 and Fichte, I. H. 95 and Jacobi 21 and Hegel 63 and Kant 32, 49 and Leibniz 32 and Lotze 21, 32, 49, 58–60, 63, 177 and Martineau 22 n. 64 and Schelling 87 and Ulrici 21 see also Illingworth; Pringle-Pattison Boyce Gibson, W. R. 19 n. 58 Bradley, F. H. 36–9, 58, 123–4, 180–1, 190, 194, 201, 235–6, 245, 246–8, 250, 252, 261, 273, 274 Brightman, E. S. 20 n. 61, 31–2, 34, 39, 54 n. 76, 63, 65–6, 184, 271 Bruno, G. 153 Buber, M. 1, 15 n. 43, 34, 35, 74–5 n. 28, 79, 205–6 Buford, T. O. 271 n. 1 Bulgakov, S. 130 n. 3 Burke, E. 80

Bussell, F. W. 19 n. 58 Butler, J. 256 Caird, E. 22 n. 64, 41, 52, 63, 130, 192–3, 235 Caird, J. 18 n. 54, 192 Calkins, M. 31, 52, 63 Calvin, J. (Calvinism) 65, 276 Cappadocian Fathers 200 n. 243; see also Church Fathers Carlyle, T. 24, 74 n. 26 Carr, H. W. 63 Carriere, M. 6 n.14 Catholicism 42 Catholic personalism 276; see also Catholic Tu¨bingen school; John Paul II; Thomistic personalism; Wojtyła Catholic Tu¨bingen school 5 Cato 216 causality (cause, cause-eVect) 53, 55, 57–8, 99, 100–1, 114, 127, 143, 174–5, 185, 203–4, 210–11, 241, 261 Centre Hegelianism 9 Chalybaeus, H. M. 6 n. 14 character: intelligible 215–16, 228, 254–5 moral 75–6, 85, 105, 114, 241, 250, 254, 256, 261, 262; see also will Christ 8, 125, 126, 136, 151, 264–5 see also Trinity, the Church Fathers 130–1, 133; see also Trinity, the civilization 23 n. 66, 25 coherence 123–4 Coleridge, S. T. 17, 22, 24, 26, 42, 74, 95, 116–17, 177–8, 183, 196, 240 common good, the 268–9 common-sense philosophy, see Scottish philosophy communism 12 n. 37 community 25 conceptualism 65 concreteness 55, 58, 68, 79, 80, 82, 85, 88, 109, 119, 123, 124, 129, 239, 245 of the absolute or God 82, 108, 136, 154–6, 170–1, 180–1 see also determination; universality conscience 44, 58, 224, 228, 232, 234; see also idea; moral imperative; moral order

Index conservatism 25–6, 46–9, 80, 167, 223 contingency 44, 57, 87–8, 156, 241, 250 Cook Wilson, J. 21, 51 counter-Enlightenment, the 47 n. 59 Cousin, V. 22, 152 creation 129–30, 131, 139, 150, 184–5, 204, 211, 214–15, 217, 218, 229–30, 237–8, 240, 241, 242–6, 263, 266 Croce, B. 83 Cudworth, R. 153 n. 86 Daub, K. 9 n. 23 Deats, P. 271 n. 1 decision (decisionism) 88–9, 96 deism 129, 137, 186, 187, 192–3 democracy 40, 268 demonstration (arguments, evidence, proofs) for (of) the existence of God 54, 57, 69, 71, 76–7, 101–2, 104–5, 136–7, 140–1, 197 Descartes, R. (Cartesianism) 56, 58, 59, 62, 71, 77, 88–9, 149, 226, 232–3, 273, 282 desire (sensual pleasure), in relation to morality (duty) 224–5, 229, 268 determination (Bestimmung, besta¨mning) 70–1, 135, 163, 206–7 of the absolute and/or God 70–1, 97, 104–6, 119, 120, 136, 138, 154–65, 171, 180–1, 186–8, 196, 208 determinism 57, 70, 100, 112, 115, 134–5, 238–9, 241, 259; see also fatalism Deutinger, M. 35 DeWolf, L. H. 61 dialectical thought (logic, reason) 63, 75, 82–3, 88–9, 94, 95, 96, 109, 115, 124, 218 dialogical philosophy 1, 3 n. 4, 11 n. 32, 15 n. 43, 35, 205 n. 2, 206 n. 9, 208–9, 271, 280 Dilthey, W. 7, 14 n. 40, 27, 113, 114 n. 185, 269 divine right of kings 269 Dominicans 65 n. 116 Dorner, I. A. 6 n.14, 22 n. 64 drama (dramatist), analogy of 146–7, 149, 156, 244, 251, 254–5, 266 Duns Scotus, J. 34, 61, 214, 275 duty (duties) 227, 229, 268

299

Eckhart 183, 191 education 40 Einfu¨hlung (empathy) 23 n. 66, 24 n. 69, 114 n. 185 Eklund, J. A. 14 n. 40 Eleatics 158–9 Emerson, R. W. 74 n. 26 empiricism 57, 69, 70, 89, 90, 99, 105, 106, 112 ends, see teleology Enlightenment, the 2–3, 26, 45, 47, 65, 67, 69, 70, 72, 77, 79, 80, 81, 87, 88, 89, 112, 129, 132 n. 6, 135, 138–9, 187, 214, 274, 275, 276, 277, 282; see also individualism; rationalism Erdmann, J. E. 9 n. 23 esoteric tradition, the (Hermetic tradition, theogony, theosophy) 10, 16 n. 46, 47, 61, 64, 75, 108, 135–6, 145–50, 191, 195, 218, 219, 153, 177–8, 271, 277; see also Bo¨hme; Ground, the; mysticism eternity (the eternal) 81, 105, 108, 116, 138, 149–50, 158–9, 160, 184–5, 193–4, 215, 230–1, 233, 252–3 Eucken, R. 14 n. 40, 51 eudaimonism 224, 256 Evangelicalism 65, 223 evil 90, 147, 262–3, 277; see also good, the evolution 166, 179, 262 exemplarism 154 existence 78–9, 84, 206 existentialism 11 n. 32, 14–15, 115, 279 elements of in personalism 14–15, 41–2, 62, 64, 68, 86, 92, 93, 215 existentialist personalism (twentiethcentury) 1; see also existentialism experience 65, 68, 70, 75–6, 82, 88–9, 93–4, 95, 99, 103, 106, 107–8, 115, 116–17, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126–7, 129, 137, 139, 170–3, 179–82, 186, 210, 233, 238, 241, 264, 282 God’s, the absolute as 183, 187, 190, 243, 246 and analogy 141, 183–4, 194, 250 faith 13, 56, 65, 74–5, 80, 82, 84, 107, 113, 134 philosophy of 96 see also Wdeism

