Hope and the Kantian Legacy: New Contributions to the History of Optimism (Bloomsbury Studies in Modern German Philosophy) 9781350238084, 9781350238091, 9781350238107, 1350238082

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HOPE AND THE KANTIAN LEGACY

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Bloomsbury Studies in Modern German Philosophy Series Editors:

Courtney D. Fugate, American University of Beirut, Lebanon Anne Pollok, University of South Carolina, USA Editorial Board: Desmond Hogan (Princeton University, USA) Ursula Goldenbaum (Emory University, USA) Robert Clewis (Gwynedd Mercy University, USA) Paul Guyer (Brown University, USA) Brandon Look (University of Kentucky, USA) Eric Watkins (University of California, San Diego, USA) Corey W. Dyck (University of Western Ontario, Canada) Stefanie Buchenau (University of Paris, France) Paola Rumore (University of Turin, Italy) Heiner Klemme (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany) Central and previously overlooked ideas and thinkers from the German Enlightenment Era are showcased in this series. Expanding research into areas that have been neglected particularly in English-language scholarship, it covers the work of lesser-known authors, previously untranslated texts, and issues that have suffered an undeserved life on the margins of current philosophical-historical discussion about 18th-century German thought. By opening itself to a broad range of subjects and placing the role of women during this period centre-stage, the series not only advances our understanding about the German Enlightenment and its connection with the pan-European debates, but also contributes to debates about the reception of Newtonian science and the impact of Leibnizian, Kantian and Wolffian philosophies. Featuring edited collections and single-authored works, and overseen by an esteemed Editorial Board, the goal is to enrich current debates in the history of philosophy and to correct common misconceptions. Titles in the series include: Tetens’s Writings on Method, Language, and Anthropology, edited by Courtney D. Fugate, Curtis Sommerlatte and Scott Stapleford Kant’s Rational Religion and the Radical Enlightenment, by Anna Tomaszewska The Human Vocation in German Philosophy, edited by Anne Pollok and Courtney D. Fugate The Philosophy of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, by Birgit Sandkaulen

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HOPE AND THE KANTIAN LEGACY NEW CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE HISTORY OF OPTIMISM

Edited by Katerina Mihaylova and Anna Ezekiel Foreword by George di Giovanni

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Katerina Mihaylova, Anna Ezekiel and Contributors, 2023 Katerina Mihaylova and Anna Ezekiel have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. George Frederick Watts, Hope, 1886, Artefact / Alamy Stock Photo. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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CONTENTS

N OTES ON C ONTRIBUTORS F OREWORD , George di Giovanni

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A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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A BBREVIATIONS

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Introduction Katerina Mihaylova and Anna Ezekiel 1

Between Need and Permission: The Role of Hope in Kant’s Critical Foundation of Moral Faith Günter Zöller, translated by Anna Ezekiel and Katerina Mihaylova

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Hopeful Pessimism: The Kantian Mind at the End of All Things Andrew Chignell

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Circulus Volitionis: The Hope for Divine Aid in Kant’s Religion Lawrence Pasternack

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Kant, Beck, and the Highest Good Fiacha D. Heneghan

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Between Faith and Reason: Is J. H. Tieftrunk’s Concept of Hope a Postulate? Ingomar Kloos, translated by Anna Ezekiel

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Fichte on Optimism and Pessimism Rory Phillips

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The Autonomy of the Heart: Forberg on Action Without Belief Kevin Harrelson

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Mind Subverted to Madness: The Psychological Force of Hope as Affect in Kant and J. C. Hoffbauer Katerina Mihaylova

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“What May I Hope?” Schleiermacher’s Answer to Kant’s Third Question Jörg Noller

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10 C. A. Eschenmayer: History as the Realm of Freedom and Moral Development Cristiana Senigaglia

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11 Undirected Directionality: Jakob Friedrich Fries on Hope, Faith, and Comprehensive Feelings Paul G. Ziche

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CONTENTS

12 Humboldt, Bildung, Language, and Hope Susan-Judith Hoffmann

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13 In The Hope of a Philosopher of Nature Daniel Whistler

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14 Knowledge, Faith, and Ambiguity: Hope in the Work of Novalis and Karoline von Günderrode Anna Ezekiel 15 Friedrich Creuzer and the Claims of the Symbolic Allen Speight

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16 “When My Heart Says So . . .” Hope as Delusion in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy Marie-Michèle Blondin

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17 Hope And Faith: Kierkegaard’s Call for the Self to Develop its Relationship to Itself Esther Oluffa Pedersen

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I NDEX OF N AMES I NDEX OF S UBJECTS

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Marie-Michèle Blondin teaches philosophy at Collège Montmorency in Laval, Canada, is a member of the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at the Université de Montréal, and is an editorial assistant for Symphilosophie, International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism. She published Vivre et vivre encore. La notion de vie chez Arthur Schopenhauer in 2018. After conducting postdoctoral research at the Université de Montréal in 2019, she continues to pursue her work on Schopenhauer’s thought. Andrew Chignell is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor at Princeton University. He works on early modern philosophy (especially Kant) as well as moral psychology, food ethics, and philosophy of religion. He is currently the president of the North American Kant Society, and the director of the Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion. Anna Ezekiel is an honorary fellow at the University of York, working on post-Kantian German philosophy, and teaches on philosophy and gender at Parami University in Myanmar. Dr. Ezekiel’s research focuses on historical women philosophers, especially Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806). She has translated work by Günderrode and other German women philosophers in Poetic Fragments (2016), Philosophical Fragments (forthcoming) and Women Philosophers of the Long 19th Century: The German Tradition, ed. Dalia Nassar and Kristin Gjesdal (2021). Kevin J. Harrelson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ball State University, where he also directs the Health Humanities Program. He is the author of The Ontological Argument from Descartes to Hegel (2009), as well as many essays on German Idealism, American Philosophy, the philosophy of historiography, the philosophy of race, and other topics. Fiacha Heneghan writes on the history of philosophy—especially Kant’s ethics—and environmental philosophy. He completed his PhD at Vanderbilt University in 2021, exploring the relevance of Kant’s concept of the highest good for contemporary environmental thought. Fiacha is now privately teaching philosophy while training as a violin maker at the Chicago School of Violin Making. Susan-Judith Hoffmann teaches philosophy at Dawson College and is an adjunct professor at McGill University. Her main interests are German Idealism, Romanticism, Hermeneutics, Feminism and Aesthetics. She works on Fichte, Nietzsche and conceptions of the self and the imagination in the nineteenth century. Hoffmann recently published “Fichte and the Early German Romantics” in the Brill’s Companion to German Romantic Philosophy edited by Elizabeth Millán Brusslan and Judith Norman (2018). Ingomar Kloos studied philosophy and political science at Hannover University (now Leibniz University), under the supervision of Dr. Gerd-Günther Grau, Dr. Peter Brokmeier vii

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and Dr. Oskar Negt. He completed his philosophical studies as auditor at Halle with Dr. Günter Schenk. Kloos was chair of the society Hallische Philosophische Bibliothek e.V. (HPB e.V.), founded in 2001. Of the book series edited by this society, he was involved (among others) with the three-volume publication Frühkantianer an der Academia Fridericiana Halenses, in Philosophisches Denken in Halle – Personen und Texte, part 1, Philosophen des 18. Jahrhunderts (2015). Katerina Mihaylova is a post-doctoral fellow and lecturer at Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg working mainly on modern moral and political philosophy. She got her MA and PhD from Ludwig-Maximillian-University Munich with theses on Kant’s theory of space and on the function of sincerity in Kant’s theory of obligation. She has written articles on eighteenth-century German moral and legal philosophy and edited volumes on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, conscience, obligation, and sincerity in Enlightenment philosophy. Jörg Noller is a lecturer (“Privatdozent”) in philosophy at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. He has published numerous books on Kant and German idealism, including The Concept of Will in Classical German Philosophy (ed. with Manja Kisner, 2020), Kant’s Early Critics on Freedom of the Will (ed. and transl. with John Walsh; forthcoming) as well as articles in journals including the European Journal of Philosophy, Theoria, and Kant-Studien. Lawrence Pasternack is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Religious Studies at Oklahoma State University. He is among the most published specialists in Kant’s philosophy of religion. In addition to a commentary on Kant’s Religion (2014), his work appears in such outlets as Kant-Studien, Kantian Review, Rethinking Kant, The Kant Yearbook, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Philosophia, Faith and Philosophy, Religious Studies, and various edited collections. Esther Oluffa Pedersen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Section for Philosophy and Science Studies, Department of Arts, Roskilde University, Denmark. Pedersen works in the intersection between the history of philosophy, philosophy of culture and social epistemology. She is the author of Die Mythosphilosophie Ernst Cassirers (2009) and Fremkaldte Kulturrum [Developing Spaces of Culture] (2019) and co-author of Anthropology and Philosophy: Dialogues on Trust and Hope (2015; 2018) as well as articles on trust such as “A Kantian Conception of Trust” (2012) and “A Two-Level Theory of Trust” (2010). Rory Lawrence Phillips is an associate lecturer at University College London (UCL). He has research interests in the German philosophical tradition broadly, especially Reformation philosophy, German Idealism (particularly Fichte), and nineteenth-century German Philosophy. He also specializes in the philosophy of religion. Cristiana Senigaglia studied philosophy at the University of Trieste, where she took her doctoral degree with a dissertation on Hegel and Max Weber. She obtained a scholarship at the University of Regensburg and pursued studies at the Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität of Munich; then she received a post-doctorate scholarship at the University of Padova (Italy) and a scholarship at the University of Trieste. She has been a lecturer at the Universities of Trieste and Passau (Germany), where she currently teaches. In Italy, she obtained habilitation for Moral Philosophy. She has published four books and edited Carl August Eschenmayer’s work Einleitung in Natur und Geschichte (2016).

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Allen Speight (PhD, University of Chicago) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston University. A recipient of Fulbright, DAAD and Berlin Prize Fellowships, he is the author of Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency (2001); The Philosophy of Hegel (2008) and numerous articles on aesthetics and ethics in German idealism; he is also co-editor/ translator (with Brady Bowman) of Hegel’s Heidelberg Writings (2009) and editor of Philosophy, Narrative and Life (2015). Daniel Whistler is a reader in Modern European Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author and editor of numerous volumes on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy, including The Schelling Reader (2020) and the threevolume Edinburgh Edition of the Philosophical Works of François Hemsterhuis (2022). Paul Ziche studied physics, then philosophy, physics, and psychology, in Munich and Oxford; his PhD and Habilitation were completed in Munich with theses on mathematical and scientific models in Schelling and Hegel, and on the relationship between philosophy and the sciences around 1900. From 1996 to 2000 he was an assistant professor at the Institute for the History of Medicine, the Sciences, and Technology at Jena University, from 2001 to 2008 he worked for the edition of the works of Schelling at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities at Munich and taught at Munich University, and since 2008 he is professor for the History of Modern Philosophy at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. Günter Zöller is Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus) at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Germany. His main research areas are Kant, German Idealism and political philosophy, on which he has published over 400 articles in journals, essay collections and reference works worldwide. Recent book publications include: Reading Fichte (2013; Japanese translation 2014; Spanish translation 2015; Italian translation 2018; Chinese translation 2019), Res Publica: Plato’s “Republic” in Classical German Philosophy (2015), The Cambridge Companion to Philosophy (coedited with David James, 2016), Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century: From Kant to Nietzsche (2018) and Hegel’s Philosophy: An Introduction (2020; Turkish and Spanish translations in preparation).

FOREWORD GEORGE DI GIOVANNI (Professor Emeritus, McGill University)

What does one hope for? At the level of day-to-day experience, the answer is easy enough. Since we are not born ready-made but must become whatever we are, we hope that by virtue of personal effort and favorable circumstances what we desire to become will actually come to pass. Required, of course, is that the desire be reasonable, i.e., predicated upon real possibilities. Nonetheless, the possibility that the desire might not be satisfied and the hope thus remains unfulfilled must also be real. It is just as foolish to hope for what one already possesses as to hope for what is impossible to have. There is no betting on a predetermined outcome. While the “what” in the question thus varies in content from individual to individual, and even for the same individual from moment to moment, in form it can be generalized. One hopes for the satisfaction of reasonable desires. And even with respect to content, a norm for categorizing kinds of hopes is also possible. Since perceived personal identity is at issue in the realization of what one hopes to be, hopes can be distinguished (trivial, peripheral, substantial) according to the measure their realization contributes to the attainment of precisely that identity. All this is at the level of common sense. The last point, however, brings to light a dimension of hope that directly leads to philosophical reflection. Human experience is normative. In a judgment, when one declares that such and such is the case, entailed in the declaration is that there are reasons for the case being such; in declaring it, one means the judgment to be self-validating and, as such, to command universal acceptance. The same normativity applies to hope as well; it, too, has an a priori, to use Kantian language. This is to say that, apart from peripheral cases as when one hopes for good weather, to the extent that at issue in a hope is the realization of one’s perceived identity, the realization also is the satisfaction of an entitlement. Entailed in the hope is the demand for the recognition of its validity as hope. The value of one’s personal existence is at stake. It is this circumstance that gives rise to the three famous questions—“What can I know?” “What ought I to do?” “What may I hope?” There is right hope and false hope, and to define the conditions for each is precisely the task of philosophical reflection. The three questions are normally associated with Kant. But Kant was hardly the first to raise them. The questions have a long pedigree, philosophical as well as theological. So far as the late German Enlightenment is concerned, they were put into circulation by the neologist J. J. Spalding with a tract published in 1774 under the title of The Vocation of Humankind. The tract gave rise to a discussion regarding the place of humankind in the universe—its determination or vocation (Bestimmung) within the universe’s overall economy—that came to an unintended conclusion only in 1800, when Fichte published his own tract by the same title. He did so in a socio-political climate that Spalding could hardly have imagined in his own days. Kant’s critical re-statement of the three questions, and his equally critical replies, were his contribution to this discussion. For his part, Spalding treated the questions in the spirit of the Leibnizian rationalism, as mitigated by British empiricism, that was typical of the late German Enlightenment. In x

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brief, this is what he said. We can reasonably hold on the basis of common observation that things happen in accordance with well-established laws. This is common sense. We are therefore inevitably led to believe that there is a rational order governing the universe—one established by a superior intellect, in accordance with which things happen for the best. It therefore behooves us, individual human beings, that we endeavor to satisfy our desire for happiness as reasonably as possible in view of this order, with the well-grounded hope that the desire will be satisfied in conformity to precisely this order— if not immediately, certainly at some state of existence beyond visible death. Kant’s re-statement of the questions and his replies to them are of course a lot more conceptually sophisticated. Both the belief in a universal order of things and the hope that there be a place within it for deserved happiness are in his case motivated by the requirements of moral action. This is a subtle point, but in no need of expansion in the present context. Important to note is rather that, despite profound differences, Spalding’s and Kant’s positions both suffer from the same and I believe decisive misconception. Relevant hope is normative, I said. And, admittedly, both Spalding and Kant have a robust norm for distinguishing right from false hope. But is what they call “hope” truly hope? Hope requires, at least as we normally understand it, that the possibility that it not be realized is just as real as the possibility that it be—even granted that some hopes are more likely to be realized than others. It requires, in other words, active engagement in its realization on the part of the one entertaining the hope, in full awareness that the realization also depends on factors over which one has no control and which might indeed ultimately frustrate it despite all efforts to the contrary. Take the case in which one has cause to believe that whether one’s desire has been satisfied is already decided, yet for some reason or other does not know whether it has been decided in one’s favor. In that case one would trust, even in trepidation, that it be so, but not hope for it in the strong sense of the word. What’s already decided is to be ascertained, wished for or recoiled from, not hoped for. This is the circumstance affecting Spalding and Kant’s or, for that matter, the Enlightenment’s rationalism in general. On the assumption of a universal order, whether posited on the strength of reasonable common sense or moral imperative, how one fits within it is determined ab origine. The Bestimmung in Die Bestimmung des Menschen is to be understood as “determination” alone rather than “vocation,” and a pre-established determination at that. Trepidation about one’s desired happiness can only be a matter of not knowing what is already in store for one rather than of uncertainty about what is to come, or about one’s capacity to bring it about. Even trepidation, let alone angst or despair, would be out of the question. As Fichte, who had his own idealized version of universal order, said in 1806, “[for those in the know], the misery that lies most open to view is not the true misery;—since things are as they are, misery is the best of all that is in the world; and since the world does not improve notwithstanding all this misery, one might almost believe that there is not yet enough of misery in the world.” On the belief that all is for the best, regardless of whether the belief is framed in critical or pre-critical or idealizing terms, Fichte’s attitude must be right. On the other hand, should one be repelled by it, that alone would already constitute a refutation of the rationalism on which it is predicated—a lived refutation, of course; but, in matters of hope, that is what counts most. This, I believe, was Jacobi’s intended witness when, as he said, before the philosophers and their metaphysics he recoiled in fugam vacui, in flight before their nihilism. I realize that in ordinary discourse “to hope for” and “to trust in” are hardly distinguishable. The distinction is difficult to hold on to. And there is a good reason for