300

Index

fatalism 69–70, 100, 170, 193, 210, 241 fate 170, 185 feeling (emotion, the heart, sentiment) 15, 26, 74, 83, 84 n. 72, 90, 96, 103–6, 113–14, 125, 126, 160–1, 170–2, 174, 210, 212, 226, 227, 239 Fe´nelon, F. de Salignac de la Mothe 136 Feuerbach, L. 9, 33, 44–6, 67, 74 n. 24, 207 n. 13, 231 n. 128 Fichte, I. H. 6, 9, 35, 43, 47, 93–5, 151–3, 157–8, 192, 217–19 and Fichte, J. G. 152, 226 n. 106 and Hegel 6 n.14, 94, 218, 219 and Jacobi 93–5, 151–2, 217–18 and Kant 157 and Schelling 93–5, 151–3, 192, 217–18 see also Lotze Fichte, J. G. 2, 34, 35, 58, 61, 232–3, 239; see also Biberg; Fichte, I. H.; Grubbe; Jacobi; Lotze; Pringle-Pattison; Schelling Wdeism 15, 43, 64–5, 68–9, 74, 86, 93, 99, 275 leap of faith (salto mortale) 15 n. 44, 73 Wnitism 250 Wnitistic personalism 52; see also Wnitism Fisher, G. P. 22 n. 64 Fischer, K. P. 6 n.14 Flewelling, R. T. 1, 20 n. 61, 39, 54, 63, 133 force (energy, power) 57, 127, 160, 260 n. 235 form 56, 61, 154–5, 275; see also idea Francis of Assisi (Franciscan tradition) 56, 65, 74, 96, 275–6 Fraser, A. C. 4, 18, 51, 183, 242, 274 freedom (free will) 40, 42, 43, 46, 53, 57, 58, 59–60, 61, 68, 70, 76, 82, 84–5, 87–8, 90, 91, 94–5, 96, 99–101, 107, 114–15, 124–5, 127, 128 n. 239, 137, 143–7, 150, 151, 193, 204, 207 n. 10, 209, 210–11, 214–16, 218–19, 220, 222, 225–6, 230, 231, 235, 238, 240, 243, 256–7, 258–62, 264, 265, 268, 277 God’s 46, 133, 151–2, 195–6, 218–19, 242, 263 political (political self-determination) 40, 43, 46–7, 80, 268–9 French revolution, the 79, 80, 274, 278

Friedrich Wilhelm III 46 Fries, J. F. 16 Gabler, G. A. 9 n. 23 Geijer, E. G. 10–12, 109–111, 164–8, 171, 185, 219, 230–6, 237, 248 and Atterbom 12, 109, 111, 230–1 and Biberg 110–11, 167, 223, 233 and Bo¨hme 166 and Fichte, J. G. 231–3 and Grubbe 12, 110–11, 159, 167, 233 and Hegel 109–11, 165–8, 231–2 and Jacobi 109–11, 165, 167, 231 and Kant 232–3, 234 and the Left Hegelians 167 and Leibniz 231 and Schelling 12, 109, 110, 164–7, 233, 235 and Schleiermacher 233 and Scottish philosophy 12 n. 36 and Trendelenburg 120 n. 207 gender 45 al-Ghazzali 65 Gilson, E. 63 Gloege, G. 33 God: and limits 147–8, 171–6, 185, 196, 263 as moral legislator (lawgiver) 140–1, 219–20, 240, 268 personality of and personality in 130–2, 141, 146, 152, 163, 170, 175, 182–3, 187–8, 198–200 Godhead (Gottheit) 94, 131, 137, 150 Goethe, J. W. von 50, 54 n. 76, 135, 209, 210 good, the (goodness) 98, 122, 187–8, 212, 222, 235, 238, 240, 259 and evil 87–8, 196, 214, 216, 250, 257 see also idea; values Go¨rres, J. J. von 5, 35 Go¨schel, K. F. 9 n. 23 Gregory of Nyssa 218 n. 74; see also Cappadocian Fathers Green, T. H. 18, 19, 22 n. 64, 23, 37, 41, 63, 119, 130, 184, 194, 202 n. 253, 268, 273 Grote, J. 17 ground (ground-consequent, reason) 57, 70–1, 143, 149, 157, 185, 210, 242

Index Ground, the (Ungrund) 71, 86, 89, 141, 144–7, 150, 170–1 Grubbe, S. 10–13, 98–107, 119, 156–62, 223–9, 248 and Biberg 98, 103, 156, 162, 223, 224 and Descartes 226 and Fichte, J. G. 99, 104, 105, 161, 224–6 and Hegel 101, 103, 105, 106, 159, 162 and Jacobi 98, 102, 103, 105, 107, 110–11, 157, 159 n. 106, 161, 225 n. 103, 227 and Kant 98, 99, 101, 103, 105, 161, 224–6 and Leibniz 160 and Plato (Platonism) 98, 103, 105, 160 and Schelling 11, 98, 99, 103, 104, 107, 157, 158, 162, 228 and Schiller, F. von 224 and Schleiermacher 105–6, 224 and Spinoza 100 n. 135, 157, 158–60, 162, 227 n. 108 see also Geijer Gu¨nther, A. 35 Haeckel, E. 25, 196 Haller, C. L. von 47 Hallett, H. F. 116 Hamann, J. G. 74–5 n. 28, 78 n. 47, 79, 80 Hamelin, O. 22 Hamilton, Sir W. 17 Hanne, J. W. 132 n. 7 Hare, J. C. 117 n. 197 Harris, W. T. 54 n. 76 Hartmann, E. von 6 n. 14 Hartshorne, C. 63, 272 n. 3 Hegel, G. W. F. (Hegelianism) 4, 7, 14 n. 40, 26–7, 31, 34, 36–7, 40, 46, 50 n. 64, 53, 61, 63, 64, 112 n. 177, 130, 132, 134, 142, 151, 170, 235–6, 251, 273; see also abstract and concrete personality; Biberg; Centre Hegelianism; Fichte, I. H.; Geijer; Grubbe; idea; Illingworth; Jacobi; Left Hegelianism; Lotze; Neo-Hegelianism; Pringle-Pattison; Right Hegelianism; Schelling; Seth; Upton; Webb; Weisse Heidegger, M. 4, 5, 79, 91, 279 Herder, J. G. 74–5 n. 28, 139, 141, 209

301

Herrmann, J. G. W. 124–5 history (historical consciousness, historicism, historicity) 14 n. 40, 24, 26, 69, 80, 108, 153, 213–14, 231, 239 n. 152, 276, 277, 282 historical reason 80–3, 95, 124 speculative philosophy of, progressive view of 24–5, 108, 276 see also experience Hocking, W. E. 20–1 n. 61, 39, 52, 63 Holbach, P. H. T., baron d’ 69 n. 4 Howison, C. H. 1, 20, 39, 52, 63, 249–50 Ho¨ijer, B. 9 Hu¨gel, F. von 38, 219 humanism 20 n. 58, 26, 38, 74 n. 24, 145, 175, 179, 219, 228–9, 269, 274, 276, 277, 279, 282; see also neo-humanism human rights 26, 279; see also natural right Humboldt, W. von 256, 275 Hume, D. (Humeanism) 3, 58, 238, 270 Husserl, E. 79, 115 n. 190 idea 96, 117, 127, 156, 172–3 of God and the absolute 94–5, 98, 102, 104 of the beautiful (ideal of the beautiful) 73, 76, 104, 122, 260 distinct from concept 97, 101–4, 115 in divine reason 154–5 of the good (ideal of the good) 73, 76, 101, 104, 106, 113, 122, 160–1, 199, 224–7, 260 Hegelian 115 of humanity (ideal of humanity) 228–9, 278 innate 71 Kantian 44, 69, 73, 97, 98, 103, 134 of the individual person (ideal of) 220–1, 223, 228–9, 233–4, 255, 256 Platonic (forms) 55, 103, 112–13, 115, 121, 153–6, 171, 199, 275 of the true (of truth, ideal of the true) 73, 76, 104, 113, 122, 260 as value 115, 266 ideal (ideals) 54, 122, 181–2, 192, 197, 210–11, 227–8, 234, 257–8, 259–60, 266

302

Index

idealism: general characteristics of typical early German and nineteenth-century 24, 26, 27, 219, 274 debasement of in Germany 25–7 connection with materialism and naturalism 79, 115, 133, 134–5, 159 n. 106, 165, 175, 177–8, 186, 282 Spa¨tidealismus (late idealism) 5 n.12, 7 n.15, 10, 17, 27 see also pantheism idealistic realism (realistic idealism) 49–50, 87, 93, 125 identity (philosophy of) 10, 50 n. 64, 79, 119, 134–5, 152, 172, 177 ideology 79, 80, 276 in Marxist sense 29, 46 idiographic and nomothetic sciences 115 Illingworth, J. R. 19, 21, 22 n. 64, 38, 41, 117, 126–8, 130, 194–7, 262–5, 273 and Bosanquet 194 and Bowne 21–2, 128, 197 and Bradley 194 and Coleridge 196 and Green 194–5 and Haeckel 196 and Hegel 264 and Lotze 22 n. 64, 128 n. 239, 194, 195, 197 and Martineau 22 n. 64, 127 n. 238 and Plato 264 and Pringle-Pattison 22 n. 64, 117, 194, 196, 262 and Schiller, F. C. S. 127 and Spinoza 196, 263 and Upton 262 see also Webb imagination 96, 135, 160, 226 immanence 54 n. 76, 70, 148–9, 183, 187–9, 254, 264 of God, divine 129–30, 179–82, 195–6, 202, 207 God both transcendent and immanent 267–8 immanentism (closed immanence, radical immanentization) 25–6, 132–3, 141, 146, 151, 167, 181, 277 immortality 54, 55, 57, 58, 73, 251–2, 254, 261–2