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this, since the moment of pathos is essential to hope. In day-to-day experience, unencumbered by speculations about universal order, hopes are inevitably affected by at least the implicit acknowledgement that there might well be particular factors, already decided but yet unknown, that have already frustrated them despite all efforts to the contrary. Hopes are historically conditioned and therefore always entertained on trust. And this is a trust that varies in import from individual to individual, and for every individual from moment to moment. In old age one no longer hopes for what would be possible in youth. The right factors are no longer in place. Trust in the validity of what one has done progressively takes over the space of hopes yet to be realized, until the moment arrives when hope simply yields to trust. It is all part of human finitude. What kind of trust? Hegel helps in this regard. The trust is in the community which, with its funereal rites, rescues the departed member from the scandal of being abandoned to the whims of natural powers over which the member no longer has any control. Death is thus humanized. But even more insightful is Hegel’s further comment that the member, irreducibly singular when alive, assumes in the community’s memory the status of universal. I take this to mean (but I am now glossing on Hegel) that the validation of the member’s existence, such as the member strove for in hope while alive, is finally confirmed by the community’s judgment of what it was, or perhaps was not. The words of Kierkegaard’s priest from Jutland here sound true: “There is great consolation in knowing that before God we are all in the wrong.” But, of course, one cannot mention the name of Kierkegaard in connection with Hegel without instantly hearing the petulant voice of that irritatingly lovable gadfly of Copenhagen. Hegel cast in comic light the otherwise tragic human situation, we can hear him complain. Self-identity, when earnestly striven for, is either achieved or not achieved: there is no in-between. Its achievement is eternal, sealed in a moment that has infinite value subjectively, yet which, because of human finitude, cannot be objectively determined except quantitatively, dispersed over time. The tragedy lies in the tension created by this mismatch (“misrelation,” Kierkegaard calls it) between the eternal and the temporal. It lies in the consequent temptation of seeking the qualitative interiority required by the one in the quantitative exteriority of the other. The problem here is not that one ends up subverting subjectivity by painting human existence, so to speak, on a cosmic canvas predetermined by universal laws. Hegel rightly shifted attention from cosmogony to history. He knew that personal identity is an achievement; that, as such, it is a historical event which, like all historical events, occurs in the context of contingent circumstances and with objectively unpredictable results. But Hegel made the de facto historical success of the event the measure of the value of the achieved personality. For him, the significant circumstance was that the otherwise subjectively initiated event de facto collude with the spirit of the time (der Geist der Zeit); that the resulting personality assume world significance. Hegel, the absent-minded professor, did not subvert subjectivity. He comically forgot his own subjectivity: he forgot himself. He forgot that, when it comes to interiority and its value, we are all alike. And this value is infinite. We might indeed all be wrong before God, but the point is that we are all equally and infinitely wrong. The hope is that, in the face of history’s vicissitudes and the evanescence of human existence, we have nonetheless the strength to stand by this infinite value. Kierkegaard was merciless when satirizing Hegel—unfairly perhaps, since he disingenuously also borrowed abundantly from him. But, leaving this aside, was he not himself also vulnerable to satirical debunking? We can just see him: the dandy in town, parading in the streets of Copenhagen, the habitué of coffee houses; boasting of not

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needing to gain financially from his writing; preaching interiority, yet worrying about his public persona as writer; stewing in an emotional morass which, had he not transformed it into a magnificent parable of human subjectivity, we might well dismiss as adolescent self-indulgence or as plain pathological. There is no denying it: Kierkegaard was a great philosophical artist, and this alone already redeems him from his all too many human weaknesses. However, it never occurred to him to think of the gold miners of West Africa, whose slave-labor had been the source of the wealth that made his privileged lifestyle possible and afforded him the leisure to agonize. He never thought of their situation, or of what it might ever have meant to them to stand by the infinite value of their interiority. We might not want to blame Kierkegaard for this blind spot. It belonged to the zeitgeist of the Copenhagen of his days. Nonetheless, the blind spot was there, and in retrospect it cannot but cast irony on Kierkegaard’s self-professed vocation of being the witness of interiority. And this finally leads me to the question that, unspoken, has in fact troubled me from the beginning. What could hope mean for the multitude of those, past or present, who are denied the modicum of a decent human life even before being born? worse still, who, because of human cruelty or just the vicissitudes of history, are condemned to anonymity, denied the validation that reason demands? To the question I have no answer: only an inkling of what Schelling meant by the cosmic sadness that affects experience; also the suggestion that, of the three questions regarding the human vocation posed by the tradition, the last, and the least explored in the philosophical literature, is the one that existentially brings the issue to a head. For this reason, when Anna Ezekiel asked me to write a foreword to the present volume, I was honored, of course, but also delighted to discover that she, and her colleague Katerina Mihaylova, would undertake this work of historico-philosophical reflection on a topic much in need of it. For their efforts, we all owe much gratitude.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are deeply grateful to Andreas Blank, Erik Eschmann, Wolfgang Künne, David Wood, and Julian Würth, who provided valuable input into the development of this volume, and without whom the collection would have taken a different and less interesting course. Thanks also to John Walsh and Stephan Zimmermann for their helpful remarks, to Martin Kessler and Christian Soboth for exchange on the theological aspects of the German Enlightenment, and to anonymous referees for thoughtful comments. We were particularly touched by the kind advice and support of Dieter Henrich while planning this volume, and are very saddened by his passing. As always, our abiding gratitude for the continuing support and encouragement of our Doktoreltern George di Giovanni, Susan-Judith Hoffmann, and Günter Zöller. Lastly, our deepest thanks to the contributors to this volume for sharing their work and for their patience while we brought the collection to completion. We would like to thank Georg Olms Verlag for their kind permission to publish an English translation of Günter Zöller’s paper included in this collection.

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ABBREVIATIONS

ABBREVIATIONS OF KANT’S WORKS AA

The Academy Edition of Kant’s Writings / Kant, Immanuel, 1902–. Kants gesammelte Schriften, 29 vols., Preußichen Akademie der Wissenschaften (vols. 1–21), deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften (vol. 23), Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (vols. 24–29). Berlin: De Gruyter

A/B

The pagination of the A (1781) and B (1787) editions of the Critique of Pure Reason (AA 03–04)

Anth

Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht / Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (AA 07)

AnthN

Anthropologie Nachlass (AA 15)

Br

Briefe / Letters (AA 10–13)

EaD

Das Ende aller Dinge / The End of All Things (AA 08)

GMS

Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten / Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (AA 04)

IaG

Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht / Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (AA 08)

KpV

Kritik der praktischen Vernunft / Critique of Practical Reason (AA 05)

KU

Kritik der Urteilskraft / Critique of the Power of Judgment (AA 05)

LJ

Immanel Kant’s Logic / Jäsche-Logik (AA 09)

ML2

Metaphysics Lectures L2 (AA 28)

MorCo

Moralphilosophie Collins (AA 27)

MS

Metaphysik der Sitten / Metaphysics of Morals (AA 06)

Op

Opus postumum (AA 21–22)

PkM

Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik / Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (AA 04)

R

Reflections and Elucidations (AA 14–19)

ReflM

Reflections on Metaphysics / Reflexionen zu Metaphysik (AA 17–18)

Rel

Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft / Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (AA 06) xv

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ABBREVIATIONS

RelPö

Religion Lectures Pölitz (AA 28)

RR

Reflexionen zur Rechtsphilosophie (AA 19)

TG

Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch die Träume der Metaphysik / Dreams of a Spirit-seer Elucidated by the Dreams of Metaphysics (AA 02)

TP

Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis / Theory and Practice (AA 08)

ÜdM

Über das Misslingen aller philosophischen Versuche in Theodizee / On the Failure of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy (AA 08)

V

Vorarbeiten (AA 23)

ZeF

Zum ewigen Frieden / Perpetual Peace (AA 08)

ABBREVIATIONS OF WORKS BY OTHER AUTHORS GA

Fichte, J. G. (1962–2012), Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 42 vols., ed. Reinhard Lauth, Hans Jacob and Hans Gliwitsky, Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann.

GW

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1968f.), Gesammelte Werke, ed. Rheinisch-westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste, Hamburg: Felix Meiner.

HKA

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (2009), Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Manfred Durner et al., Stuttgart: frommann-holzboog.

KFSA

Schlegel, Friedrich (1958f.), Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler et al., 35 vols., Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh.

KGA

Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1980f.), Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Lutz Käppel et al., Berlin: De Gruyter.

KW

Kierkegaard, Søren (1978–1998), Kierkegaard’s Writings, ed. and transl. Edward V. Hong and Edna Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

NS

Novalis (1960–1975), Schriften. Zweite, nach den Handschriften ergänzte, erweiterte und verbesserte Auflage in vier Bänden, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, 4 vols., Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer.

SKS

Kierkegaard, Søren (1997–2013), Søren Kierkegaard Skrifter, Copenhagen: Gad.

SSB

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1923–), Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, Darmstadt, Leipzig and Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

SW

Günderrode, Karoline von (1990–1991), Sämtliche Werke, ed. Walther Morgenthaler, 3 vols., Frankfurt and Basel: Stroemfeld and Roter Stern.

Introduction KATERINA MIHAYLOVA and ANNA EZEKIEL

There is something fascinating about the human capacity to hope, whether this is the transformative and potentially dangerous hope for political change, the hope that sustains a person through a life-threatening illness, a gambler’s destructive hope to win against the odds, or the little everyday hopes that motivate our activities, for better or for worse. We find testimonials of thought on hope handed down through thousands of years of human history, but one of the most intriguing periods in the development of this concept is surely the German Enlightenment. The importance of the concept of hope to philosophy and theology during this period is illustrated by the number and diversity of accounts of hope and its role in human wellbeing and development that emerged at this time. As a result, the German philosophical tradition generated a remarkable set of reflections on the crucial role of hope in human life, especially its importance for dealing with the uncertainty of the future. These reflections culminated, but were also fundamentally altered, in Immanuel Kant’s claim that the nature of hope is one of the most essential questions of philosophy—indeed, of human reason itself. This volume considers how hope is conceptualized within Kant’s system, and the influence of his concept of hope on his successors working within German intellectual tradition. From the early Enlightenment, German thinkers treated hope as an important consideration in the preservation and improvement of the human capacities of thinking and acting, as well as in the ways that human beings relate to the divine. Philosophers of this period produced various accounts of the role of hope in the human relationship to God, of the possible effects of hope on the human mind, and of the (often crucial) role of hope in achieving a just and honorable life of self-fulfillment. These accounts tended to highlight the potential benefits and harms of hope, and the need for hope to be carefully managed, cultivated, and understood in order to optimize its effects on human flourishing. The connection of hope to human reason, and in particular the ability to rationally evaluate and direct hopes, was seen as essential to maximizing the positive, and minimizing the negative, effects of hope. Theories of hope at this time often included a demand to cultivate one’s cognitive abilities in order to become more conscious of the possibilities a human life can offer and how these possibilities can be realized. It was thought that the more a person hopes, and the more they deal with their hope in an appropriate way, the greater would be their ability to engage with and enjoy life. The normative demand to develop one’s ability to hope rationally thus raised the human capacity to hope to an essential task of human life. In this regard, Immanuel Kant’s response to his third question of interested reason— “What may I hope?”—represents both a continuation of, and a critical turning point for, the philosophical discussions of his predecessors. Like the Enlightenment thinkers 1

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who came before him, Kant was concerned with the conditions under which we hope and the impact of hope on our happiness, moral status, and motivations. However, Kant’s theory of hope decoupled moral philosophy from religion and moral from prudential principles, initiating radical changes in how these topics were approached. After Kant, German philosophers continued to inquire into the psychological conditions for the emergence of hope, the relationship of hope to virtue, happiness, joy, and despair, the significance of hope for individual and sociopolitical progress, and the place of hope in religion. But they had to address the new distinctions introduced by Kant, leading to a proliferation of attempts to understand hope in the realms of psychology, morality, history, and religion, and in its relation to epistemology, science, and philosophy itself. The impact of Kant’s work on hope is the starting point of this collection. The chapters consider Kant’s central claims on hope and explore how his legacy was adopted and modified by his contemporaries and later nineteenth-century philosophers. Below, section 1 of this introduction outlines the background to Kant’s work on hope in eighteenthcentury German philosophy, while section 2 describes how Kant transformed these debates. Section 3 considers how Kant’s rethinking of hope was adapted and developed by philosophers in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The contributions of the papers in this collection to our understanding of these developments are outlined in section 4.

1 ENLIGHTENMENT DEBATES ON HOPE Kant’s work on hope was embedded within a context of philosophical, theological, and moral-psychological accounts of hope developed by his predecessors. The diverse philosophical discussions on hope in the late eighteenth century emerged against a background of theological discussions of hope that had been taking place since the Middle Ages, but also integrated a newer, psychological perspective on this concept. The latter was an important point of departure for Kant in his own work on hope. This perspective owes much to the emergence at that time of research fields like empirical psychology and anthropology but was also based on certain developments in early modern philosophy. Beginning in the medieval period, scholastic thinkers had generally considered hope as one of the three theological virtues, together with faith and love. Hope, it was claimed, aimed at the eternal bliss of union with God (see, e.g., Aquinas 2001, II. II. 17. 1 c; 5 c; 2 c; 4 c). In other words, its object was otherworldly: hope (as a theological virtue) was not thought to aim at earthly outcomes, but at the state of the soul after death. Furthermore, the fulfillment of hope for eternal bliss depended on the grace of God: it would only be through his intervention that an individual could achieve this happy posthumous state. Thus, hope as a theological virtue was based on the expectation of divine kindness (ibid., II. II. 17. 6). In this respect, scholastic thinkers distinguished the theological virtue of hope from other kinds of hope, the objects of which could be achieved through human abilities (ibid., I. II. 62. 3 ad. 2). In addition, while both kinds of hope were seen as relating to forms of love, they were thought to do so in different ways. The kind of hope that aimed at objects achievable by human means was seen as a passion (a form of sensual desire), which drives human actions (ibid., II. II. 17. 1 c; 20. 4 c and I. II. 40. 1 c; I. 20. 1 c). As with any desire, hope was thought to be connected to the love of some good; in this case, a future good. But unlike this kind of hope, which arises when the apprehension of a good leads to love of that good, hope as a theological virtue was thought to arise from the theological virtue of love, that is, from love for God (ibid., I. II. 62. 4 and II. II. 17.

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8). In other words, unlike mundane hope, the theological virtue of hope was closely implicated in the other two theological virtues of faith and love, and essentially involved a particular orientation to God. In the seventeenth century, Descartes presented a completely different account of hope that focused on its position within his account of the passions. For Descartes, hope is a particular mode of the passion desire. According to Descartes, passions do not have a motivational impact on the will; instead, they simply tell us something about the inner state of the subject (Dalferth 2016, 75). Unlike willing or deliberate thinking (which Descartes describes as actions of the soul), passions are passively received states. These states could be perceptions of real, external objects, dreams (perceptions caused directly in the brain), inner perceptions (like hunger or thirst), or emotions. Descartes classifies experiences such as admiration, love, hate, joy, sorrow, and desire as emotions. These, he claims, are not caused directly by physical phenomena; rather, they result from the soul’s evaluations of physical phenomena (ibid., 73). On Descartes’ account, hope is a mode of the passion (the emotion) of desire. According to Descartes, just like the other passions, desire begins when we think of something we consider good or bad. However, unlike other passions, which simply express an evaluation of, or reaction to, the good or bad object, desire aims to acquire the good or avoid the bad thing. Descartes characterizes hope (and its opposite, fear) as particular modes of desire where we do not have certainty about our ability to attain the desired object (or, in the case of fear, our ability to avoid the undesirable object). Importantly, for Descartes hope describes an intentional state, but does not say whether or how the hoping person will be motivated to achieve the hoped-for object. Descartes’ modern perspective, which separates hope from ethics and theory of motivation and analyzes it merely as a psychological and epistemological issue, was widely received in the early German Enlightenment. In Protestant thinking in particular this approach was often taken up and combined with a negative view of the passions or affects which, it was thought, had the potential to disrupt or otherwise adversely impact human rational capacities. The different ways that individual thinkers attempted to combine these claims was one factor underlying the proliferation at this time of diverse and original ways of understanding hope. This diversity was also partly the result of intellectual exchange between philosophers and theologians, especially Pietists, which had a large impact on German philosophy of the early eighteenth century. As a consequence, in this period we find wide-ranging discussions on various aspects of hope which have both theological and philosophical relevance. A good example is the question of the relationship between the concepts of love and hope, which was evaluated very differently by Protestant and Catholic theologians. Catholic thinkers tended to identify a potential conflict between love and hope, because the intrinsic orientation of hope to personal happiness could not, they thought, be compatible with the purity and selflessness of a Christian’s love for God. In other words, in order to love God purely we may not love him for some purpose, such as his ability to grant eternal happiness after death; we may love him only for his perfection. These thinkers argued that God cannot be viewed as a means for achieving our happiness, and our love for him must be separated from our hopes. In keeping with this view, the French philosopher and theologian François Fénelon (1651–1715) distinguished different degrees of love, from the lowest degree of self-love to the highest and purest love of God. According to Fénelon, the latter could not involve any concern for oneself; on the contrary, it is the negation of self-love:

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Each love speaks only of its object. Amour-propre speaks only of the self, which it thinks is never treated well enough. It thinks only of regard, consideration, and esteem. It is put in despair by all that fails to flatter it. On the contrary, the love of God would like to see the self be forgotten, that it be counted for nothing, that God alone be all, that the self which is the god of the profane be trampled underfoot. — Cited in Hanley 2020, 204f. Fénelon’s account of pure love was heavily criticized by Protestant philosophers and theologians. For instance, Johann Franz Buddeus (1667–1729) and Johann Georg Walch (1693–1775) argued that Fénelon’s model excluded every possible hope for happiness, even the happiness of union with God (Buddeus and Walch 1724, 309–313). Fénelon, who they portrayed as representative of Catholic thought, had failed to consider that every kind of love essentially aims at some good as an object and that every good is intrinsically related to happiness. Thus, they claimed, Fénelon had confused love for God with respect for God. On that basis, they concluded, he had erroneously identified a contradiction between hope and love and, as a result, devalued hope. As a consequence of such arguments, many philosophers maintained that hope must be understood as an important part of both human everyday experience and religious striving. The main problem became the question of the reliability of hope, understood as an affect or passion. As mentioned above, there was concern, especially among Protestant theologians, that affects and passions were deficient foundations for achieving reliable epistemic or motivational states. As a result, it was important to examine the precise relationship of hope, as an affect, to the human rational capacities. For, it was believed, the potentially destructive affects involved in hoping could only be harnessed for positive results if the affective dimension of hope could be brought into proper relation with both the understanding and free will. The details and implications of this claim were elaborated by different thinkers in different ways. So, for example, the philosopher and politician Arnold Wesenfeld (1664– 1727) defined hope as a passion composed of pleasure based on understanding (ex laetitia ratione intellectus) and desire based on volition (ex cupiditate ratione voluntatis), where the object is a future good (1696, 602f.). Similarly, the influential jurist, theologian, and philosopher Johann Gottlieb Heineccius (1681–1741) claimed the involvement of both higher faculties (cognition and volition) when he defined hope as love for a future good (amor boni future) which we understand as easy to attain (1744, 301). In specifying the function of understanding as judging how easy it is to attain a hoped-for good, Heineccius followed his colleague Buddeus, who also claimed that hope included both love and a judgment about the ease or difficulty of attaining the future good (1711, 283). Both Heineccius and Buddeus saw hope as involving pleasure; however, they maintained that this should not be caused by bodily sensations. Heineccius (1738, 202) adopts Cartesian dualism between mind and body and asserts the dignity of the mind in its supremacy over the body (dignitas mentis prae corpore). However, his essential premise is that the domination of the mind over the body is not a fact but a goal. Since this domination is the only way to achieve the good, the mind, and the rationality provided by the mind, is the real source of true happiness. Heineccius integrates this claim in his demand for rationality to dominate in the way we use our will when we hope. According to Heineccius, “sensual desires” (appetitus sensitivus) are those desires that focus on objects given by perception (through the senses). Since in perception good and bad qualities are represented simultaneously, sensual desire can fail to identify the good as