Incarnation, the 44–5, 126, 132, 188; see also Christ indiVerence 119, 144–5, 164–5, 177 individuality (individuation): of the absolute or God 108, 140–1, 155, 163, 197, 208, 211 of reality in general 58, 61, 65, 68–70, 72, 77, 79, 85, 95, 108–9, 129, 155, 239, 245–6, 275 Wnite personal 15, 16, 26, 44, 55, 56–7, 58, 69, 70, 72, 80, 84, 88, 95, 107, 108–9, 111, 119, 135, 207–8, 209–10, 211, 215–17, 218, 221–2, 227–9, 248, 260, 264–5, 282, 283 see also concreteness; determination individualism 15, 227, 246 Enlightenment (‘atomism’) 25–6, 45, 88, 185–7, 276, 277–8 Romantic 26, 45, 276, 277–8 irrationalism (irrationality, the subrational) 71, 74, 78, 86, 89, 92, 93, 113, 125, 146, 239, 241 n. 163, 244, 276 Jacobi, F. H. 2–7, 14–15, 16 n. 45, 33, 34, 38, 40, 42–3, 48–9, 50, 54 n. 76, 63, 64, 66, 67–83, 112, 113, 116, 119, 122, 132–41, 151, 168, 171, 177, 201, 205–12, 237, 239, 240, 244, 273–4, 275, 276, 278–9, 281 n. 13 and Aquinas 140 and Aristotle 68–9, 77, 141 and Augustine 74, 207, 214 and Berkeley 134 and St Bernard 65 and Bruno 153 n. 85 and Burke 80 and Descartes 71, 77 and Fichte, J. G. 2, 79, 83–4, 85 n. 76, 134–5, 139, 206 and the Franciscan tradition 74 and al-Ghazzali 65 and Goethe 50, 209, 210 and Hamann 78 n. 47, 80 and Hegel 68, 75, 77, 78 n. 47, 80–3, 136–7, 143 and Herder 139, 141, 209 and Hume 3

Index and Kant 69, 73–5, 77, 79, 86, 134–5, 139, 206, 208, 209, 211 and Leibniz 69, 72, 78, 80, 134 and Lessing 121, 135–6, 141 and Mendelssohn 72 and Pascal 65 and St Paul 65 and Plato (Platonism) 68–9, 73–4, 76, 78, 90, 138 and the pre-Socratics 77 and Rousseau 75, 78 n. 47, 212 and Scottish philosophy 3, 38, 68, 74, 210 and Spinoza 69, 70–81, 90, 134–6, 139, 141, 207, 210 and Tertullian 65 and WolV 72, 136 n. 16 see also Atterbom; Biberg; Fichte, I. H.; Geijer; Grubbe; Illingworth; Lotze; Pringle-Pattison; Schelling; Webb; Weisse Jacobins, the 80, 278 James, W. 21, 22, 184, 186, 244, 250, 259 n. 229, 261 n. 240 Ja¨sche, G. B. 6 n. 14 John Paul II 280 n. 10, 281 n. 14 Jones, H. 20 n. 58, 41, 52 Judas 216 Kant, I. (Kantianism) 9, 32, 36, 42, 51–3, 54 n. 76, 57–8, 83, 151, 224 n. 97, 232–3, 270, 273, 282; see also Biberg; Bowne; Fichte, I. H.; Geijer; Grubbe; idea; Jacobi; Lotze; Neo-Kantianism; Pringle-Pattison; Schelling; Seth; Webb Kathederphilosophie 9, 23, 218 Keats, J. 251, 254 Kierkegaard, S. 14–15, 218, 219, 276 King, M. L., Jr 280 n. 10 Knudson, A. C. 16, 39, 50–60, 63, 112 n. 177, 129–30, 151, 159, 203–4, 232–3, 235–6, 247 n. 187, 250 n. 196, 272–5 Krause, K. C. F. 16 Kuhn, J. E. 5 Kultur (culture) 23 n. 66, 24 n. 69, 25 Labadie, J. de 251 Laberthonnie`re, L. 22, 271

303

Ladd, G. T. 34, 51, 63 Landquist, J. 14 n. 40, 231 n. 128 Lask, E. 115; see also Neo-Kantianism Lavater, J. C. 140, 206 n. 9, 212 n. 37 Lavely, J. H. 61–4, 130, 159, 235 Leibniz, G. W. 32, 51–3, 56–8, 60 n. 101, 62, 63, 69, 72, 78, 80, 87, 134, 169, 232–3, 250 n. 196, 260, 267, 273 Left Hegelianism (Young Hegelianism) 8 n. 20, 9, 33, 34, 42 n. 38, 45–6, 49, 111–12, 167, 173, 274, 279 Lequier, J. 60 n. 100 Le Senne, R. 22, 271 Lessing, G. E. 121, 135–6, 138, 141 Le´vinas, E. 280 n. 11 Lewis, C. S. 125 n. 230 liberalism 12, 25–6, 47–9, 80, 167–8, 223, 274–5, 277–9; see also freedom liberal theology 16, 42, 65, 67, 188, 200, 219, 238 n. 148, 250–1, 276, 283 Lichtenberg, G. C. 44 life 78, 87, 90, 92, 97, 117, 144, 149, 158, 160, 173 philosophy of (Lebensphilosophie) 78, 92, 113, 205 n. 2, 239 Lotze, R. H. 7–8, 32, 35, 36, 38, 51–3, 54 n. 76, 58–9, 63, 67, 93–4, 99, 111–15, 124–5, 152, 168–77, 192, 200, 203, 218 n. 74, 224, 232–3, 236–40, 271, 272–4 and Aquinas 170 and Aristotle 172 and Augustine 170 and Fichte, I. H. 8 n. 19 and Fichte, J. G. 7 and Hegel 58, 112, 114–15 and Hume 112 and Jacobi 112, 114, 152, 168, 173, 237 and Kant 112, 113, 238–9 and the Left Hegelians 8 n. 20, 173 and Leibniz 169 and Plato 112–13, 115 and the Right Hegelians 8 n. 20 and Schelling 112, 114, 168, 173–4, 237, 238 and Schleiermacher 114 and Spinoza 168, 172, 238 and Ulrici 8 n. 19, 171 n. 145, 242

304

Index

Lotze, R. H. (cont.) and Weisse 8, 112 n. 179, 115, 168, 239 see also Bowne; Illingworth; PringlePattison; Seth; Upton; Webb love 105, 125, 137, 140–1, 183, 187–8, 199, 202, 213, 217, 251, 262, 263 Luther, M. (Lutheranism) 65, 276 Macmurray, J. 1 McTaggart, J. M. E. 20 n. 58, 31, 36–8, 38–9, 51, 250 Maine de Biran, F. P. 22, 58, 232–3 Mansel, H. L. 17, 22 n. 64, 178, 240 Marett, R. R. 19 n. 58 Marheineke, P. K. 9 n. 23 Maritain, J. 1, 63 Martensen, H. L. 15 Martineau, J. 17, 41, 122 n. 217, 127 n. 238, 178, 192, 194, 240–1, 252 n. 204, 259 n. 229, 267 Marx, K. (Marxism) 46–8, 279; see also ideology materialism 69, 79, 111–12, 134–5, 157, 174 matter 54, 127, 129, 157, 192, 195, 247; see also form Maurice, F. D. 17 measure (Plato’s view of) 138 mechanism 78, 85, 112–13, 141, 161 Mendelssohn, M. 72 Methodism 42 Michelet, K. L. 39 n. 29 Mill, J. S. 24, 268 modernism 279 modernity 25–6, 64, 106, 278–81 Momerie, A. W. 18, 22 n. 64 monads (monadology) 57, 160 n. 109, 231, 250 n. 196 monarchy 48 n. 61, 188, 269, 274; see also sovereignty monism 36, 40, 77, 79, 98, 111, 129, 133, 196, 226, 241, 246–7, 251–2; see also mysticism moral imperative (categorical imperative, moral obligation, principium moralitatis) 161, 223, 224–8, 267–8 moral order (moral law) 139, 219–23, 226 n. 106, 227–8, 233–4, 240, 257–8, 259–60, 267–8, 269, 279

one with God as person 133, 150, 161, 169–70, 172, 199, 200, 217, 234, 237, 263, 248, 258 see also rational order moral-sense philosophy, see Scottish philosophy Morell, J. D. 17 Mounier, E. 1, 22, 63, 271 Muelder, W. G. 54 n. 76 Mu¨ller, J. 268 n. 270 mysticism 47, 75, 79, 99, 125, 133, 135–6, 220, 226, 251–2, 259, 283; see also esoteric tradition, the; Ground, the nationalism 25–6 naturalism 25, 69, 112, 157, 158, 210, 278 n. 8 natural right 80 natural theology 56, 113, 149, 267 nature 55, 78, 81, 85, 86 n. 79, 140, 160, 211, 217, 260, 277 laws of 115, 238 philosophy of (Naturphilosophie) 4, 10–11, 25, 85–7, 135, 139, 143, 160 Nazism 12 n. 37 necessity 82, 87, 110, 128 n. 239, 146, 161, 185, 216, 217, 243, 257 Ne´doncelle, M. 22, 271 negative philosophy 43, 86 Neo-Hegelianism 269 n. 274 neo-humanism 11–12, 16, 23, 24, 26, 45, 158, 224, 256, 277, 278 neo-idealism 269 n. 274 Neo-Kantianism 7–8 Baden 7, 14 n. 40, 20, 239, 266–7, 269–70 Nicaea, council of 199–200 Nietzsche, F. 5, 92–3, 239, 269, 279 nihilism 2, 47, 77, 79, 95, 110–11, 139, 143, 189, 209, 278, 282 Nobel Prize in Literature 272 nominalism 69, 169, 246, 276 Norstro¨m, V. 13–14 n. 40 noumena (the noumenal) 99, 123, 257, 267 Nyblaeus, A. 11 n. 32, 13, 111, 154, 164–6, 231 n. 128, 233

Index Obereit, J. H. 79 n. 51 Ockham (Ockhamism) 56, 267 Oliver, H. H. 271 n. 1 omnipotence 169–70, 251, 161–2 omnipresence 237 omniscience 161–2 ontologism 74 n. 25 organism (organicism) 25, 48, 143–4, 165–6, 246, 263, 278 orthodoxy (Christian orthodoxy, orthodox theology) 46–7, 51, 62, 90, 125 n. 230, 142, 145, 151, 176, 182, 183, 214, 218, 262–3, 264–5, 274, 276 panentheism 16, 148 panpsychism 55, 63 pantheism: historical sources 47, 64, 75, 133, 158–9, 191, 258 connection with materialism, naturalism, and atheism 6 n. 14, 9, 25–26, 33, 111–12, 133, 142, 167, 177, 181–2, 193, 195–6, 201, 252 in personalism 87, 129–30, 143–4, 167, 179, 182–3, 192 early (pre-personalist) criticism of Spinoza’s 136 conceptual and terminological history 50, 69 n. 4 typological distinction between impersonalistic pantheism and personalism 28, 69, 273 see also esoteric tradition, the; nihilism Pantheismusstreit, der 4, 33, 43, 50, 121, 135–6, 142, 273 pantheistic personalism 51 paradoxicalism 15 Pascal, B. 65 patripassianism 174 n. 152 Paul, St 65 person (personality), conceptual and terminological history 34, 43–5, 67–8, 70, 130–4, 136–7, 140–1, 144–6, 151–2, 170–6, 197–8, 203, 205, 213, 208, 233, 236–7, 248, 249, 254–5, 263–4, 267 personalism: classiWcations and varieties of 1, 13, 31, 34, 50–3, 63–4