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such (ibid., 208). By contrast, the will (voluntas) is not dependent on perception and, through the abstracting function of imagination, can represent the good clearly and as separate from the bad. The will can therefore produce a pure desire for the good. Because for Heineccius the desire for the good is the definition of love (amor), and love for a future good is the definition of hope (ibid., 211), hope should incorporate rational and not sensual desires. The rationality of hope is also a central issue in the definition of hope in Johann Heinrich Zedler’s famous dictionary from 1735. Zedler’s entry on hope starts with a critical examination of the ancient idea of Chilon of Sparta (one of the seven sages of Greece) that hope is an irrational attitude of a fool (1735, vol. 13, 426–430). In opposition to this idea, Zedler claims that the difference between a fool and a wise person is not that the former hopes and the latter does not, but rather that the former is capable of imagining every possible future good while the latter imagines only those that their understanding claims are probable. Both cases have positive and negative features. A fool can imagine more possibilities of future good than a wise person because the latter’s imagination is limited by considerations of probability. But a fool lets every possible future good be accompanied by hope, while a wise person sensibly hopes only for those future goods that are likely to be realized. According to Zedler’s account, the strength of a fool is their optimism, i.e., their ability to imagine all possible goods. But the fool’s weakness is the missing connection between hope and reality. The strength of a wise person is that their understanding rationally guides their hope (by focusing on what is probable) while their weakness is their skepticism, which limits the access of their imagination to possibilities. According to Zedler’s account, the best option would combine the fool’s optimism with the wise person’s rational conduct. This combination would generate two further positive effects: satisfaction and confidence. Andreas Rüdiger (1673–1731) goes further than Zedler and claims that satisfaction is the highest good that we are capable of achieving within the limits of time and that the rational conduct of hope is the means to achieve it (1721, 204–241). According to Rüdiger, the rational conduct of hope can support satisfaction by preventing the fear of disappointed hope. This fear originates in the desire for happiness and is one of the most powerful fears—according to Rüdiger, far more powerful than the fear of death (ibid., 205). Preventing the fear of disappointed hope entails, first, choosing those future goods that have a reasonable probability of being achieved, and second, focusing on the means to achieve them (ibid., 208–209). By imagining such details, the hoping person obtains a clearer idea of how to achieve the good, which leads to an increase in motivation. We find an alternative argument for the importance of rationality to hope in the theory of affect of the influential philosopher and jurist Christian Thomasius (1655–1728). For Thomasius, the rational conduct of hope can prevent rage and its attendant dangers (1696, 46). When a person imagining a future good focuses, not on the desired future good itself, but on the difficulties of and hindrances to achieving it, the will’s desire turns into rage. The negative impact of rage disables the person’s capacity to decide whether they should remain hopeful or become despairing. By contrast, the rational conduct of hope can prevent rage (or turn it into patience, which Thomasius views as inactive rage) so that the person can consider ways to overcome the difficulties and find means for achieving the future good (ibid.). According to Thomasius, a person can use their imagination to stimulate or calm the activities of desire and hope. While imagining a future good causes a desire (Verlangen) for this good and a hope of achieving it, imagining the presence of the good converts the

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desire and hope into the passive state of joy (Freude) (Thomasius 1696, 89f.). For Thomasius, this illustrates the extent to which hope depends on the activity of imagination. According to Thomasius, it is also possible to support hope by reflecting on whether a future good is available in the long- or short term. While imagining the good as too far in the future leads to distrust in the possibility of achieving it, the closer a person imagines a future good, the more hopeful and confident they become (ibid., 130). A similar impact can be obtained by reflecting on the relative difficulty of achieving the future good (ibid., 121).1 By using the imagination to support hope in this way, a person attains more self-control and satisfaction. The increase of hope (which may be raised to confidence and even to daring) leads to an increase in motivation to achieve the good (ibid., 135f.).2 The above illustrates the importance for early Enlightenment theories of hope of the relationship between hope as a passion and the higher capacities of cognition and volition. On the basis of this relationship, Enlightenment thinkers maintained, it is possible to analyze the origins of hope and explain the necessity for conducting hope rationally. This concern also emerges in theories derived from scholastic conceptions of hope as a disposition of the will and a virtue. The most prominent advocates of this claim were Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Christian Wolff (1679–1754). Leibniz’s innovative concept of hope is based on a modified account of the passions that differs from that of Descartes, for whom passions are caused by beliefs. By contrast, Leibniz claims that passions are caused by striving or endeavor (tendance), which is part of a dynamic process grounded in unconscious perceptions. These accumulate until they become an expectation of which we are aware and for which we strive (see Roinila 2012). According to Leibniz, the joy involved in hoping can promote human development towards perfection because it is related to intellectual activities such as curiosity and courage, which support the practice of science and promote the common good (ibid., 168–170). Like Leibniz, Wolff presents the rational conduct of hope as part of a dynamic process of increasing one’s consciousness of an idea of a future good. The key to Wolff ’s version of this idea is found in his concept of confidence (Vertrauen), which he claims is a higher degree of hope (1741, 288f.). The difference between hope and confidence, according to Wolff, is that hope involves the feeling of pleasure (Lust) regarding the future good that a person expects, whereas confidence involves joy (Freude). Wolff claims that joy is a degree of pleasure,3 but while mere pleasure is accompanied by an image of a good that is both unclear (unklar) and indistinct (undeutlich), joy implies a clearer (but still indistinct) image of this good (ibid., 274). For Wolff, it is the task of the imagination to clarify our ideas, meaning that confidence implies that a (freely initiated) activity of the imagination has taken place. However, since neither hope nor confidence includes a distinct idea of the future good, Wolff still claims that both of these are affects (1733, 262f. §393–394). As such, they must be moderated in order to enable the perfection of the will—a duty derived from Wolff ’s moral principle “Perfect yourself!” (ibid., 261f., §391–392). Such moderation can be achieved only through the understanding, as the faculty responsible for achieving distinctness in our ideas. Thus, through the free activity of both the imagination and the understanding, hope is raised to the level of a clear and distinct idea of the hoped-for good. For Wolff, confidence, as a higher degree of hope, is related to motivation, since it includes a clear idea of a future good, which increases the motivation to achieve it. There is also a religious dimension to Wolff ’s idea of confidence as a higher degree of hope: our

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confidence in God is based on the joy caused by imagining the future good that follows from our idea of his perfection (Wolff 1733, 495–496, §715–716). For both Leibniz and Wolff, this divine perfection is a principle of our moral motivation. Although they claim that a human being is not capable of achieving such perfection, these thinkers maintain that the highest good (and greatest bliss) that is available to us is attained by striving to approach this perfection through continually improving our own state (ibid., 32, §44). The motivation to approach God’s perfection is an essential aspect of conscience, which is also, therefore, closely connected to hope. Leibniz defines the moral concept of good conscience (das gute Gewissen) as joy caused by the hope for eternal happiness, conceived as the result of both one’s own effort and the grace of God (Leibniz 1931, IV, 1, 530; hereafter “SSB”). According to Leibniz, hope is therefore closely connected to faith or belief (Glaube), which not only shape our view of the world and of God but also have practical consequences for our actions: Hope is a belief in the future, just as belief (so to speak) is a hope of the past. For to believe is as much as to hope that the past . . . is true. Now, though, true belief and true hope mean not only to speak, and not only to think, but to think practically, that is, to act, as if it were true. To believe in God, to hope in God, is to believe that God loves us, and for his love—offered to us through our Savior and Mediator—to awaken our love in return; and then to hope that, if we love him back with all our hearts, an inseparable friendship and Amicitia vera et aeterna [true and eternal friendship], and their inexpressible, infinite enjoyment in the next life, will follow. — ibid., 530–531 With this practical consequence of the relationship between hope, faith, and love, Leibniz takes up the idea of the Christian virtues and connects this with the theory of natural law. Love becomes a duty for human beings. God’s love is mediated by the joy caused by recognizing the perfection of the world as God created it. This joy is the foundation of faith in God’s grace and of hope for the bliss of the reality of love. All three virtues require knowledge based on the recognition of perfection: “Thus hope and faith are based on love, and all three on knowledge. Love is a joyful disposition from considering the beauty or excellence of another” (SSB IV, 1, 530–531). Because human understanding is too limited to recognize the perfection of the world in order to love it, hope is based not on the knowledge of such perfection but on belief (Glaube) in it, insofar as this belief is an assurance of reason without empirical validation (ibid., I, 24, 454). In contrast to the rationalist considerations of Leibniz, Thomasius and his followers claimed that the nature of human beings as God’s creations provides enough empirical knowledge for reason to guide human hopes and fears according to divine will. It is up to us to become self-aware and achieve knowledge about human nature. In this vein, the jurist and philosopher Nicolaus Hieronymus Gundling (1671–1729) claimed: “There is no philosopher who has not asked for self-knowledge. . . . This is the foundation of why we live according to our nature and why we should follow the will of God” (1740, 275f.). Both kinds of argumentation—rationalist as in Leibniz and Wolff and empiricist as in Thomasius and Gundling—advocate an optimistic view of the positive effects of divine reason on human life. Both view divine reason as a reliable source for guiding human hopes and fears and, therefore, for shaping moral motivation. In this way, the religious dimension and moral psychology of hope remain closely connected. It is Kant who, with his critical examination of the boundaries of reason in both its theoretical and its practical use, sets the course for a clear separation between the moral function of hope and its

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prudential dimensions. It is also Kant who separates moral philosophy from religion, and at the same time analyzes the function of religion in regard to moral motivation.

2 HOPE IN THE WORK OF KANT Kant’s view of hope is based on a fundamental revision of the grounds of both epistemology and morals. Earlier Enlightenment accounts connected the epistemological aspects of hope (such as the representation of a future good) with its motivational aspects (its affective dimension). While the nature of this relationship differed, there was general agreement regarding the necessity for rational guidance of the affects involved in hoping, with the aim of achieving a clear and distinct idea of the object of hope as the proper end for determining the will. The conceptual distinction Kant draws between the moral or intelligible and the empirical or sensible existence of the human being separates the moral and prudential aspects of hope. That is, Kant uncouples the object of a future good as it relates to a hoping person’s satisfaction with their own moral state (virtue) from the object of a future good as it relates to their satisfaction with their physical state (happiness). Kant was aware of the novelty of his approach. In Metaphysics of Morals, he noted that his predecessors counted both states as part of the concept of happiness, whereas he views happiness as implying satisfaction only with one’s physical state (MS, AA 06:387–388). According to Kant, the main difference between happiness and satisfaction with one’s moral state is that the former is given as an end for our will by the instinct of nature (we enjoy it; our affects motivate us to achieve it) while the adoption of the latter as an end for the will is a duty (our instincts and affects do not motivate us to achieve it) (ibid., 386). Kant’s reframing of the relationship between moral and physical satisfaction in relation to hope had important theoretical and practical implications. These included changes in how the impact of the affective dimension of hope on the use of cognition was viewed. Like his predecessors, Kant claims that both hope and the imagination can involve making judgments about the future. However, the imagination can provide a clear idea of future objects and how to achieve them while hope, as an affect, does not. Kant maintains that this function of the imagination is the one in which human beings are most interested, “because it is the condition of all possible praxis and the purpose towards which human beings relate the use of their forces” (Anth, AA 07:185). However, the interest of human beings in their imagined futures results in a considerable epistemological weakness, as our hopes and fears impair the objectivity of our judgments (ibid., 187). Elsewhere, Kant claims that we can understand the impact of this weakness on the reliability of human understanding on the same principle as evaluating the accuracy of a set of scales: “The inaccuracies of a balance . . . are discovered when one exchanges the goods and weights on the scales. The partiality of the balance of the mind is revealed through the same strategy” (TG, AA 02:348f.). In other words, a defect of the understanding can be identified and corrected by changing one’s perspective, in the same way as a defect in a set of scales can be identified and corrected by changing the positions of the weights and the weighed object. However, Kant claims this reliable procedure has an exception regarding judgments about the future as objects of hope. In this case, it is impossible to correct the defect; in fact, it is not even desirable to correct it: The scales of the understanding are not totally impartial, and one of their arms, which bears the inscription “hope for the future,” has a mechanical advantage which means

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that even lightweight reasons that fall in that side of the scale outweigh heavier speculations on the other side. This is the only inaccuracy that I cannot remove, and that in fact I never want to remove. — ibid., 349–350 For Kant, the incompleteness of human knowledge and the uncertainties this engenders, including uncertainty about the future, restrain us from rejecting all possibilities for which we hope, even those that are not probable at all (ibid., 351). The inescapability of this defect of human understanding opens the road to Kant’s claim that we are justified, in certain cases, in replacing knowledge by faith. Kant’s argument for the relationship between hope and the understanding, and the relationship of these to faith, is given new form and a more central role in the first and second Critiques. Here, he develops his most distinctive ideas about the domain and function of hope, including its relation to the interests and theoretical and practical uses of reason. Kant’s best-known statements on this topic occur in the Critique of Pure Reason, in Section 2 of The Canon of Pure Reason, titled “On the Ideal of the Highest Good.”4 Here, he asks three questions which he claims together encompass “All my reason’s interest”—i.e., all our theoretical and practical concerns (A804/B833).5 These are “What can I know?” (a question regarding the theoretical use of reason); “What ought I to do?” (a question regarding the practical use of reason, which concerns the use of the free will); and “What may I hope?” (a question that Kant says “is simultaneously practical and theoretical”). The full formulation of the third question, he adds, is: “If, now, I do what I ought to do, what may I then hope?” (ibid.). Kant develops an answer based on this question and the deceptively simple premise that “all hoping aims at happiness” (A805/B833). Put simply, the answer is that if I do what I ought to do (i.e., behave virtuously), I may hope to become happy, to a degree commensurate with my virtue. However, Kant notes that, if we look at the world around us, this is not what happens (A811/B839): virtue is frequently unrewarded, while thoroughly vicious people often live happy lives. Why and how, then, can we hope for virtuous acts to correlate with happiness? The answer, according to Kant, is that we can hope for this if we assume that a benevolent God arranges this connection (A810/ B838). Kant calls this state of commensurability of virtue and happiness “the moral world” (A811/B839). Since this state does not exist on earth, we must also assume that God, as “supreme reason,” arranges this in “a future life,” i.e., that we have an immortal soul that will enjoy happiness commensurate with our virtue (ibid.). Together with the idea that we are free beings capable of determining our actions (a requirement for acts to be moral, rather than simply prompted by the inclinations of our nature), the ideas of God and the immortality of the soul must, Kant claims, be presupposed in order to justify the claim that, if we act virtuously, we may hope for happiness proportionate to these actions. Several questions or complexities emerge from this passage and from considering the passage in relation to claims Kant makes elsewhere. Scholars have explored the relationship between Kant’s view of the moral world in the Critique of Pure Reason, in which this is imagined as a future life, and in his political writings, where the moral world seems to be (partly) achievable on earth, i.e., through improvements to social and political arrangements (see, e.g., Blöser 2020a, 74f.; Goldman 2012, 506f.; Kleingeld 1995). Others have investigated the relationship between Kant’s account of hope and related

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concepts such as faith6 and expectation or certainty (which imply a different relationship to an imagined future than does hope).7 A particularly significant issue concerns Kant’s framing of the question of hope as a matter of connecting virtuous actions and happiness. This framing can lead readers to assume that Kant intends happiness to be a motivation for virtue, especially in light of his statement that “without a God and without a world that is invisible to us now but is hoped for, the splendid ideas of morality are indeed objects of approbation and admiration, but are not incentives for our resolve and for us carrying out these ideas” (A813/B841). At first glance, the introduction of “incentives” (Triebfedern) for carrying out the ideas of morality seems to conflict with Kant’s claims that virtue must be motivated by respect for the moral law, and not self-interest (see, e.g., GMS, AA 04:400; KpV, AA 05:112, 124). However, Kant repeatedly and explicitly rejects the idea that happiness is a divine reward for virtue or the “motivating cause for maxims of virtue” (KpV, AA 05:113). Interpreters of Kant’s work have found various ways to reconcile these claims, drawing on Kant’s own efforts to address the apparent difficulty (e.g., KpV, AA 05:113f.; 129–130; Insole 2008; Kleingeld 1995, 100f.). While these differ in their details, in general they emphasize the function of hope in Kant’s work as an orientation to an imagined better future that fosters efforts to improve oneself and/or the world, without promise of reward. For Kant, it is not our own happiness, but the establishment of a “moral world” in which happiness and virtue are commensurate, that acts as a goal and an incentive for virtuous actions (see, e.g., Kleingeld 1995, 108–109). The condition of the commensurability of happiness to virtue also has an important consequence for how we understand happiness as an object of hope. We mentioned above that Kant separates the concept of happiness (as satisfaction with one’s state) into satisfaction with one’s physical state (happiness) and satisfaction with one’s moral state (moral perfection). The former is initially connected with instinct and the affects arising from it, but we have the duty to overcome the influence of these factors and instead connect our motivation to the moral law. We may then still have the subjective desire for the hoped-for object (as long as this desire does not conflict with the moral law), but the objective necessity driving us to attain it is the moral law. In other words, hope no longer provides the motivation for our will (see Zöller 2015), and the will is free from determination by nature. This internal freedom allows us, instead of unquestioningly following our subjective desire, to identify the appropriate object of hope (happiness) and the appropriate means to achieve it by applying the rules of prudence. On Kant’s account, we still need our subjective desires, because happiness (as the object of hope) is an empirical concept: it depends on empirical factors and knowledge of these factors. But whatever ends may constitute the concept of happiness, we should invoke prudential concerns to determine the practical possibility of (and means of achieving) the end we hope for under the condition of morality. Given agency in a moral world, this approach to rational hope establishes a close relationship between hope and the expectation that one’s hopes will be realized through one’s own efforts.8 Regarding satisfaction with one’s moral state as a possible object of hope, Kant claims that we have a duty to achieve moral perfection (virtue). But perfect virtue is an unattainable ideal: we ought to try to approach this state, but fully realizing it is beyond our abilities. In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant assigns both moral faith and hope an important role in bridging this gap between what we ought to do and what is possible. But there are several possible interpretations of how (and what kind of) hope is involved when we hope for moral progress: does this reflect a hope in one’s own