305

concept and term 32–4 deWnitions of 31–4, 49–53, 54 n. 76, 61 phenomena (phenomenality) 52, 55, 58, 78, 123, 129, 157, 160, 267 phenomenological personalism 1, 23, 281; see also phenomenology phenomenology 11 n. 32, 205 n. 2, 280 Philo 131, 183 Pietism 42, 65, 135, 276 Plato (Platonism) 53–5, 56, 57, 58, 60 n. 101, 62, 69, 108, 170, 273, 275, 282 Cambridge Platonism 96, 153 n. 86 Christian Platonism 55, 92, 131, 154, 191 Middle Platonism 154 Neo-Platonism 131, 153 n. 85, 154, 177, 191, 200 Romantic Platonism 95, 153 see also Biberg; Grubbe; idea; Jacobi, Lotze; measure; Plotinus; PringlePattison; Proclus; Schelling; Seth; Webb Plotinus 55, 154, 183, 273 pluralism 36, 40, 129, 184, 186–7, 203, 246–7, 250 Pope, A. 181 positive philosophy 42–3, 46, 86 positivism (neo-positivism) 112, 123, 238, 270, 277, 279 postmodernism 5, 279 pragmatism 20 n. 58, 27, 127 pre-Socratics, the 77 Pringle-Pattison, A. S. 18–19, 35–41, 50, 51, 116, 117, 118–24, 130, 177, 178–91, 194, 203, 236, 238 n. 145, 241–55, 273 and Aquinas 247 and Aristotle 124, 188, 243, 246, 250, 253–4 and Bergson 183–4, 244 and Boehme 241 n. 163 and Bosanquet 36–7, 39, 116, 118, 123–4, 188, 189, 242 n. 170, 246–9, 251, 253, 273 and Bowne 21–2, 190 and Bradley 36–9, 116, 118, 123–4, 180–1, 190, 245, 246–8, 250, 252, 273 and Coleridge 183 and Eckhart 183

306

Index

Pringle-Pattison, A. S. (cont.) and Fichte, J. G. 119, 179, 181, 242–3 and Fraser 3–4, 183, 242, 274 and Green 18, 116, 118, 119, 184, 273 and Hegel 18, 37, 41–2, 118, 120–21, 123, 124, 179, 180, 182–3, 185–9, 241 n. 163, 243, 244, 245, 255, 273 and Howison 249–50 and Jacobi 121, 186–8, 189, 190, 255 and James 186, 244, 250 and Kant 36, 118 and the Left Hegelians 42 n. 38 and Lotze 18–19, 36, 38, 116, 122, 177, 185–6, 241, 248, 254, 274 and McTaggart 36–8, 250 and Martineau 22 n. 65, 36, 122 n. 217 and Philo 183 and Plato 121, 122, 184, 250, 253–4, 254–5 and Plotinus 183 and Proclus 183 and Rashdall 37, 185–7, 250, 254 and the Right Hegelians 36, 118 and Royce 184, 253 and Schelling 18, 41–2, 119–20, 121, 122, 184, 187–8, 190, 241, 243, 244–5, 254–5 and Schiller, F. C. S. 123 and Schleiermacher 249, 252 and Scottish philosophy 3–4, 38, 41 and Scotus Eriugena 183 and Sorley 37 and Spencer 180, 190 and Spinoza 119, 123, 181, 189, 243, 244, 246, 249, 253–4 and Sturt 38 n. 28, 123 and Trendelenburg 18, 41, 120 and Troeltsch 271 and Ulrici 18, 242 and Ward 36, 185, 244 see also Illingworth; Seth; Upton process theology 27, 184 Proclus 183 progressivism 262–3 Protestantism (Protestant theology) 42, 56, 65, 88, 275–6 providence 44–5, 65, 105, 137, 140, 210, 223 n. 95, 275 psychoanalysis 279

psychology 20 n. 58, 85, 113 humanistic 279 Puritanism 276 racialism 25 Ramanuja 65–6 Rashdall, H. 19–20 n. 58, 37, 38 n. 26, 50 n. 63, 51, 185–7, 250, 254 rationalism (intellectualism) 53, 64–5, 69, 99, 101–2, 105, 125, 161, 275 modern (Enlightenment reason) 25, 47, 57–8, 61, 68–73, 77, 79, 87–8, 90, 112, 276, 277–9, 282–3 rational order 136, 163, 184 one with God as person 133, 137, 150, 169–70, 172, 199, 200, 217, 237, 248, 263, 266–7 realism 20 n. 58, 62, 63–4, 76, 78, 87, 93, 96, 102, 116, 129, 139, 186, 203 conceptual 55, 65, 69, 118–19, 121, 131, 246, 275 realistic personalism 63–4 Reformation, the 276 Reid, T. 76 n. 34 relativism 80, 238, 283 relativistic personalism 51–2 Renaissance, the 283 Renouvier, C. B. 1, 22, 34, 52, 60 n. 100, 63, 173 n. 149, 186 n. 191, 250 n. 197 resurrection 44–5 revelation 56, 65, 69, 75, 88, 94, 99, 113–14, 126 inner 75, 104, 106, 114, 125, 161, 212 Richard of St Victor 34, 275 n. 7 Richmond, W. 18 Rickert, H. 115, 239; see also NeoKantianism Right Hegelianism 9, 14 n. 40, 15, 39 n. 29, 142 convergence with speculative theism 111, 142, 273 Ritschl, A. 8, 124, 177, 192 Robb, C. 271 n. 1 Rococo, the 3 Romanticism (Romantics) 6, 8, 15–16, 25–6, 47, 68, 69, 74, 75, 78, 87, 90, 103, 107, 138–9, 210, 212–13, 217, 274, 275, 276, 277–9, 282–3; see also esoteric tradition the; individualism;