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powers (moral hope) or hope in God’s aid, on the condition that we also do what we ought to (religious hope)?9 One controversial aspect of this question is whether religious hope is necessary for the possibility of moral hope. For example, Claudia Blöser (2020b, 65) claims that, given belief in one’s own powers, “hope for divine assistance is not rationally necessary” for the possibility of moral progress. On this point, she disagrees with Andrew Chignell (2013, 210). Others claim that reference to God regarding moral progress has a merely regulative function and moral progress is due to the efforts of autonomous moral agents alone (Kleingeld 1995, 104), or that hope for God’s aid is a result of the use of one’s moral powers but not a condition for their use (Forschner 2011, 84). Nonetheless, all seem to agree that Kant thinks moral progress is possible and that we may have reason to hope to achieve satisfaction with our moral state.10 From the above, it is clear that Kant’s critical philosophy provides a different account of the relationship between hope and its object (happiness) to his predecessors, especially regarding what is required for the rational conduct of hope. While earlier Enlightenment philosophers related the rationality of hope to achieving a clear and distinct idea of its object, Kant regards the latter achievement as part of his separate concept of prudence. For Kant, the prudential use of reason provides consistency among the ends of our inclinations and coordinates the means to achieve them, but, since the conditions for this prudential use are empirical (given by nature), in using reason in this way we are not necessarily acting freely; we may be overly influenced by the laws of nature (A800/B828). Such a use of reason—which does not apply the law of pure reason (the moral law)—is, according to Kant, merely regulative. As a consequence, objects of hope that fall within the prudential use of reason without consideration of their moral worth are not effects of our free will. As such, they cannot be imputed to our agency but depend on fortune, coincidence, or other factors outside our power. Kant’s analysis of the third question of interested reason thus provides a new approach to ascribing rationality to hope. Hope can be said to be rational when we hope for objects we can realize through the practical use of reason, i.e., objects that are effects of our free will and can therefore be imputed to us. Kant is claiming a structural similarity between objects we rationally hope for and objects we can know about (A805–806/B833–834).11 Both are objects whose existence is possible; however, the cause of their existence is different. Objects of knowledge (the objects that make up our world of experience) are caused by the laws of nature.12 Objects of rationally permitted hope, on the other hand, are brought about by the causality of free will according to the moral law (A806/B834). In this case, therefore, natural instinct is no longer the cause of our actions; we are free to reject objects of hope given by the instinct of nature if they are inconsistent with the moral law, or to desire these objects if they are consistent with the moral law. Thus, Kant’s explication of the third question takes up his predecessors’ idea that the object of hope is happiness, but in a completely different conceptual context. Like his predecessors, Kant defines happiness as the satisfaction of sensual needs (A806/B834), but with the restriction that happiness may legitimately be an object of hope only insofar as it is the outcome of the causality of our free will. And this, Kant claims, is only possible when we act freely, i.e., according to the moral law and in conformity with the answer to the second question of interested reason. Thus: “Happiness by itself is, for our reason, far from being the complete good. For happiness is not approved by our reason (however much it may be wished for by our inclination) unless this happiness is united with worthiness to be happy, i.e., with morally good conduct” (A813/B841). Kant’s condition

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of rationally permitted hope requires prudence to be subordinated to morality, granted the condition of agency in a moral world. Kant’s claims about the rational conduct of hope, the relations between prudence and morality and between morality and religion, and the role of hope in moral progress were taken up by his successors and used as the basis for many and varied reconceptualizations of hope. In addition, Kant’s psychological account of hope as affect and his opposing concept of moral apathy, which has not been considered here, are important points of reference for many later scholars working on anthropology, psychology, and psychiatry. These reconceptualizations, as well as attempts to interpret Kant’s own thought on hope, form the subject of the papers in this volume.

3 THE KANTIAN LEGACY: HOPE, REASON, AND PROGRESS After Kant, discussions of hope in German philosophy took three main directions. First, attempts to develop popular explanations and interpretations of Kant’s moral philosophy and philosophy of religion; second, analyses of the psychology of hope, especially in its relation to happiness; and third, considerations of hope in relation to history and moral progress. This period also saw a struggle between different attempts to found a systematic account of Kantian philosophy. Among other things, these debates initiated metaphilosophical discussions about philosophy as an instrument for achieving wisdom, conceived as the ultimate object of human hope. In 1810, the Catholic theologian and philosopher Jakob Salat (1766–1851) argued that having multiple competing philosophical systems was advantageous to the effort to overcome fallacy and superstition and for promoting human culture (Salat 1810; see also Knöpfler 1890, 194–197). According to Salat, the fact that there are competing systems of German Idealism should not lead to despair but to hope for achieving the end of philosophy. Philosophy, he claims, is distinguished from the empirical sciences because the end of philosophy is to cultivate the human character, and philosophy therefore focuses on the part of human nature that is different from animals and near to God. Salat also contrasts philosophy with sophistry, for (he says) the latter involves a meaningless use of words and therefore fails to bring together human knowledge and love for human beings which, according to Salat, alone contributes to human culture and is the task of philosophy. Salat gives two reasons for hope in achieving the end of philosophy in the context of a proliferation of competing systems. The first is that, he claims, Kantian philosophy already provides the standards for philosophy as a science. The second is the tendency of post-Kantian Idealists to seek metaphysical foundations. According to Salat, philosophy needs both these elements: a conceptual framework providing the logical form of a specific system, and a metaphysical foundation establishing the significance of that system for human culture. Despite the differences between Salat’s philosophical system (which is very close to that of Jacobi) and those of Idealists like Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel, Salat addresses a common understanding of metaphilosophical issues from that period. It was a widely shared view that the competing systems differed most importantly in their metaphysical foundation. For example, Fichte designates this as the spirit (Geist) of philosophy in opposition to its conceptual frame (literally the “letter” [Buchstabe]).13 He claims that the former is the crucial aspect to be determined in every philosophy, while the latter is only its conceptual explication (Fichte [1794] 1845/1846, 29–38, 274). To use the latter

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without the former neglects the factor at the core of all philosophizing: the activity of the self-reflecting subject of thought—the spontaneity and freedom of the mind. This metaphilosophical consensus, articulated explicitly in Salat’s claim that the end of philosophy is an object of hope for human beings, also has political implications such as the right to freedom of thought and the duty to promote the best for human culture (Salat 1810, 36f.). Thus, the idea that the end of philosophy involves promoting human culture can be understood as a specific interpretation of Kant’s third question, “What may I hope?” The answer of the Idealists seems to be that I am allowed to hope for the cultivation of human nature.14 And, since this hope can be realized only with the help of philosophy, this idealistic interpretation of Kant’s third question also seems to include the answer to his fourth question: “What is the human being?” The answer seems to be: A human being is a philosopher. From this perspective, hope can be seen as a central issue in post-Kantian German philosophy. The particular discussions of hope by various philosophers during this period are nevertheless very different. As a result of Kant’s philosophy of religion and his articulation of its relationship to moral psychology, philosophers in the early nineteenth century distinguished clearly between hope in religion and hope in philosophy.15 Philosophical definitions of hope from this period are closely connected with ideas about human cultivation and perfection, but also with the concept of happiness. These definitions mainly focus on the relationship between a present mental state of expectation and the representation of a future state of improvement and happiness.16 One important aspect of such definitions is the emphasis on the emotional involvement of these two states with each other. Some definitions suggest that the state of expectation is accompanied by pleasure, joy, or other affects, which are initiated by the representation of a future state of improvement.17 Others suggest that the state of expectation is itself an emotion, insofar as it is an anticipation (Vorgefühl) of a future pleasant feeling.18 Another important aspect of definitions of hope at this time relates to the certainty of the relationship between the present state of expectation and the state of improvement represented in the future. This relationship was often seen as depending on the quality of the reasons that justify the hope.19 As a result, the validity of a particular hope depends on the intellectual capacity of the hoping person, that is, their ability to identify the right reasons for the hope. Failure to correctly identify such reasons means that the relationship between expectation and the hoped-for future situation (and therefore the hope itself) is faulty, and its realization could lead to frustration or other negative emotional states. This failure could also lead to discontent in cases where the person simultaneously identifies reasons that support the expectation of improvement and reasons that undermine it. The result in such cases is an additional emotional state of fear (bangen) (ibid.).20 Thus, philosophical definitions of hope from this period present hope as a complex dynamic phenomenon involving interaction between intellectual functions and emotional states. In addition, the evaluation of the benefits or harms caused by hope was seen as relating to the ability of the hoping person to deal with hope in a sensible way. Generally, hope was claimed to be beneficial for both the psychological and physical health of the hoping person. For example, in an encyclopedia entry on hope T. Schreger writes that “In itself [hope] is always benevolent, never harmful, and, like temperate joy, works on our blood- and nervous-systems. Someone who can hope prolongs their existence, not merely ideally, but really, physically, through calm and imperturbability” (1832, 275). However, these positive effects require the predominance of intellectual activities over emotional states, in order to prevent negative emotional impacts in cases of disappointed hope. As

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Schreger puts it, “the less the cold and calmly testing understanding participates in an envisioned hope, the more idle the latter is, yes it even becomes chimerical, bordering on insane, if the understanding realizes the impossibility, or even only the difficulty, of its fulfillment” (ibid.). In other words, if the emotions associated with hope are not kept within realistic boundaries by the intellect, the hoping person is liable to disappointment to a degree that outweighs any of the benefits that accrue from the state of hoping. In addition, too much emotional investment in hoping can actually obstruct the intellectual activity that is essential to its healthy functioning. A failure to adequately use intellectual activity to realistically evaluate the certainty of the relationship between present (expectation) and future (realization) can also have a subjective cause. For example, such an evaluation becomes irrelevant when the state of expectation is experienced as a greater source of pleasure than the real happiness that is or would be caused by achieving the object of hope. Schreger claims that the danger of such a situation, where hope becomes a substitute for reality, is the essence of self-deception: “This condition is enough by itself, and the upheaval that it effects is a form of pleasure, which replaces reality and is perhaps worth more. One enjoys the real possession less than the hope, and one is only happy before one becomes so” (1832, 275).21 The above dangers associated with disconnecting hope from reality make clear why it is important to learn how to deal with hope in a proper way. Philosophers in the nineteenth century tended to present hope as essential for human life, enabling the pursuit of happiness and both individual and sociopolitical improvement. However, in the same way, they claimed, hope could impede happiness and improvement, or even become a disorder, if the hoping person failed to keep their hopes connected to reality. In philosophical discussions of hope in the post-Kantian tradition, the requirement for a realistic point of view is mainly directed to the ability of a person to achieve their ends. That is, the requirement for a realistic assessment of the relationship between present and future states is important because, as philosophers of the time recognized, improvement and progress are not necessarily granted by nature but are purposes given by human beings and embodied in human actions. Kant claimed that human culture does not necessarily progress, but that we should be allowed to claim that it does because this claim allows human actions to be caused by reason (IaG, AA 08:17; see also Rel, AA 06:19–20). Some post-Kantian philosophers seem to interpret this as claiming that progress (in human nature or political arrangements) is an object of faith. For example, Franz Volkmar Reinhard suggests that faith in the improvability of human nature promotes the development of the powers of human nature. For Reinhard, hope has an important function as a means for increasing benevolence and supporting the disposition to cooperate and help others, which itself promotes progress (1810, 375). A slightly different relationship between hope and (moral) progress is articulated by Jakob Friedrich Fries, who suggests that hope always implies an object that a person is unable to attain. As such, hope (together with longing or grief) is in the class of wishes, which are effects of desire (Begierde des Willens) that emerge when it is impossible for actions to achieve the object of desire. In opposition to wishes is, according to Fries, endeavor (Bestrebungen der Willenskraft), which is only possible when an action could help achieve the object of desire (Fries 1823, 60). For Fries, hope for moral progress is similar to religious hope insofar as it implies that actions alone are not sufficient to achieve the object of hope (ibid., 217). The latter also requires the contentment which only the confidence in God and God’s love can provide, and which is required in order to secure the possibility of progress (ibid., 219).

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In all the above ideas, we can discern the Kantian legacy that oriented subsequent responses to the question “What may I hope?” For Kant and his successors, hope is an achievement, gained in the face of inevitable suffering and death and only dubious signs of progress. A successful, proportional, and rationally considered hope allows a person to identify progress as an object of hope and adopt the (psychological or religious) attitude necessary to achieve it. The final section of this introduction provides an overview of this volume and its contributions to scholarship on theorizing about hope in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Together, the papers in this collection indicate the manifold ways that Kant’s legacy was adopted, adapted, justified, expanded, and critiqued by philosophers in the decades following his work.

4 HOPE AFTER KANT: CONTRIBUTIONS OF THIS VOLUME The papers in this volume consider the ways that philosophers in the German tradition took up Kant’s rethinking of the nature, purpose, and appropriate use of hope. Kant’s own work on hope is explored in the first three papers in the volume, which each address a different aspect of his thought on this topic. The remaining papers explore developments in conceptions of hope by philosophers after Kant. The volume follows a roughly chronological order based on the publication date of the texts under discussion. Because work on Kant’s influence on theorizing about hope (and, with a few exceptions, research into philosophy of hope during this period in general) is still at a relatively early stage, we have not attempted to impose a thematic or any other type of grouping on the chapters. We hope this will help avoid prematurely forcing the appearance of alignment or opposition between the work of certain thinkers, before the ideas of each philosopher have been considered in their individual detail. Nonetheless, certain common themes emerge between many of the papers. The contributions consider the distinction between hope and expectation; the interplay between hope for outcomes that result from one’s own actions and hope for those that result from divine intervention; and the potential for hope to play a positive role in human experience (including the conditions under which this occurs) as well as, conversely, the possibility of negative effects emerging from the influence of hope on our lives. Other shared concerns include the relationship between hope and happiness and between hope and personal or sociopolitical improvement, and the importance of hope for understanding the relationship between ethics and religion. The views of philosophers on the roles and interrelations of the human faculties of reason, imagination, understanding, and feeling with regard to hope are also considered. In choosing papers for this collection, we focused on gathering stimulating articles that consider the question of hope from a wide range of angles, rather than on covering canonical figures in the German tradition. This approach has led to the inclusion of relatively neglected figures such as Friedrich Karl Forberg, Karoline von Günderrode, and Johann Christian Hoffbauer, and the omission of better-known philosophers—notably Hegel, but also many later thinkers such as Feuerbach, Marx, or Nietzsche. This in no way suggests that these figures (or the many less well-known philosophers who we also did not have space to include) have nothing interesting to say about hope. It is the purpose of this collection to stimulate research into philosophy on hope in the period after Kant, and our sincere hope that others will take up the task of further exploring how hope is

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conceptualized—both explicitly and implicitly—by individuals whose work is not included in this collection, as well as deepening our understanding of the ideas of those who are. This is only the beginning of our engagement with the thought of philosophers who worked in the context of Kant’s transformation of the foundations of human reason, religion, and practical activity to articulate Kant’s ideas or create new ways of conceptualizing hope. The first paper in the collection, Günter Zöller’s “Between Need and Permission: The Role of Hope in Kant’s Critical Foundations of Moral Faith,” investigates the relationship between faith and reason in Kant’s response to his third question of interested reason: “What may I hope?” Zöller addresses the interplay of Kant’s critiques of knowledge and faith, and the complex interactions between the theoretical and practical aspects of Kant’s response to this question. Zöller argues that Kant presents a complementary relationship between the limitation of theoretical knowledge through rational critique, which allows space for moral faith, and the way this rational critique limits religious faith by establishing a role for moral consciousness. The result, according to Zöller, is that for Kant moral faith supersedes not only (purported) knowledge but also doctrinal faith. Andrew Chignell’s paper, “Hopeful Pessimism: The Kantian Mind at the End of All Things,” considers Kant’s ideas about hope in relation to two contemporary areas of scholarship: Anthropocene scholarship and Christian eschatology. Chignell argues that, like philosophers before him, Kant tended to blur the distinction between hope and expectation. However, he traces the development of Kant’s views through a kind of “hopeful pessimism” about this-worldly human existence to a “moral-psychological” argument that establishes hope as meaningfully different to expectation, Belief, optimism, and other related concepts. Chignell claims that this distinction is reflected in prevailing ideas about hope in Anthropocene scholarship, whereas contemporary theologians, like earlier Christian authors, tend to slip from hope to optimistic faith and even to certainty in a more positive future. Lawrence Pasternack’s contribution, “Circulus Volitionis: The Hope for Divine Aid in Kant’s Religion,” explores Kant’s discussions of the hope for divine aid in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Pasternack argues that, whereas in Part 1 of this text Kant considers a possible role for divine aid in individual moral transformation, in Part 3 he considers this aid in relation to the establishment of an ethical community. On the basis of this contrast, Pasternack constructs an account of the place of hope within Kant’s philosophy of religion as a whole, especially regarding the relationship between hope and the needs of reason. The first two chapters on post-Kantian philosophers consider work by Kant’s early interpreters Jakob Sigismund Beck (1761–1840) and Johann Heinrich Tieftrunk (1760– 1837). In “Kant, Beck and the Highest Good,” Fiacha D. Heneghan explains Beck’s solution to a discrepancy between the object and nature of hope in Kant’s rational religion and his political writings. Heneghan notes the tendency in Kant scholarship to attempt to reconcile these views with a deflationary, secular account of Kantian hope that focuses on establishing political institutions that maximize virtue, happiness, and their proportional distribution. By contrast, Heneghan argues, Beck retains Kant’s theological commitments and, with these, his hope for a perfectly moral future. Although Beck’s account depends on the practical postulates of freedom, God, and immortality, which seems to violate his Standpunktslehre (the eradication of the thing-in-itself from theoretical philosophy), in fact these are consistent. This is because Beck grounds his hope for moral perfection— and, with it, Kantian moral religion—on something immanent to human experience: the

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felt necessity of moral imperatives. Beck’s version of Kantian moral religion thus reconciles the dual nature of human beings as embedded in a causal world but practically oriented to an object outside nature. In “Between Faith and Reason: Is J. H. Tieftrunk’s Concept of Hope a Postulate?” Ingomar Kloos traces the development of the concept of hope in Tieftrunk’s philosophy of religion. Kloos argues that Tieftrunk views the future commensurability of virtue and happiness as more certain than Kant does, based on his firmer conviction in the grace of God. As a result, Tieftrunk often reconceptualizes hope as “assurance,” “trust,” or “justified expectation.” Tieftrunk’s certainty in the intervention of God’s grace also allows him to reject a legalistic fulfillment of hope while still basing hope on obedience to the moral law. For Tieftrunk, obedience to this law is a necessary but not sufficient condition for hope in God’s forgiveness, which depends on his grace. Tieftrunk characterizes the resulting moral orientation as “love of the law” (Liebe des Gesetzes), which Kloos argues is distinct from Kantian “love for the law” (Liebe zum Gesetz). The next two papers consider the development of Kant’s thought on hope via the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In “Fichte on Optimism and Pessimism,” Rory Phillips considers the position Fichte might have taken in the Pessimismusstreit (Pessimism Dispute): the mid- to late-nineteenth-century debate over the value of life. Against Eduard von Hartmann’s contention that Fichte was a pessimist along similar lines to Schopenhauer, Phillips argues that Fichte’s claims regarding morality, history, and religion commit him to a cautious optimism. On Phillips’ interpretation, the question whether the world currently or necessarily contains more pleasure or pain is irrelevant for Fichte; either way, Fichte thinks, we can and should have hope for the future and work to improve the world. Kevin Harrelson’s paper, “The Autonomy of the Heart: Forberg on Action Without Belief,” challenges the prevailing notion that Friedrich Karl Forberg (1770–1848) is mainly interesting for his role in instigating the Atheismusstreit (Atheism Dispute), which led to Fichte losing his position at Jena. Harrelson argues that Forberg’s claim that Kantian moral theory is compatible with atheism is underpinned by an important critique of Kant’s and Fichte’s moral theory. According to Forberg, Kant’s and Fichte’s theories of moral action are flawed because they claim that moral action presupposes optimism regarding the action’s outcome. Forberg, by contrast, defends a model of moral action that is compatible with pessimism. He does so by separating action from belief in its efficacy, claiming instead that moral acts occur when the wishes of a good heart overcome a skeptical intellect. Katerina Mihaylova’s paper, “Mind Subverted to Madness: The Psychological Force of Hope as Affect in Kant and J. C. Hoffbauer,” further investigates the psychology of hope in post-Kantian thought, tracing the development of Kant’s work on this topic in the writings of Johann Christoph Hoffbauer (1766–1827). Mihaylova shows that for Kant, while hope is not essentially an affect, in some kind of (pre-rational) natural state of human existence or immaturity it has an affective character and can thereby impair a person’s mood and cognitive faculties. In Hoffbauer’s work this claim is expanded and placed in the context of a discussion of mental illness. Hoffbauer concludes that the affective aspect of hope can result in inappropriate uses of a person’s cognitive faculties— and even madness. In the next paper, “ ‘What May I hope?’: Schleiermacher’s Answer to Kant’s Third Question,” Jörg Noller reconstructs Friedrich Schleiermacher’s theory of the feeling of ultimate dependence as an answer to Kant’s question “What may I hope?” Noller argues

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that both Kant and Schleiermacher identify hope as a non-empirical feeling, contrasting it with “empirical” feelings such as hunger. However, while Kant considers hope (like the feeling of respect) from the perspective of practical reason, Schleiermacher claims such emotions must be understood as part of the realm of religion. Noller explains this difference in terms of Kant’s and Schleiermacher’s divergent understandings of religion and its relationship to morality, feeling, and reason (and therefore to freedom). In Schleiermacher’s case, the result is a model of hope as a unity of freedom and dependence, which situates the finite, free, self-acting human being within a broader society and an infinite universe. The interaction between human freedom and the context in which it is realized, and the importance of this interaction for determining the nature of hope, is also explored in the next contribution to this volume. In “C. A. Eschenmayer: History as the Realm of Freedom and Moral Development,” Cristiana Senigaglia argues that Eschenmayer reformulates Kant’s question “What may I hope?” as “What will become of you?” shifting the focus to include the historical development of humankind as well as individual expectations and responsibilities. Eschenmayer regards history as a concatenation of human actions rather than an expression of a power external to individuals. Nonetheless, his conception of history involves a structure that guides its development and a “world plan” that specifies its end. Eschenmayer resolves the tension between these concepts, and between their corresponding bases for hope in, respectively, individual actions and divine intervention, through a theory of compensation, according to which the actions of an individual can be offset by events outside their control. As a result, individuals can contribute to realizing the ideal end of the universe even though this realization is not dependent on any one person’s actions. Thus, despite the influence of providence on events as a whole, for Eschenmayer hope is not a passive attitude based on expectation of divine intervention or belief in the inevitability of progress, nor hope in the outcomes of one’s own actions alone, but something requires the free contribution of individuals to a collective endeavor. In “Undirected Directionality: Jakob Friedrich Fries on Hope, Faith, and Comprehensive Feelings,” Paul G. Ziche argues that Fries provides a novel account of hope (and related feelings including faith and confidence) that connects the domains of religion and science. Fries’ concept of hope as “undirected directedness,” or anticipation of an unknown future, emphasizes aspects of human experience that cannot be captured in cognition. Thus, Fries accepts Kant’s limitation of human cognitive capacities while suggesting that feelings can take us beyond them. However, Ziche argues that, rather than advocating irrationalism, Fries rejects Kant’s separation of the functions of judgment and sensation, claiming that feelings must be integrated with discursive states to develop epistemic attitudes that maintain the noncognitive, mysterious aspects of human experience as such. Ziche illustrates the originality of Fries’ concept of hope through a comparison with Herder’s account of future-directed cognitive activities. The next paper in the collection focuses, not on the elaboration of a theoretical concept of hope, but on the practical possibilities that can be drawn from a particular idea of hope, which emerges in relation to a theory of education and development. In “Humboldt, Bildung, Language and Hope,” Susan-Judith Hoffmann considers the lessons for today’s university of the scholarly and practical work of philosopher, linguist, statesman and educational reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Hoffmann explores Humboldt’s educational reforms in light of his claim that Bildung (cultivation, development, or education) requires the development of one’s own faculties in respectful

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interaction with others, and draws from this a model of hope as a future-directed orientation of openness to otherness. The account of Bildung that emerges in Humboldt’s writing and educational policy reflects Enlightenment ideals of the human vocation and progress for humanity as a whole, but with an emphasis on respect for diversity that resonates well today. Hoffmann argues that, in the context of current efforts to decolonize tertiary education and counter the commercialization of universities, Humboldt’s work opens possibilities for genuine diversity and intercultural engagement and for creating a tertiary education system that promotes, not just the learning of marketable skills, but the self-cultivation of individuals. Hoffmann’s paper highlights the importance of Enlightenment thinkers, not just for understanding what it is to hope, but for providing resources for developing and realizing positive and inclusive objects of hope. The next three papers consider work on hope by thinkers associated with the Romantic movement. Daniel Whistler’s paper, “In the Hope of a Philosopher of Nature,” situates Schelling’s writings on philosophy of nature within post-Kantian “messianic” discourses regarding the hope for a philosophical system. Whistler first identifies three distinct tendencies in the early development of Schelling’s philosophy of nature regarding the connection between eschatology and philosophizing about nature. This is followed by a more detailed analysis of the Introduction to Schelling’s 1797 Ideen, which Whistler argues is written in the hope of being able to undertake a philosophy of nature. In this text, Whistler claims, Schelling presents the emergence of a practice that could be termed a “philosophy of nature” as itself an article of hope. In “Knowledge, Faith, and Ambiguity: Hope in the Work of Novalis and Karoline von Günderrode,” Anna Ezekiel explores the work of Romantic writers Friedrich von Hardenberg/Novalis (1772–1801) and Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806). Ezekiel argues that, despite Novalis’ influence on Günderrode’s thought, there are important differences in their responses to Kant’s delimitation of human cognition and, correspondingly, the ways they theorize hope. Ezekiel explores these differences in five areas: hope for union with loved ones after death; hope for escaping the Kantian limits to cognition; hope for the moral betterment of the individual; hope for the perfection of the universe; and hope for an ideal society. Ezekiel argues that Günderrode in particular carefully navigates between pessimism, certainty regarding progress, and faith, maintaining hope as a distinctive human capacity. Allen Speight’s paper, “Friedrich Creuzer and the Claims of the Symbolic,” considers the work of Heidelberg mythologist Georg Friedrich Creuzer (1771–1858) and traces the influence of his ideas about myth, religion, art, and symbol on Hegel, Goethe, Walter Benjamin, and E. H. Gombrich. Creuzer’s relevance to nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking on hope emerges through his impact on conceptualizations of history, particularly the appropriation of resonant symbolic and mythological forms from ancient cultures. Speight argues that Creuzer’s ideas are reflected in accounts of hope by Goethe and Benjamin, who explore how an orientation to our inheritance from earlier cultures can shape hopes for the future. Goethe’s poem “Primal Words. Orphic,” and Benjamin’s analysis of hope in this poem and in Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities, situate hope in a context of mythical forces of nature that retain elements of openness and ambiguity drawn from Creuzer’s writings on mythology and his acknowledgement of the role of the unconscious, the hidden, and the “encounter with the unexpected” (that which had not been hoped-for; the unverhofft). Creuzer’s work emphasizes the importance of open forms such as symbol, myth, and art for approaching hope in a postRomantic age.

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The volume concludes with papers on two thinkers whose work is often mentioned in relation to hope. Far from being considered a theorist of hope, Arthur Schopenhauer is usually seen as exemplifying mid- to late-nineteenth-century pessimism. By contrast, Søren Kierkegaard is known for having articulated a radical vision of hope as a counterpart to existential despair and a crucial aspect of the constitution of a coherent self. In “ ‘When my Heart Says So. . .’ Hope as Delusion in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy,” Marie-Michèle Blondin argues that Schopenhauer, while overtly pessimistic, nevertheless envisions a role for a specific kind of hope. For Schopenhauer, hope in general is an illusion resulting from the corruption of the intellect by the will to life. The tension between what the will (or the “heart”) wants and what the intellect recognizes as possible can only be resolved by hope, which makes us believe in things that are improbable or implausible. However, Schopenhauer recognizes the legitimacy of one particular hope: that of escaping the deceptions of the will and liberating oneself from its demands—in other words, the hope of not having any hope at all. Thus, despite his antipathy to hope and its role in human life, Schopenhauer is unable to completely excise hope from his account. Lastly, Esther Oluffa Pedersen’s paper, “Hope and Faith: Kierkegaard’s Call for the Self to Develop Its Relationship to Itself,” considers the role of hope in Kierkegaard’s appeal to his readers to reevaluate their orientation to life and become fully human. Kierkegaard is opposed to all forms of hope that relate to worldly success; however, he regards hope as indispensable to efforts to overcome despair. Using Kierkegaard’s examples of genuine hope—the synthesis of the temporal and eternal in (an ideal) marriage, the faith of Sarah and Abraham, and the attitude of a penniless tax collector— Pedersen argues that, for Kierkegaard, individuals who hope relate themselves to their future as the possibility of the good, without expecting a particular outcome. Thus, the attitude of the hoping person is not the expectation of a desired outcome but faith that for God all things are possible. The seventeen papers of this collection do not constitute an exhaustive account of nineteenth-century philosophical developments in the concept of hope. They provide only a sample of some of the thinkers who addressed this question and a glimpse of the many angles from which the topic was approached. In addition to Hegel (already mentioned above), there are many philosophers, theologians, and psychologists whose work is not included in this volume but whose theorizing of hope is likely to reward detailed study. These include—among many others—Johann Heinrich Ferdinand Autenrieth (1772– 1835), Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848), Bettina Brentano-von Arnim (1785–1859), Friedrich August Carus (1770–1807), Wilhelm Traugott Krug (1770–1842), Michael von Lenhossék (1773–1840), Johann Gebhard Ehrenreich Maaß (1766–1823), Franz Volkmar Reinhard (1753–1812), Ernst Christian Gottlieb Reinhold (1793–1855), and Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761–1833). It is our hope that this volume will stimulate further scholarship on this subject, and go some way towards establishing the concept of hope where it belongs: at the heart of our understanding of nineteenth-century German philosophy.

NOTES 1.

The importance of reflecting on the means of achieving the object of hope is also stressed in Walch 1726, 1470.

2.

Similarly, Rüdiger distinguishes between driving hope (antreibende Hoffnung), in which the means to achieve the future good are in the power of the acting person, and resting hope (ruhende Hoffnung), in which these means are not within their power (1721, 212f.).

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3.

The idea of degrees of hope based on the clarity or achievability of the object of hope is adopted by some of Wolff ’s followers (e.g., Gottsched 1762, 269). Other of his successors claim that the difference between hope and confidence is due to the degree of certainty of the object of hope (e.g., Baumgarten 1766, 23, §505).

4.

The full title is “On the Ideal of the Highest Good, As a Determining Basis of the Ultimate Purpose of Pure Reason.” Kant gives a longer discussion of this and related topics in the Critique of Practical Reason (KpV, AA 05:110–148, esp. 110–133).

5.

Translations from the Critique of Pure Reason are by Werner S. Pluhar in Kant [1781/1787] 1996.

6.

Kant’s claims about hope form part of his argument for rational faith (or rational belief: Vernunftglaube). This issue features in several papers in this volume, including those by Günter Zöller, Andrew Chignell, Fiacha D. Heneghan (in relation to Beck’s reception of Kant), and Ingomar Kloos (in relation to Tieftrunk). See also Blöser 2022; Chignell 2013.

7.

The difference between hope and expectation is considered in papers in this volume by Chignell and Kloos. See also Chignell 2013.

8.

On this topic, see Chignell’s paper in this volume.

9.

On this topic, see Kloos’ paper in this volume.

10. On the relevance of religious hope to moral perfection, see Lawrence Pasternack’s paper in this volume. 11. Kant defines the principles for the use of pure reason in the Canon of Pure Reason (A796/ B824). Here, he claims that since it is impossible to achieve knowledge about objects beyond all experience (such as the ideas of freedom of the will, immortality, or God), there is no adequate theoretical use for pure reason. However, a use of pure reason is possible in the practical realm, and we may discover the final end of this pure use of reason by asking “what is to be done if the will is free, if there is a God and a future world” (A800–801/ B828–B829). 12. This is also the case in regard to objects of hopes that are not rationally permitted, since in this case hope is determined merely by the instinct of nature. 13. Fichte refers to this distinction between “spirit” and “letter” in order to legitimate his concept of intellectual intuition (intellektuelle Anschauung) in the face of Kant’s rejection of such a concept. According to Fichte, in this case we can agree with Kant if we eschew Kant’s vocabulary and focus on the content (see Gerber 2013, 105–106). For Kant’s disapproving reply see Br, AA 12:370. 14. Other philosophers such as Fries also claim that human culture is a crucial concept in Kant, because it involves the realization of the ability to achieve self-given ends. Fries refers to Kant’s philosophy of history, in which history is analyzed as anticipating such an understanding of human culture, which can only be achieved through political and cosmopolitan means (Fries 1837, 559f.). 15. As result, some conceptual dictionaries divide their entries on hope into separate parts relating to religion and philosophy (see Maertens 1832; Schreger 1832, 275). 16. Herbig (1834, 131f.) lists several philosophers who, he claims, consider hope in this way. 17. Herbig (1834) refers to this in his explanations of hope in Johann Gebhard Ehrenreich Maaß, Gottlob Ernst Schulze, and Fries. See also Ernst Christian Gottlieb Reinhold (1832), who defines hope as an expectation of a pleasant sensation, stimulated by memories of such

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sensations triggered by a particular image of an object. According to Reinhold, the present (pleasant) sensation caused by such an expectation is different from the pleasure caused by the object of hope itself, once it has been achieved, and from the pleasure caused by verification of the expectation (1832, 68f.). However, there are also philosophers who do not seem to think that the expectation in hope is accompanied by a present experience of pleasure, or at least not by one that is as intense as the pleasure that is hoped for. See, for example, Bernard Bolzano’s discussion of the advantage of delaying a hoped-for pleasure (1839, 287f.). 18. e.g., Herbig (1834, 131) refers to such a definition in the work of Friedrich August Carus. 19. If the hoping person is not aware of the reasons for the hope, Maaß describes it as an obscure hope (Herbig 1834, 131f.). 20. Some philosophers of the time claimed a permanent connection between hope and fear (see Krug 1798, 148). 21. See also Hoffbauer (1807, 134–135) who notes that in both situations (hoping for something and having achieved or failed to achieve what one hoped for) it is essential for human reason to keep a firm grip on emotional states. Otherwise, we lose our connection to the senses and thus to reality, and become mad. See also von Lenhossék (1808, 224– 234), who analyzes the negative relation between hope and the emotions in regard to issues of mental health.