Index irrationalism; nihilism; pantheism; Plato Rosenkrantz, J. K. F. 9 n. 23 Rothe, R. 6 n. 14, 22 n. 64 Rousseau, J-J. (Rousseauanism) 47 n. 59, 75, 78 n. 47, 212, 268–9, 274, 278 Royce, J. 20–21 n. 61, 31, 34, 38 n. 28, 52, 63, 130, 184, 235, 253 Rydberg, V. 14 n. 40 scepticism 3, 99 Scheler, M. 1, 79, 271 Schell, H. 35 Schelling, F. W. J. von (Schellingianism) 4–7, 12, 14–15, 34, 35, 40, 42, 50, 63, 64, 66, 67–8, 83–93, 116–17, 142–50, 152–3, 170–1, 177, 212–17, 260, 273–4 and Aquinas 214 and Aristotle 216 and Augustine 214 and Baader 146 n. 60 and Bo¨hme 5, 89, 108, 145–6, 150 and Descartes 88–9, 149 and Duns Scotus 214 and Hegel 4–5, 85, 86, 87–92, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 212, 214, 215–16, 217 and Fichte, J. G. 84–5, 149 and Jacobi 4–7, 79, 83–8, 90–2, 134–6, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143–5, 147, 150, 214 and Kant 84–5, 86, 91, 216, 217 and Leibniz 87 and Plato (Platonism) 90, 153 and Spinoza 85, 87, 143, 215–16 see also Atterbom; Biberg; Bowne; Fichte, I. H.; Geijer; Grubbe; Illingworth; Lotze; Pringle-Pattison; Upton; Webb Schiller, F. C. S. 19–20 n. 58, 38–9 n. 28, 123, 127, 193 Schiller, F. von 224 Schleiermacher, F. D. E. 15–16, 32–3, 42, 50, 96, 105–6, 114, 133, 153, 221, 223 n. 95, 224, 233, 249, 252, 259 scholasticism 65, 121, 130, 133, 154, 169, 199; see also Aquinas; orthodoxy; theism Schopenhauer, A. 92–3, 218

307

science 7 n. 16, 77, 78, 86, 112–13, 117, 127, 134, 193, 214, 276 Scottish philosophy 3, 9–10, 12 n. 36, 18, 38, 65, 68, 74, 96, 224 n. 97, 274, 277 Scotus Eriugena, J. 183 self, the (selfhood): absolute, divine 152, 178–9, 187, 214, 219 ‘dethroning’ of 45–7, 279 Wnite, human 42, 45, 57, 58, 73, 84–6, 99, 139, 147, 171–2, 175–6, 181–2, 187, 194, 216–17, 220, 234, 241–2, 247–8, 249, 250–5, 256, 259–61 non-personalist conception of absolute, divine 118–20, 166–7, 184, 186, 191, 209, 214, 235, 248 non-personalist conception of Wnite, human 52, 83, 96, 99, 118–20, 134, 166–7, 191, 209, 235, 241–2, 246, 247, 248, 251–2, 257, 258, 261, 262 n. 246, 264 see also self-actualization; selfconsciousness; self-determination self-actualization (self-realization) 24, 40, 195, 220–1, 224, 227–9, 250, 253–4, 256, 277, 279 self-consciousness (self-certainty, selfexperience) 52–3, 54 n. 76, 56, 58–9, 68, 83–4, 96, 98–104, 119, 120–1, 125, 154–6, 163, 170–6, 254, 261, 264, 265 absolute, eternal, God’s, 119, 125, 137, 158–60, 177, 178–9, 182–3 modern thematic of self-consciousness and subjectivity 67, 159, 283 self-determination 57, 99–101, 158, 160, 163–4, 265 God’s 195, 197 see also determination Sengler, J. 6 n. 14 Seth, J. 19, 38 n. 26, 255–8 and Aristotle 256 and Butler 256 and Green 256 and Hegel 256–7 and Kant 256–7 and Plato 256 and Pringle-Pattison 255–6 and Royce 253 n. 210

308

Index

Seth, J. (cont.) and Schleiermacher 252 n. 204 and Spinoza 257 see also Upton; Webb Seth Pringle-Pattison, A., see PringlePattison, A. S. Shakespeare, W. 255 Sibbern, F. C. 15 sin 192, 213–14, 258, 260, 264 Snellman, J. V. 14 n. 40 socialism 262 n. 246, 279 social contract 268–9 society 25, 45–7, 274, 278; see also community Socrates 136 So¨derblom, N. 252 n. 206 Soloviev, V. 15 n. 42 Sorley, W. R. 20, 37, 38 n. 26, 39, 51, 248, 266–7, 269 soul, the 54, 55, 57, 98, 99, 122, 262, 275 sovereignty 45, 48 space 52, 58, 78, 127, 129, 157–8, 230, 230–1, 235, 237 specious present 184, 244 Spencer, H. 180, 190 Spinoza, B. (Spinozism) 43, 47, 56–7, 90, 112 n. 177, 130, 136, 251; see also Biberg; Grubbe; Illingworth; Jacobi; Lotze; Pringle-Pattison; Schelling; Seth; substance; Upton; Webb Stahl, F. J. 42, 47, 109 state, the 23 n. 66, 45, 274, 278 Staudenmaier, F. A. 5, 35 Stern, W. 1, 34, 51, 63, 271 Stirling, J. H. 18 n. 54 Stoics, the (Stoicism) 191, 258 Stout, G. F. 19 n. 58 Strauss, D. F. 34 Strauss, L. 281 n. 13 structuralism 279 Sturt, H. 19–20 n. 58, 38–9 n. 28, 123 St Victor, school of 275 subject, the (subjectivity) 35, 44–5, 67, 79, 87, 94, 118–19, 132–3, 134–5, 152, 163, 201, 206, 209, 243, 282; see also self; self-consciousness; subjectivism subject and predicate 123 subjectivism 83, 227