REFERENCES Aquinas, Thomas (2001), Opera Omnia S. Thomae, ed. Enrique Alarcon, Pamplona: Alarcon. Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb (1766), Metaphysik, Halle: Hemmerede. Blöser, Claudia (2020a), “Enlightenment Views of Hope,” in Steven C. van den Heuvel, (ed.), Historical and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Hope, 61–76, Dordrecht: Springer. Blöser, Claudia (2020b), “Hope in Kant,” in Claudia Blöser and Titus Stahl, (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Hope, 57–74, London: Rowman & Littlefeld. Blöser, Claudia (2022), “ ‘Sure Hope’ of Attaining Happiness and Its Relation to ‘Wish’ and ‘Faith,’ ” in Beatrix Himmelmann and Camilla Serck-Hanssen, (eds.), The Court of Reason: Proceedings of the 13th International Kant Congress, vol. 1, 1941–1949, Berlin: De Gruyter. Bolzano, Bernard (1839), Erbauungsreden an die akademische Jugend, 2nd edn., vol. 1, Sulzbach: Seidel. Buddeus, Johann Franz (1711), Institutiones theologiae moralis variis observationibus illustratae, Leipzig: Fritsch. Buddeus, Johann Franz and Johann Georg Walch (1724), Historische und theologische Einleitung in die vornehmsten Religionsstreitigkeiten, Jena: Meyer. Chignell, Andrew (2013), “Rational Hope, Moral Order, and the Revolution of the Will,” in Eric Watkins, (ed.), Divine Order, Human Order, and the Order of Nature: Historical Perspectives, 197–218, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dalferth, Ingolf (2016), Hoffnung, Berlin: De Gruyter. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb ([1794] 1845/1846), Ueber Geist und Buchstabe in der Philosophie, in Johann Gottlieb Fichtes sämmtliche Werke, vol. 8, 270–300, Berlin: Veit & Co. Forschner, Maximilian (2011), “Über verschiedene Bedeutungen des ‘Hangs zum Bösen,’ ” in Ottfried Höffe, (ed.), Immanuel Kant. Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, 71–90, Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

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Fries, Jakob Friedrich (1823), Die Lehren der Liebe, des Glaubens und der Hoffnung, Heidelberg: Winter. Fries, Jakob Friedrich (1837), Die Geschichte der Philosophie dargestellt nach den Fortschritten ihrer wissenschaftlichen Entwicklung, vol. 1, Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses. Gerber, Simon (2013), “Geist, Buchstabe und Buchstäblichkeit: Schleiermacher und seine Vorgänger,” in Dirk Schmid and Michael Pietsch, (eds.), Geist und Buchstabe Interpretationsund Transformationsprozesse innerhalb des Christentums, 105–130, Berlin: De Gruyer. Goldman, Loren (2012), “In Defense of Blinders: On Kant, Political Hope, and the Need for Practical Belief,” Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Philosophy, 40 (4): 497–523. Gottsched, Johann Christoph (1762), Erste Gründe der gesammten Weltweisheit, Praktischer Theil, Leipzig: Breitkopf. Gundling, Nicolaus Hieronymus (1740), Philosophischer Discours Anderer und Dritter Teil Oder Academische Vorlesugen, Frankfurt and Leipzig: Spring. Hanley, Ryan Patrick (2020), The Political Philosophy of Fénelon, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heineccius, Johann Gottlieb (1738), Elementa philosophiae rationalis et moralis ex principiis admodum evidentibus iusto ordine adornata, Frankfurt and Leipzig: Hartmann. Heineccius, Johann Gottlieb (1744), Praelectiones academicae in Hvgonis Grotii De ivre belli et pacis libros III, Berlin: Rudiger. Herbig, Johann Christian Karl (1834), Wörterbuch der Sittenlehre oder alphabetisch geordnete Erklärungen aus den Werken v. Ammon, Reinhard, Stäudlin, Vogel, de Wette, Cannabich, Fries, Kant, Krug, Maaß, Platner, Schulze und andere Theologen und Philosophen neuerer Zeit, Quedlinburg and Leipzig: Gottfried Basse. Hoffbauer, Johann Christoph (1807), Psychologische Untersuchungen über den Wahnsinn, die übrigen Arten der Verrückung und die Behandlung derselben, Halle: Hemmerde und Schwetschke. Insole, Christopher (2008), “The Irreducible Importance of Religious Hope in Kant’s Conception of the Highest Good,” Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, 83 (325): 333–351. Kant, Immanuel ([1781/1787] 1996), Critique of Pure Reason, transl. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett. Kleingeld, Pauline (1995), “What do the Virtuous Hope for? Re-reading Kant’s Doctrine of the Highest Good,” in H. Robinson, (ed.), Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress, (1): 91–112. Knöpfler, Alois (1890), “Salat, Jakob,” in Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, (ed.), Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vol. 30, 194–197, Leipzig: Duncker. Krug, Wilhelm Traugott (1798), Über das Verhältniss der kritischen Philosophie zur moralischen, politischen und religiösen Kultur des Menschen zur Beantwortung der Frage: Ob man nach den Grundsätzen jener Philosophie ein guter Mensch, ein guter Bürger, und ein guter Christ seyn könne? Jena: Voigt. Leibniz, G. W. (1931), Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe [SSB], ed. Preussische Akademie der Wissenschften, Darmstadt: Otto Reichl Verlag. Lenhossék, Michael von (1808), Darstellung der menschlichen Leidenschaften in physischer und moralischer Hinsicht. Für Aerzte, Erzieher und jeden gebildeten Leser, Pesth: Leyrer. Maertens, [Carl Andreas August?] (1832), “Hoffnung,” in J. S. Ersch and J. G. Gruber, (eds.), Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künsten, vol. 2.9, 275, Leipzig: Brockhaus.

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Reinhard, Franz Volkmar (1810), System der christlichen Moral, vol. 4, Wittenberg: Zimmerman. Reinhold, Ernst Christian Gottlob (1832), Theorie des menschlichen Erkenntnisvermögens und Metaphysik, vol. 1, Gotha and Erfurt: Henning. Roinila, Markku (2012), “Leibniz on Hope,” in S. Ebbersmeyer, (ed.), Emotional Minds: The Passions and the Limits of Pure Inquiry in Early Modern Philosophy, 161–178, Berlin: De Gruyter. Rüdiger, Andreas (1721), Anweisung zu der Zufriedenheit der Menschlichen Seele als dem Höchsten Guthe dieses zeitlichen Lebens, Leipzig: Coerner. Salat, Jakob (1810), Von einer schöneren Hoffnung, welche der Philosophie aus dem neuen Wechsel und Sturz’ der Systeme aufblüht. Ein Wort der Zeit an denkende Freunde der Wahrheit, Landshut: Thomann. Schreger, T. (1832), “Hoffnung,” in J. S. Ersch and J. S. Gruber, (eds.), Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künsten, II.9, 275, Leipzig: Brockhaus. Thomasius, Christian (1696), Von der Artzeney Wider die unvernünftige Liebe und der zuvorher nötigen Erkäntniß Sein Selbst. Oder: Ausübung der SittenLehre, Halle: Salfeld. Walch, Johann Georg (1726), Philosophisches Lexicon, Leipzig: Johann Friedrich Gleditsch. Wesenfeld, Arnold (1696), Georgica Animi Et Vitae, Seu Pathologia Practica, Frankfurt and Oder: Volcker. Wolff, Christian (1733), Vernünfftige Gedanken von der Menschen Thun und Lassen, 4th edn., Frankfurt and Leipzig. Wolff, Christian (1741), Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott, Der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, Auch allen Dingen überhaupt, Halle. Zedler, Johann Heinrich (1735), Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon Aller Wissenschafften und Künste, Welche bißhero durch menschlichen Verstand und Witz erfunden und verbessert worden, vol. 9, Leipzig and Halle: Zedler. Zöller, Günter (2015), “ ‘[O]hne Hofnung und Furcht.’ Kants Naturrecht Feyerabend über den Grund der Verbindlichkeit zu einer Handlung,” in Simon Bunke, Katerina Mihaylova and Daniela Ringkamp, (eds.), Das Band der Gesellschaft. Verbindlichkeitsdiskurse im 18. Jahrhundert, 99–112, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

CHAPTER ONE

Between Need and Permission The Role of Hope in Kant’s Critical Foundation of Moral Faith1 G Ü NTER Z Ö LLER (Professor Emeritus, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich) Translated by ANNA EZEKIEL and KATERINA MIHAYLOVA

The unreachable Here happens —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust II, Final Scene This paper considers the systematic relationship between faith and reason in Kant’s grounding and limiting of moral faith in the Canon of Pure Reason in the Critique of Pure Reason. The first section addresses the interrelationship between Kant’s critique of knowledge and his critique of faith. The second section defines the complex interplay of theoretical and practical issues in Kant’s critical question of what a morally acting agent may hope for regarding the outcome of his actions. The third section investigates Kant’s positioning of faith as contrasted with the epistemic modi of opining and knowing, and defines the specific status of moral faith in Kant. The textually based systematic analyses focus on the complementary relationship in Kant’s work between the way rational critique limits theoretical knowledge in favor of moral faith and the way this critique limits religious faith through moral consciousness.2

1 FAITH IN PLACE OF KNOWLEDGE? Hardly any sentence of Kant’s has given so much occasion for misunderstanding and misinterpretation as the self-interpretory statement in the Preface to the Second Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason that looks back on the undertaking of the “Determination of the Limits of Pure Reason”3 by declaring, in the past tense: “I therefore had to annul knowledge in order to make room for faith . . .” (Bxxx).4 In its terse brevity, the passage seems to suggest not only an epistemic ascent from knowledge to faith, but also a complementary relationship between repressing knowledge and enthroning faith, and even a teleological transition from insufficient knowledge to adequate faith. But above all, 25

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the talk of annulling knowledge and making room for faith suggests the idea of substituting faith for knowledge—as if it meant to renounce possible or even actual knowledge in favor of faith, which could or should step into its place. So construed, Kant’s formula of the relationship between knowledge and faith would entail sacrificing knowledge for faith. Expressed in the topological metaphor chosen by Kant: knowledge would have to vacate its place for faith. But instead of hastily interpreting the brief, formulaic juxtaposition of annulled knowledge and granted faith as a programmatic announcement that knowledge should be replaced by faith, we should examine the systematic context of the formulation. That is, we should examine the narrower context of the programmatic Preface to the Second Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, and the broader context of the philosophical project of the self-critique of reason. As follows from the critical theory of objective cognition in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant does not intend to entirely or even partly annul possible or indeed actual knowledge—the proven, objectively validated cognition of objects in space and time (experience)—in favor of mere faith in the individual things that are or can be given in experience. In the immediate context of the problematic passage on the relationship of knowledge and faith, Kant even calls it a “scandal for philosophy” to have to accept the existence of things outside us “merely on faith” (Bxxxix n). In this, he opposes the fideistic theory of cognition, orientated to Hume’s epistemic skepsis, of his early critic Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (cf. Jacobi [1787] 1983). In particular, the meta-knowledge of the non-empirical, “transcendental” conditions of possible objective cognition, which is expressly thematized and theorized in the Critique of Pure Reason, cannot be the object of the annulling of knowledge in favor of faith mentioned retrospectively in the Preface. The sum total of the necessary conditions of possible experience, including the objects of possible experience, is not “based on faith.” Rather, transcendental cognition of the pure forms of intuition, the pure concepts of the understanding (categories), the transcendental schemata, and the principles of pure understanding is, for Kant, a paradigmatic case of scientific cognition and, especially, of synthetic theoretical discursive cognition a priori. Neither can the pure concepts of reason (transcendental ideas) and the principles of reason of the Transcendental Dialectic that correlate with them be revoked from knowledge and appropriated by faith. Even if, through the critique of the metaphysical syllogisms, the transcendental ideas of soul, world and God prove to be merely regulative for the ideal completion of experience (in contrast to the constitutive enabling of experience by the pure concepts of the understanding), they are not objects of faith, but, in their regulative function, objects of a priori theoretical cognition. In this respect, they constitute principles of knowledge. The moral-practical laws of rational action, which according to the Critique of Pure Reason are only proven as possible in principle, are also not suited for the transformation of knowledge into faith. Rather, the unconditional precepts of action, which the Canon of Pure Reason, within the Transcendental Doctrine of Method of the first Critique, identifies with the conditions of worthiness for happiness, are the object of apodictically certain (a priori) practical cognition. In relation to neither theoretical cognition (determination of objects) nor practical cognition (determination of the will), therefore, is there to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason a change or transition from knowledge to faith that would correspond to the programmatic announcement of the Preface to the Second Edition.

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2 FOR WHAT IT MUST BE PERMITTED TO HOPE At the end of the Critique of Pure Reason, in the Canon of Pure Reason, Kant allocates to each of the two types of cognition previously distinguished by him—theoretical cognition, of that which is, and practical cognition, of that which ought to be—a guiding interest in the basic questioning that reflects the interests of human reason. Theoretical cognition, or knowledge of objects, counts as an answer to the theoretical guiding question of human reason: “What can I know?” Practical cognition, or knowledge of actions, is to be seen as an answer to the practical guiding question of human reason: “What should I do?” Only at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason, with the third and final question arising from the interest of human reason, does the discussion turn to a realm of objects that elude both theoretical cognition and practical cognition, and which therefore cannot constitute objects of possible knowledge. Kant himself characterizes the third guiding question, “What may I hope?” as “simultaneously practical and theoretical” (B833/A805). Accordingly, the question is not a third type of question, in addition to the theoretical question of cognition of that which is and the practical question of cognition of that which should be; rather, the question “What may I hope?” is so constituted that “the practical [component] is only a guide that leads to the answering of the theoretical question” (B833/A805). Kant himself spells out the specific combination of the theoretical and the practical in the third question in the form of a conditional: “If, now, I do what I ought to do, what may I then hope?” (B833/A805). The function of the practical question (“What should I do?”) as a clue to answering the question “What may I hope?” which is itself not practical but should instead be classified as theoretical, consists more precisely in asking what is to be expected, on the presupposition of action conforming to what one ought to do, as the possible consequence (“outcome”) of this action, the advent of which may therefore be hoped for. The practical aspect of the third question “What may I hope?” thus concerns the presupposition of an action in accordance with the rational answer to the second, practical question of human reason. By contrast, the characterization of the object of the third question as “theoretical” indicates that the question to be posed under the practical presupposition does not concern the practical cognition of the laws of obligation, but the cognition (to be adopted in the theoretical perspective) of an object—admittedly an entirely unique object. That is, the specific object aimed at by the third question, which is practically conditioned but has a theoretical dimension, is not an object that can be cognized by purely theoretical cognition independent of the practical presupposition required by the third question. Rather, the object involved in the answer to the third question is precisely and only what is not and cannot be a possible object involved in the answer to the first question. The object that may be hoped for is not an object that can be known, but an object that cannot be known, and which is instead—on the presupposition of an action in accordance with the answer to the second, practical question—an object of permitted hope. Hope (more precisely, permission to hope [“to be permitted to hope”]), thus applies to an object regarding which—after the first, theoretical question has been answered—one may not hope that it could be known, and which—after the second, practical question has been answered—one also may not hope that it could be obligatory. One can only hope for something that can neither be known purely theoretically (without involving practical questioning) nor cognized purely practically (without involving theoretical questioning) as obligatory (and in this respect be known). Thus in Kant’s analysis of the third type of question of interested human reason, hope functions in relation to an object that can be

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determined neither theoretically by knowledge nor practically by the will. In such cases, the permission to hope concerns an object for which neither human knowledge nor human action is sufficient. That an object that can be attained neither through knowledge nor through action is at all the object of a question of interested human reason has, again, theoretical as well as practical grounds. In the third question, these become concrete as a theoretico-practically complex question. The permitted hope to which the third question relates concerns an object that is fundamentally withheld from human knowledge and human action, but in which human reason takes a double interest. Theoretically, reason is also, and particularly, interested in that which cannot and can never be the object of knowledge: the unconditioned in its threefold form as the transcendental idea of God, the soul, and the world. In the third question of the Canon of Pure Reason, this orientation of theoretical reason, derived from the Transcendental Dialectic, determines the identity of the object of permitted hope. The practical interest of reason in the specific object of the theoretico-practically complex third question is based on the systematic difference between the practical determination of the will and the theoretical determination of objects. In other words, the required practical determination of willing and acting in accordance with rational practical cognition (second question) is not identical with a further determination and alteration of the world, which would then be the object of purposively morally modified theoretical or objective cognition (first question). Rather, there is a fundamental discrepancy between the possible (and also practically necessary) purely rational determination of the will and the theoretical objective constitution of the world (i.e., its empirical constitution as the embodiment of objects in space and time). Kant marks the systematic difference between practical and theoretical determination by the juxtaposition of the “moral world” and the world of experience. He characterizes the former, in opposition to the latter, as an “intelligible world,” which has the status of a “practical idea” according to which the empirical world should be further determined (B836/A808). To do what is morally obligatory admittedly fulfills the interest of the second question, but does not result eo ipso in a successfully altered state of the world that would correspond to the extra-theoretical interests of human reason. In particular, Kant refers to the additional human interest in happiness (“to be happy”) and the reasoned pursuit of this factual universal goal of human existence. In the Canon of Pure Reason he even goes so far as to answer the second, purely practical question by means of the universal natural striving for happiness, when he formulates the basic moral command thus: “Do that whereby you become worthy to be happy” (B836f./A808f.). The purpose of this defining convergence of the moral and the eudaimonistic is not to make the moral eudaimonistic, but, on the contrary, to morally condition eudaimonistic desire. The legitimate possession of happiness is bound by the condition of morality. The morally grounded dignity of eudaimonia subjects the natural striving for happiness to a supranatural presupposition which, in a moral-practical respect, is necessary for the advent of happiness, but not sufficient for it. The abovementioned discrepancy between the intelligible or moral world and the sensible or empirical world here manifests itself as the difference between moral qualification and eudaimonistic participation, of contrafactual merit and factual outcome. But at the same time, the third question of interested reason, with its intended conjunction of practically necessary principles of reason regarding the moral world and theoretically necessary representations of reason with respect to the unity of nature, reveals the intimate connection between the “system

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of morality” and the “system of happiness” (B837/A809), even if this connection only exists “in the idea of pure reason” (B837/A809). The object of the conditional connection of moral action and the outcome it deserves, at which the third question of interested reason (“What may I hope?”) aims, is, therefore, happiness in accordance with morality. Yet, according to Kant’s realistic assessment, the connection between the system of morals and the system of nature is not analytic. Morality merits happiness but does not generate it. For that is required, according to Kant, a supranatural power, in which the specifically different systems of freedom and nature (or of morality and happiness) are both grounded and which, as “supreme reason,” both commands according to moral laws and is the source of nature (B838/A810). Kant calls the ultimate cause of happiness earned in proportion to morality, which is introduced as the object of permitted hope within the parameters of the answer to the third question of interested reason, “the ideal of the highest original good” (B838f./A810f.; emphasis in original). He then expands the realm of objects of the morally grounded permitted hope beyond the hoped-for existence of God to a “future world,” distinct from the “world of appearances,” in which happiness proportioned according to moral achievement is to be hoped for. Kant presents the two objects that may be hoped for in answer to the third question (“God” and “future life”) as “two presuppositions that, according to principles of pure reason, are inseparable from the obligation imposed on us by that same reason” (B839/ A811). In doing so, he does not have recourse exclusively to pure practical reason and its moral principles as the measure and basis for the necessary presupposition of God’s existence and the immortality of the soul. Rather, it is the connection that is to be guaranteed between practical and theoretical reason, and with it the unity of reason itself (which must also be ensured), that leads to extending the practical principles to objects that cannot be objects of either theoretical reason alone or practical duties alone. Instead, these objects serve to prevent the separation of the practical and theoretical world orders—of the “system of freedom” and “mere nature” (B843/A815)—and thus avoid a conflict between practical and theoretical reason. According to Kant, only the double assumption of a highest morally and physically efficient cause of the world and the continued existence of the moral person “unites practical with speculative reason” (B843/ A815). On the level of the finite subject of reason, the required fundamental unity of reason manifests itself as striving for the “entire purpose which is natural for every rational being and which is determined a priori and made necessary by that same pure reason” (B841/ A813; my emphasis). This purpose includes the observance of the moral law as much as the pursuit of morally conditioned happiness. Furthermore, its realization is fundamentally impossible through merely human willing and acting, which are always finite, and through recourse to the natural course of things alone. Thus, in the third question of interested reason, the theoretico-practical complex constellation of theoretically inadequate knowledge, practically inefficient moral acting, and the morally-indicated outcome of action corresponds to the double character of permitted hope with respect to the highest good. For the advent of the highest good there is, on the one hand, the theoretically ensured permission, insofar as neither the existence nor the non-existence of God and the immortal soul can be known. On the other hand, there is also a need, insofar as the unity of theoretical and practical reason is only established in the anticipated highest good. The hope that is permitted is, at the same time, needed. Alongside the sense of permission, there is that of requirement. The

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question “What may I hope?” must systematically as well as linguistically be read as the question “What do I need to hope?”5

3 MORAL FAITH In a further step, Kant uses the epistemic concept of “faith” to determine in modal terms the double object (God, future world) of the presupposition required by theoreticopractically interested reason that was defined above with regard to its content. In doing so, he picks up on the tripartite division of assent based on “conviction” (in contrast to cognitively irrelevant “persuasion”) into opining, believing, and knowing. While opining is “assent that is consciously insufficient both subjectively and objectively” and knowing is “assent that is sufficient both subjectively and objectively,” believing is a matter of assent (from conviction) that is “sufficient only subjectively and is at the same time regarded as objectively insufficient” (B850/A822). Faith thus attains a middle position between the epistemically inferior mere opinion and the epistemically superior knowledge, which is equipped with certainty (more precisely: “logical . . . certainty”; B857/A829). Kant clarifies that the three levels of assent with conviction are not epistemic attitudes that could be allocated arbitrarily and that could be the object of an arbitrary choice and exchange between them. Rather, the chosen level of assent in each case reflects the respective state of cognition and interest. Furthermore, Kant states that certain epistemic states of affairs require a specific epistemic modality and exclude other such modalities. Thus it is basically impossible to have opinions in judgments of pure reason. This holds as much for the formation of judgments by theoretical reason in questions of objective cognition as it does for the formation of practical judgments of reason for the determination of the grounds of willing and acting. But Kant also concedes that in the theoretical use of reason that exceeds possible experience (its “transcendental use”), knowledge represents no available alternative to inadequate opinion. Yet instead of simply assigning the speculative use of reason, which is suitable for neither mere opinion nor outright knowledge, to the third epistemic mode, believing or faith, in the Canon of Pure Reason Kant—consistent with the negative, disciplining thrust of his “critique of pure speculative reason”—advocates a fundamental abstinence of judgment in speculative questions of reason. Believing (or faith) thus functions for Kant neither as a superior substitute for opinion nor as an inferior alternative to knowledge. Rather, specific conditions are required in order for an assent that is insufficient for knowledge to be positively designated as faith, instead of being dismissed as mere opinion. In particular, there are specifically practical conditions, concerning the determination of the will and the grounding of action, under which an assent that is practically sufficient (for the determination of the will and the grounding of action) replaces an assent that is theoretically insufficient (for the determination of the object): “only in a practical reference can the theoretically insufficient assent be called belief [faith]” (B851/A823; emphasis in original). Just as in the case of the theoretico-practically complex third question (“What may I hope?”), in faith, as the epistemic attitude correlated with permitted/needed hope, a practical condition is combined with a theoretical (or, better: quasi-theoretical) consequence, the latter of which merely simulates, or substitutes for, the attainment of some unavailable object-determining, theoretical cognition. Yet despite the structural affinity of the theoretico-practically complex third question of interested reason with the epistemic specifics of the concept of faith qua believing, being permitted/needing to hope

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for the highest good in its original as well as its derived form (existence of God, future life) does not completely coincide with the range of objects of faith. Rather, Kant grasps the concept of faith more broadly, to also include, beyond faith in the outcome of the unconditioned purposes of “morality,” faith regarding the means for pursuing the conditioned purposes of “skill” (B851/A823). Specifically, Kant calls contingent faith regarding the use of means to conditioned, and to that degree contingent, ends “pragmatic belief [faith]” (B852/A824). Because pragmatic faith is formed in dependence on the interests at hand, it is always a question of degree, according to Kant. It can be conceived most appropriately through the idea of betting. According to Kant, the extent of one’s confidence in the suitability of the means taken (on faith) to be expedient, in a given case, is shown by the amount that one is willing to bet (B852f./A824f.). By analogy to the intensely variable concept of pragmatic faith, which, as practical faith, concerns the means for actions, Kant develops the conception of “doctrinal faith” (B853/A825). The latter relates specifically to theoretical judgments in epistemic situations that do not allow knowledge but are also not involved in the rationale for actions. Kant names as an example of such graduated doctrinal faith, which, like pragmatic faith, can be the object of a variable bet, the “strong faith” “that there are inhabitants also on other worlds” (B853/A825). He then immediately also refers to the “doctrine of the existence of God” as doctrinal faith and specifically deploys physico-theological arguments for the existence of God (B854/A826). Here, the undertaking of a rational theology (theologia rationalis), which was previously aborted as a project of knowledge in the Transcendental Dialectic, is indeed substituted for by a doctrine of (doctrinal) faith. Yet, in Kant’s estimation, “something shaky” (B855/A827) clings to doctrinal faith in God since it is developed by analogy to pragmatic faith and therefore also grounded in probability only. The doctrinal faith in God remains exposed to the challenge of speculative counter-reasons, even if one, according to Kant, always “returns to it again” (B856/A828). Thus, neither the pragmatic faith in goal-promoting means of acting nor the doctrinal faith in theoretically unprovable hypothetical entities qualifies for the epistemic attitude regarding sufficiently grounded hope in the highest good, to which the third question of interested reason leads. Only a second type of practical faith besides pragmatic faith, viz., “moral faith” (B856/A828), which Kant finally introduces, conforms to the specific epistemic demand of the third question regarding what may be hoped for in acting morally in view of the full purpose of reason. The object of moral-practical faith is, namely, all and only that which, on the unconditional (because practically necessary) presupposition of the moral purpose—the unqualified observance of the moral law— ensures the agreement of this premier purpose with “the entirety of all purposes” (B856/A828). The requirement that the moral purpose agrees with “the entirety of all purposes” addresses the rational requirement for integrating moral willing and acting in a comprehensive conception of purpose. To the latter also belongs the happiness earned in proportion to the morality that is practiced in each case. But moral acting as such can only, or rather at best, realize the moral purpose, not guarantee proportionate happiness and thus the essential purposes in their entirety. Rather, what is needed to ensure the “practical validity” of a moral purpose within the framework of the totality of essential purposes of acting is the double presupposition, which Kant had previously identified, “that there is a God and a future world” (B856/A828).

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This necessary presupposition becomes an object of faith, and especially of a moral faith based on the unconditioned purpose of morality, for two reasons. First, because what is morally commanded is taken up by the moral agent into the principles of his actions (“the moral precept is thus simultaneously my maxim”; B856/A828). And second, because the existence of God and a future life, which are presupposed objectively (or, rather, quasi-objectively) on theoretico-practically complex grounds, thereby also enter subjectively into the formation of the will and the grounding of an individual’s actions. As necessary presuppositions for the integral purposive structure of moral action, the existence of God and a future life thus become objects of a convinced assent that is deeply bound up (“interwoven”) with the consciousness of moral obligation (“moral attitude”), onto which it transfers its subjectively manifest certainty. The conviction of the existence of God and a future life is thus not a “logical” certainty, which rests on objective grounds, but a “moral certainty” (B857/A829; emphasis in original) based on subjective (more precisely: practical subjective) grounds. It is a moral certainty in the double sense of, first, a certainty, accompanied by moral consciousness, of God’s existence and the immortality of the soul, and, second, a certainty that is valid only subjectively, for the formation of the will and the determination of action. In Kant, the subjective and practical nature of moral faith is indicated grammatically by renouncing the phrase “It is morally certain that there is a God, etc.” in favor of the formulation “I am morally certain, etc.” (B857/A829; emphasis in original). Thus the moral faith in God and a future life not only forms an integral constitutive part of moral consciousness in its complex and complete purposive perspective on the highest good but also has moral consciousness in a narrower sense—as consciousness of an unconditional moral obligation prior to its teleological configuration—as its indispensable presupposition. From a moral-teleological perspective, morality implies faith in the existence of God and a future life: moral teleology leads to moral theology. Yet in a moral-theoretical respect, the elementary moral consciousness (“natural interest in morality”; B858n/A830n) already conditions moral faith in religious things even prior to and independent of its religious sanction and shaping through teleological considerations. Thus the Canon of Pure Reason, which undertakes the moral-teleological vindication of supersensible objects that have become inaccessible to the mode of knowledge, especially the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, culminates in a critical doctrine of religion that grounds religious faith on the critique of reason. It thereby leads moral faith back, systematically, to ethico-theology and, in terms of practical life, to an enlightened moral theism. It is characteristic of this substitution of religious faith by moral faith—and of church faith by rational faith—that Kant hardly employs the word “religion” in the Canon of Pure Reason. Where he does use it, he does so only occasionally and specifically to refer to the “extremely pure moral law of our religion” (B845/A817; my emphasis). For the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason, who proclaims in the Preface that he had to annul knowledge to make room for faith, moral faith indeed replaces the pseudoknowledge of rational theology (and psychology). However, it does so in such a way that, together with the pseudo-knowledge, the dogmatic faith of religious tradition is annulled in order to gain a place for rational faith. For the critical Kant, not only does faith succeed (pseudo-)knowledge, but moral faith also succeeds doctrinal faith. Instead of suppressing knowledge, faith appeals to knowledge. Knowledge grounds faith, insofar as it limits it by

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means of a critique of reason. Kant will adhere to this program of a critique of religion, which combines enlightenment with self-criticism, also in his later deliberations on “pure practical rational faith” (KpV, AA 05:144) in the Critique of Practical Reason and “pure rational religion” (Rel, AA 06:12) in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.

NOTES 1.

Translator’s note: This paper was previously published in German (Zöller 2013).

2.

With their focus on the critique of religion in the Canon of Pure Reason, these explorations supplement the moral-theoretical and moral-psychological emphasis of earlier interpretations of this section of the Critique of Pure Reason, including their predominant perspective on the state of development of Kant’s critical moral philosophy in this section. See: Gueroult 1954; Gueroult 1963; Allison 1990, 54–59; Recki 1998.

3.

On the concept and doctrine of the determination of the boundaries of pure reason, see PkM, AA 04:350–365 (“Conclusion: On the Determination of the Bounds of Pure Reason”). See also Zöller 2010.

4.

Translator’s note: All translations of quotations from the Critique of Pure Reason are by Pluhar in Kant [1781/1787] 1996).

5.

For linguistic evidence that in Kant’s time dürfen (“to be permitted”) had, in addition to the sense of permission, also a sense of requirement, which today is expressed with bedürfen (“to need”) and a verb expanded by a zu (“to”) (bedürfen zu hoffen [“to need to hope”]), see: Grimm and Grimm 1860, 1721–1730 (“dürfen”), esp. 1722 (“nötig haben, egere, wie bedürfen, was jetzt gewöhnlicher ist” [“to be in need of, egere, like to need, which is now more common”]) and 1725 (“brauchen, ursache, grund haben, nötig haben. ein infinitiv steht ohne zu daneben” [“to need, cause, to have reason, to need. An infinitive goes with it, without ‘to’ ”]).

REFERENCES Allison, Henry E. (1990), Kant’s Theory of Freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1860), Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 2, Biermörder–D, Leipzig: S. Hirzel. Gueroult, Martial (1954), “Canon de la raison pure et critique de la raison pratique,” Revue internationale de philosophie, 30: 331–357. Gueroult, Martial (1963), “Vom Kanon der reinen Vernunft zur Kritik der praktischen Vernunft,” Kant-Studien, 54: 4324–4344. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich ([1787] 1983), David Hume über den Glauben oder Idealismus und Realismus. Ein Gespräch, New York and London: Garland. Kant, Immanuel ([1781/1787] 1996), Critique of Pure Reason, transl. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett. Recki, Birgit (1998), “Der Kanon der reinen Vernunft (A 795/B 823–A 831/B 859),” in George Mohr and Marcus Willaschek, (eds.), Immanuel Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 597–616, Berlin: De Gruyter. Zöller, Günter (2010), “In der Begrenzung zeigt sich der Meister: Der metaphysische Minimalismus der Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” in Jiri Chotas, Jindrich Karásek and Jürgen

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Stolzenberg, (eds.), Metaphysik und Kritik. Interpretationen zur “Transzendentalen Dialektik” der Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 19–33, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Zöller, Günter (2013), “Hoffen-Dürfen. Kants kritische Begründung des moralischen Glaubens,” in Dietmar Heidemann and Raoul Weicker, (eds.), Glauben und Vernunft in der Philosophie der Neuzeit, 131–161, Hildesheim and New York: Olms.

CHAPTER TWO

Hopeful Pessimism The Kantian Mind at the End of All Things1 ANDREW CHIGNELL (Princeton University)

1 KANT’S THIRD QUESTION No casual reader of Kant will be surprised to learn, upon arriving at the Canon of Pure Reason chapter at the end of the first Critique, that “What can I know?” and “What should I do?” are two of the three questions driving his philosophical enterprise. It is surprising to learn, however, that the third and in some sense central question for Kant is “What may I hope [Was darf ich hoffen]?” (A806/B833). Kant wrote no Critique or Metaphysical Foundations of hope, and he makes little explicit effort even to say what hope is.2 Compared to stalwarts like Erkenntnis, Urteil, and Vernunft, the word Hoffnung barely shows up at all in the critical philosophy—and many of those usages are by-the-by (“I hope to have shown. . .”). What Kant does say in this passage is that “What may I hope?” is a distinct question that also unites the other two, or acts as a bridge between their domains. The question about hope is “simultaneously practical and theoretical”—it “concerns happiness” and “finally comes down to the inference that something is . . . because something ought to happen” (A805–806/B833–834; original emphasis). Here is one way to interpret this: For Kant, any correct answer to the question “What ought I do?” will take the form: Act from subjective principles (“maxims”) that you can reasonably will to be universal laws.3 But although adherence to the form is what makes the action right, the action will also have an end—we are trying to produce, obtain, or further some outcome. So when we perform the action, we also naturally hope that the end will be achieved through our own free efforts, or with the help of others. Such hope, in turn, implicitly commits us to the “real practical possibility”4 of the end, and thus to the actual existence of any necessary means to the end (including, perhaps, our own freedom). Here’s an example. When someone (or at least someone of a Kantian mind) sends money to a charity in order to improve the lot of the poor, she is acting from duty: she thinks she ought to do this, no matter what, and that the maxim of her will could reasonably be universalized. But if she is like most of us, she also naturally hopes that the money actually helps someone. The rightness of the act is not tied to the accomplishment of the end, but the end is intended and hoped-for all the same. Such hope clearly presupposes that the end can be attained: that it is really, practically possible. And that in turn presupposes that other things actually exist. In the example, the hope that accompanies 35

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the charitable act presupposes that it is really, practically possible to help the needy in this way. That in turn presupposes the actual existence of (a) the needy, (b) the charity, and (c) a causal path between the two such that the gift financially improves someone’s lot. So hope regarding the outcome presupposes that the outcome is really, practically possible, and that in turn presupposes various existence claims. But existence claims, according to Kant, are in the domain of the theoretical. So this is one way in which the third question operates as a bridge between the practical and the theoretical: we start by acting as we ought, we then hope for certain outcomes of those acts, and we ultimately affirm propositions about what is. If the hope in question is practically rational (remember, the question is about what we dürfen5), then the theoretical “is”-claim inherits a defeasible kind of moral justification. Such justification can be defeated in a number of ways. In the case of the charitable gift, the presuppositions are about empirical matters, and so the justification can be defeated by evidence that, say, the causal pathway does not in fact exist. That’s a complicated piece of reasoning, obviously. My goal is not to reconstruct it in detail here,6 but rather to note that the steps involving hope turn out to be inessential, at least if we are inclined (as the Kantian mind clearly is) to some version of the idea that believing we ought to do something involves believing that it is possible (“ought-impliescan”). For if our subject acts from what she takes to be her duty in order to bring about a certain end (helping the needy via giving to that charity) then she already—just by taking herself to be bound to do this—presupposes that her end is really, practically possible. This means that she already presupposes the existence of whatever is required to make it really, practically possible: the poor, the charity, the causal path, and so on. There’s no need to appeal to any hopes she has in the matter. As though to confirm hope’s otiosity, after stating his three questions in the Canon, Kant proceeds to focus on Belief (Glaube)7—a shift that leads many commentators to ignore the distinction between the concepts of hope and Belief when discussing the third question. Even more strikingly, the classic presentation of the moral theistic proof in the second Critique, too, almost entirely marginalizes hope. There are a few uses of the word, but the “proof ” proper goes from ought to can to is. There the end that we set is a bit more abstract, and not entirely empirical: we aim at a perfectly just situation in which happiness is exactly apportioned to virtue (Kant calls this state the “highest good”). When we will the highest good, so the argument goes, we also presuppose that it is really, practically possible. This in turn underwrites defeasible rational Belief (Vernunftglaube) in the actuality of whatever is required for the highest good to be really, practically possible— namely, the existence of God and the immortality of the soul (KpV, AA 05:124–125). Again, hope has dropped out; reflection on our moral duty directly grounds Belief. Kant is not the first great mind to slip like this between thinking of some of our key moral and religious commitments in terms of what we would now call hope, and thinking of them as warranting more robust states like Belief (or faith or trust). In section 2, I will survey some pre-Kantian authors who also do this—not because they were confused, but because the relevant Greek and Latin terms simply had wider denotations. In section 3, I’ll consider the way Kant’s views seem to evolve on this issue—he starts off more optimistic but tends, especially in “Das Ende aller Dinge” (The End of All Things) of 1794—towards a kind of hopeful pessimism at best. I then examine (in section 4) a different version of Kant’s moral proof that does, I think, succeed in locating a role for hope that is distinct from that of Belief, expectation, optimism, and so on. As we’ll see, it is this “moral-psychological” version of Kant’s argument that finally shows how hope—

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for the Kantian mind at its best—can be an essential bridge between a practical ought and a theoretical is. In sections 5 and 6, I turn to some contemporary work in two very different arenas— Anthropocene scholarship, and Christian eschatology—in order to look at how the concepts of hope and expectation are used in those contexts. We will see that although some of the recent discourses about the “good Anthropocene” slip beyond hope into fullblown optimism, most authors working on ecological and environmental topics are careful to keep the attitudes distinct and opt for hopeful pessimism (this for good reason, since there is not much rational room for optimism on ecological matters). By contrast, there is a strong temptation among leading contemporary theologians to follow earlier Christian authors to conflate hope with optimistic Belief, or even full-blown certainty. My main point is this: although Kant himself does at times slip from talk of hope to talk of something more robust (like expectation or trust in the mode of Belief), and although various figures before and after him do the same, the Kantian mind at its best identifies an important role for unslipping hope to play. Sober, realistic reason (especially in the Anthropocene) is careful to avoid self-deception or pollyanna-ish naivete in circumstances where there is little to justify positive expectation in either a doxastic or a non-doxastic mode. Within those bounds, however, the Kantian mind may (darf) still tenaciously hope, and it may also employ various psychological techniques to support that hope. The result is an attractive kind of hopeful pessimism that can still underwrite defeasible moral justification for certain theoretical affirmations.