substance 57, 62, 99, 119, 120, 123, 158, 180, 203–4, 237, 254 Aristotelian 154 distinction between Aristotlian and Spinozist 246 Spinozist 71–2, 119, 135, 139, 242, 243–4, 245 SuWs, the 191 supernatural, the (supernaturalism) 63, 70, 99, 264 supra-rational, the 56, 71, 90, 92, 244 system (systematicity) 84–5, 87–8, 98, 120, 124, 149, 158, 164 systems theory 279 Tauler, J. 191 Taylor, A. E. 20 n. 58, 38 n. 26, 41, 63, 184 n. 184 Teichmu¨ller, G. 54 n. 76 teleological personalism 52 teleology 112–13, 238 Temple, W. 38 n. 26 temporalism 15, 108, 184 Tennant, F. R. 63 Tertullian 65 theism 40, 41, 43, 50, 51, 62, 77, 87, 143, 147, 162–4, 219, 243, 282 traditional (classical, medieval) 51–2, 57, 68, 91, 141, 146, 148, 150, 168, 170, 175, 184, 196, 218, 250, 276, 281 n. 14 see also orthodoxy Theunissen, M. 35, 280 n. 11 Thomism, see Aquinas, St Thomas Thomistic personalism 65 n. 116 Thorild, T. 12 time 52, 58, 78, 108, 127, 129, 149–50, 157–8, 184, 215, 230, 230–1, 235, 237, 244, 252–3, 261 n. 240 Toland, J. 69 totalitarianism 40, 279 transcendence 25, 54 n. 76, 75, 77, 78, 97, 129–30, 132–3, 134, 137, 139, 148–9, 152, 164, 179–80, 182, 183, 188–9, 193, 195–6, 201–2, 207, 279, 282 transcendental empiricism 49, 94–5, 282 transcendentalists, the 54 n. 76 Trendelenburg, A. 5, 60 n. 101, 120, 255 n. 216

Index

309

Trinity, the 45, 88, 130–33, 142, 145–6, 154, 163, 166, 170, 182–3, 188, 198–200, 263 social Trinitarianism 131–2, 198–200, 240, 264 Troeltsch, E. 33, 271 true, the (truth) 98, 122, 187–8, 212; see also idea; values

Vedanta (Indian and Oriental thought and religion, the Upanishads, the Veda) 65–6, 145, 158–9, 191, 227, 252, 264, 276 Victorianism 24, 270 virtue, virtues 227, 229 Voegelin, E. 280–1 n. 13 voluntarism, see will

Ulrici, H. 6, 22, 59, 116, 171 n. 145, 242 unconditioned, the 70–1, 76, 84 n. 72, 169 unconscious, the 85, 89, 92, 127 Underhill, G. E. 19 n. 58 Unitarianism 17, 132, 178 n. 167, 198, 240–1 universality 44, 45, 69, 115, 155, 201, 210, 227, 229, 239, 245–6, 260, 267 abstract 47, 55, 77, 85, 151, 278 concrete 63, 80, 245–6 see also individuality Upton, C. B. 17, 117, 124–5, 191–4, 258–62 and Aristotle 125 and Bradley 191, 258, 261 and Caird, E. 191, 192–3 and Caird, J. 191, 192 and Fichte, I. H. 192 and Green 191, 258–9 and Hegel 125, 192, 193–4, 194, 258, 261 and James 259 n. 229, 261 n. 240 and Lotze 17, 124–5, 192, 259 n. 229, 261 n. 240 and Martineau 125, 192, 194, 259 n. 229 and Pringle-Pattison 117, 125, 262 and Ritschl 192 and Schiller, F. C. S. 193 and Schleiermacher 252 n. 204, 259 and Seth 259 n. 229 and Spinoza (Spinozism) 191, 192, 193, 194, 258, 261 utilitarianism 23, 268, 277–8

Wachter, J. G. 136 Waldenfels, B. 280 n. 11 Wallace, W. 18 n. 54 Ward, J. 36, 38 n. 28, 39, 51, 63, 113, 185, 244 Webb, C. C. J. 19, 38, 41, 51, 66, 130, 197–202, 252 n. 206, 265–69 and Aquinas 267 and Aristotle 202 and Augustine 267 and Bosanquet 38, 197–8, 201–2 and Bowne 21–2 and Bradley 38, 201 and Green 202 n. 253, 268 and Hegel 264, 267 and Illingworth 198, 200, 264 and Kant 267–8 and Lotze 197–8, 199, 201 and Martineau 267 and Rousseau 268–9 and Seth 266 and Sorley 266 and Spinoza 201–2 Weber, M. 23 n. 66 Weisse, C. H. 6, 43, 47, 93–5, 98, 151–3, 168, 192, 239 and Hegel 94, 115, 152, 219 and Jacobi 93–5, 151–2 and Schelling 93–5, 151–3 see also Lotze Weltgeist 26–7, 110, 166–7 Whitehead, A. N. 63 Whitman, W. 54 n. 76 Wikner, P. 13–14 n. 40 will (volition) 53, 57, 58, 61, 65, 68, 83, 85, 89, 95, 99, 126, 143, 144, 151–2, 163, 192, 204, 210–11, 213–17, 218–19, 238, 240, 241, 243, 250, 251, 252, 258–60, 264, 275 God’s 57, 95, 133, 137, 138, 139, 140–1, 151–2, 161, 174, 178, 192, 204,

validity (Geltung) 115, 171, 239–40, 270 values 7, 40, 113, 115, 122, 123, 133, 171, 180, 181–2, 187–8, 199, 212, 238–40, 253, 266, 269–70 philosophy of 7, 14 n. 40, 20, 112–13, 239, 248, 253, 266–7, 269–70 see also ideas

310 will (cont.) 210–11, 214–15, 218–19, 221, 228, 229–30, 234, 237, 240, 243, 260 n. 235 moral 73–4, 106, 117, 160–1, 221–3, 224–6, 228, 257 voluntarism 115, 137, 169, 226 see also act; freedom Windelband, W. 115; see also NeoKantianism Wirse´n, C. D. af 272

Index Wissenschaft 23 n. 66 WolV, C. (WolYanism) 72, 90, 136 n. 16 Wojtyła, K. 1; see also John Paul II worldview: concept and nature of 27–8 personalism’s character of 16, 23, 27 Weltanschauung 23 n. 66, 25–6, 27–8, 271 see also idealism Young Hegelianism, see Left Hegelianism