2 CLASSICAL/CHRISTIAN CONFLATIONS OF (WHAT WE WOULD CALL) HOPE AND EXPECTATION The Greek word “elpis” can be translated into English as “hope,” “expectation,” “optimism,” or even “confidence”—depending on context. Because “elpis” is ambiguous in this way, it is often difficult to tell which concept a classical author has in mind. To say that the tradition “slips” between the two concepts is not meant pejoratively, since some of these authors clearly did not have the contemporary distinction in mind. But hope and expectation do seem to be distinct concepts (where optimism is just the positive species of expectation). We can see the differences along at least three axes: ●

How likely the subject takes the outcome to be

●

How valuable the subject takes the outcome to be

●

How valuable it is to have the attitude in question

The following table provides the overall picture:

Table 2.1 Hope, Expectation, Optimism.

Subjective probability estimate must be >0 Subjective probability estimate must be >0.5 Must be aimed at perceived good Is typically good to have

Hope

Expectation

√

√ √

√ ?

?

Optimism (= positive expectation) √ √ √ ?

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The first thing to note here is that the “subjective probability” estimate in the first two rows can take the form of ordinary belief (Kant’s term is Überzeugung), or it can take the form of Belief/faith (Glaube). So if we believe that p is likely, we expect that p. But we also count as expecting that p if we have Belief (i.e., faith) rather than ordinary belief that p is likely to be true. A simpler way to put this is to say that expectation comes in both doxastic and non-doxastic forms. In the case of hope, the non-zero probability estimate regarding the outcome can likewise take the form of belief or Belief.8 The latter, of course, is what happens in Kant’s moral proof—no empirical or theoretical evidence is in the offing, and so ordinary belief must be “denied” on evidentialist grounds in order to “make room” for Belief (Bxxx). The commitment to the real, practical possibility of the highest good thus takes the form of firm Belief, as does the resulting commitment to the existence of God and the future life of the soul. In this paper, I will focus mostly on the top two rows in the table. But first a few comments about the third and fourth rows. Regarding the third: it is clear that the domains of hope and expectation differ on this score. Hope always aims at what the subject perceives as good, while expectation can aim at the perceived good or the perceived bad (I can expect my own execution, after all). This makes it useful to have the concept of optimism in hand as well: it is the species of expectation that aims at what the subject perceives as good. Regarding the fourth row, and the question mark in the “Hope” column: the majority of elpistologists in the history of western philosophy (as well as in contemporary positive psychology) regard hope as typically a good thing to have, and Kant is part of that tradition. There is an important minority report, however—prominent in the Greek and Roman Stoics as well as in Spinoza and various non-western traditions—according to which hope is typically bad because it is often accompanied by fear and makes us vulnerable to disappointment. This is particularly true in cases where we invest a great deal in obtaining the object of the hope. Hope can also be bad when it leads us to fail to take precautions. Thus Seneca pictures hope as shackled to fear, like a prisoner and the guard that escorts him: “Both belong to a mind in suspense, to a mind in a state of anxiety through looking into the future” (Seneca 1969, Letter 5, 38). Regarding the value of expectation/optimism: if we assume that our subjective probability estimates reliably track objective probabilities, then these states are also typically good to have. That’s just because it’s typically good to have commitments regarding what is in fact likely to be true. There is a movement in contemporary psychology (and pop culture) that argues that it is typically good to have positive expectations regarding things the subject regards as good, regardless of the objective probabilities. Those who are less impressed with “the power of positive thinking”9 will be less persuaded of that; hence the question mark in the table. Returning to the first two rows: I noted that the classical tradition often uses “elpis,” “euelpis,” and their cognates in contexts where a subject takes the outcome to be likely to obtain. In such cases it is best to translate these terms as “expectation.” For example: Aristotle in a passage from the Rhetoric says that “elpis for some sort of good is confidence” that can lead the youth astray (2.12, 1389a, 26–28; see Gravlee 2000). In contemporary parlance, we would not call this “hope” but rather “expectation” or (if the outcome is regarded as good) a kind of “optimism” that produces “confidence.” That’s not because the youth could not also have hope: psychologically speaking, hope is compatible with optimism regarding a desired outcome (“I hope and expect that you will be there!”). But

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we typically follow an “assert-the-stronger” policy in such cases: if I am optimistically expecting something good and then ascribe mere hope to myself, I am liable to mislead you into thinking that my probability estimate is much lower than it is. If I say, for example, “I really hope the sun will warm the earth tomorrow” when I fully expect it to do so, I’ve violated the norm in a way that may lead you to worry that solar misfunction is a serious risk (see Chignell 2013 and Chignell 2023a for more argument here). The New Testament, too, seems to associate “elpis” not with what we would call hope but rather with positive expectation or optimism. “Be joyful in hope” (Rom. 12.12); “in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began” (Tit. 1.2). Joyfulness seems out of place if the outcome in question is not regarded as highly likely; and naturally if God has indeed promised that p, then a high probability estimate seems warranted. Elsewhere, though, we find the recognition that hope is less confident than faith: “Now faith (pistis) is the substance of things-hoped-for (elpisomeno ¯ n); it is the evidence (elegchó) of things that do not appear” (Heb. 11.1). Philosophers and theologians in the subsequent Christian tradition fluctuate between construing elpis (“spes” in Latin) as directed towards a good outcome that is taken to be at least possible (i.e., what we would call hope) and a good outcome that seems very likely or secure (what we would call positive expectation or optimism). The latter application of the term typically occurs when authors are thinking of it as a theological virtue (see Augustine’s “man of good hope” [Augustine [420] 1961, ch. 31]). Thomas Aquinas, however, is characteristically clear about these conceptual distinctions, and simply distinguishes two different kinds of spes. The first kind is the infused theological virtue— this is a habitual, confident expectation whose traditional object is God and the afterlife. But the second kind of hope is a passion that can take many different objects. Aquinas calls it a “movement of appetite,” and his analysis sounds quite contemporary: “Hope is a movement of appetite aroused by the perception of what is agreeable, future, arduous, and possible of attainment. It is the tendency of an appetite towards this sort of object” (Aquinas [1265–1274] 1920, 1a2ae.40–44; my emphasis).10 Here the doxastic presupposition involved in the passion of hope is the “perception” that its object is at least possible.11 Elsewhere we’re told that “hoping would be out of the question if the good that is hoped for did not appear possible” (ibid., 2a2ae.17,7).12 Despite the Thomistic clarity on this point, subsequent authors muddy the waters again by using the term (spes, “hope,” Hoffnung, etc.) to refer to what we would call positive expectation or optimism. I won’t go through all the texts here, but it is easy to find passages in Bonaventure, Calvin, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, and Hume that use “hope” to refer to an attitude involving (in Locke’s words) “the thought of a probably future enjoyment of a thing” (Locke [1690] 1975). Influenced by these classical authors, no doubt, the Oxford English Dictionary cites the following as the two primary meanings of “hope”: 1. expectation of something desired; desire combined with expectation. 2. feeling of trust or confidence. Contemporary psychologists also tend to slip between two notions here: the leading “Hope Scales” theory articulated by C. R. Snyder, for instance, takes hope to be “the perception that one can reach desired goals.” The “can” there sounds like a belief in mere possibility. But Snyder and colleagues go on to try to develop measures that characterize this “perception” in terms of the ability to find “pathways” to the hoped-for outcome, as well as the “agency” to take those pathways when they open up. On the conceptual map

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provided above, however, the latter sort of “pathway” and “agency” thinking sounds much closer to expectation and optimism than to mere hope.13 It is very unusual for contemporary Anglophone philosophers to side with Thomas Aquinas over John Locke, the OED, and contemporary psychologists, but a quick survey of the (small but growing) literature suggests that most authors now clearly distinguish hope from expectation, as well as from trust and confidence.14 Table 2.1 displays the motivation: hope is importantly different from expectation in that it can be directed at outcomes that the subject regards as merely possible, and thus be accompanied by fear of disappointment. This is what had Seneca and Spinoza worried. Expectation, by contrast, always involves the estimation that the state is more probable than not; it may even be certain, and so there is less room for fear. And its object need not be perceived by the subject as good.

3 KANT ON HOPE AND EXPECTATION For Kant, as we have seen, the primary object of hope is happiness, and if it is rationally permissible hope (hope that we “may” have) then the happiness must be apportioned to our moral worthiness. In different contexts, Kant suggests that such hope, if rational, can underwrite Beliefs regarding the direction of history, its supersensible superintendent, and our individual destinies. However, as we saw earlier, the canonical versions of the moral proof in the first and second Critiques render hope otiose: they move from the fact that we ought to will the highest good to Belief in the existence of whatever is required for the real, practical possibility of the highest good. It is perhaps unfair to say that Kant is “conflating” the two concepts in those contexts; he just hasn’t zeroed in on the distinctive role that hope plays in his system, and is more interested in the Beliefs that it presupposes. Interestingly, as Kant witnesses various political disappointments (in particular concerning the accession of Friedrich Wilhelm II and the French Revolution), he seems less willing to express optimism regarding this-worldly history, and is also a bit cagier regarding what to say about justice in the world to come. Whereas his pre-critical 1759 essay “Versuch einiger Betrachtungen über den Optimismus” (An Attempt at Some Remarks on Optimism) stoutly defends the full-dress Leibnizean best-possible-world theory, the 1791 essay “Über das Misslingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodizee” (On the Failure of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy) recommends skepticism as to whether evils contribute to a greater good—in this world or the next. By this time, Kant is also clearly distinguishing hope from expectation. In the “Failure” essay he dismisses theological efforts to show that we can reasonably “expect [erwarten]” that “in a future world a different order of things will obtain, and each will receive that which his deeds here below are worthy of according to moral judgment” (ÜdM, AA 08:262). Instead, Kant follows what he takes to be the biblical example of Job, and says that apart from the natural laws we simply have no basis for conjecture regarding how an afterlife might be arranged. Thus although reason might “allow itself an appeal to patience, and the hope of a future improvement, how can it expect [erwarten] any such thing?” Kant concludes that, given what we know of the laws, “the agreement of human fate with divine justices, according to the concepts that we construe of the latter, is just as little to be expected there as here” (ibid.; my emphasis). So even in the absence of warrant for expectation, Kant still thinks that we may hope for the highest good (and form Beliefs in what its possibility presupposes).

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A similar evolution occurs in the essays in the philosophy of history and politics. Well into the 1780s, Kant’s efforts in this domain are largely optimistic in tone.15 But by the early 1790s, Friedrich Wilhelm II (and his reign of censorship) had come to the throne in Prussia, while Robespierre (and his Reign of Terror) had taken hold in France. In “The End of All Things” (1794), Kant seems open to the idea that the final end of history could be a “perverted” one in which evil has the last word and Christianity is the culprit: If Christianity should ever come to the point where it ceased to be worthy of love (which could very well transpire if instead of its gentle spirit it were armed with commanding authority), then, because there is no neutrality in moral things . . ., a disinclination and resistance to [Christianity] would become the ruling mode of thought among people; and the AntiChrist, who is taken to be the forerunner of the last day, would begin his—albeit short—regime (presumably based on fear and selfinterest); but then, because Christianity, though once allegedly destined to be the world religion, would not after all be favored by fate to become it, and the (perverse) end of all things, in a moral respect, would arrive. — EaD, AA 08:339; Kant’s bold Admittedly, there are passages from the mid- to late-1790s that suggest that Kant, if pressed, would still endorse optimism (in the mode of firm Belief, not belief) about the trajectory of history and our ultimate moral end. But these late-career reflections, especially in “The End of All Things,” also show him sympathetically entertaining the idea that hope is all you need. In any case, his final position was much weaker than many of his contemporaries who viewed the optimistic expectation of dramatic moral progress as clearly both justified and politically essential.16 In the nineteenth century this expectation took the form of epistemic certainty (rather than mere Belief) regarding the machinations of reason, Spirit, and capital to bring about positive change. In this respect, then, it is Hegel and Marx, rather than Kant, who are the true heirs of Paul, Augustine, Bonaventure, and Calvin. I now want to turn to a third variety of Kantian moral argument—one that comes to prominence at this same time in the writings of the 1790s, and that preserves a distinct and crucial role for hope.

4 THE MORAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL ARGUMENT AGAINST DESPAIR Obviously there were practical arguments—arguments for theoretical conclusions that draw on practical (i.e., pragmatic, moral) considerations—well before Kant. Pascal had his pragmatic wager, while Arnauld and Nicole include a broadly practical argument for God’s existence in La Logique ou l’art de penser (Port Royal Logic) of 1662. Recent work on C. A. Crusius—an eighteenth-century Pietist philosopher and pastor whose work deeply influenced Kant—indicates that he had already worked out the basic ingredients of Kant’s moral proof, including a conception of the practical “Belief ” that results from it (see Gava 2019). For Kant, the goal of the moral proof is to ground Belief in the existence of God, freedom, and the future life of the soul. As noted earlier, the canonical form of the argument (found most prominently in the second Critique) says that we ought to will the highest good or perfect justice, and that we may then hope for its attainment. If the hope is rational, then it provides moral justification for Belief in what it presupposes—the

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existence of God and the future life. We also saw, however, that this version can be articulated so as to make the hope component otiose. The variety of moral proof that makes hope essential is harder to piece together from the texts, but significant gestures can be found in writings from the 1790s—especially the Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the Power of Judgment) (1790), Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason) (1793), and “Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis” (On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, But It’s No Use in Practice) (1793). I have reconstructed this form of argument in detail elsewhere; here I will just provide a sketch.17 The main idea is that, for most of us anyway, sustaining what Kant calls moral resolve (moralische Entschliessung [Rel, AA 06:5]) in the face of apparent inefficacy and widespread injustice psychologically requires that we be able to hope that the ends we are striving for will be fulfilled—that the justice we are trying to promote will be achieved. The fact that such hope is required (at least for some of us) to sustain resolve provides it with a key kind of moral justification (for those same some of us). But for Kant a deep, life-structuring hope like that presupposes, in turn, a firm commitment to the practical possibility of its object: in this case the real, practical possibility of the Highest Good. And that commitment only makes sense if we postulate the existence of the entities or states that are required to make it really, practically possible—i.e., God and the afterlife of incompatibilistically free agents. The commitment to these items cannot take the form of ordinary belief (Überzeugung)—which for Kant requires sufficient theoretical evidence—so it must take the form of Belief (Glaube). In short, if it is rational to seek to sustain our moral resolve, and if this involves implementing strategies to preserve our hope for certain outcomes, then we are defeasibly morally justified in adopting Belief in the existence of God and the future life. It’s because we may hope for the highest good that we may defeasibly Believe in what’s required for it to be practically possible. From ought to may hope to is.18 I think this moral-psychological argument structure is interesting in its own right, but also interesting in application to naturalistic, this-worldly contexts. We saw above that the widespread hope to “make a difference” as an activist, philanthropist, or consumer might require for its sustenance the Belief that there is a mechanism in the world that can bring about the real-world difference in question. If Kant’s moral-psychological argument is sound, then there are defeasible moral grounds for such Belief, even in the absence of sufficient evidence for such a mechanism. In this way, analogues of Kant’s argument might be able to support theoretical commitments regarding individual or collective impacts, or even about the direction of the arc of history.19 In the next section, I consider one such analogue according to which the demoralizing effects of pessimistic realism in the Anthropocene can be offset by participation in hopesustaining “reenchanting” efforts—even at a very local level where one’s actions are unlikely to make a difference. The goal is not to get rid of the realism or the pessimism, since they are based in overwhelming empirical/theoretical evidence. Rather, the goal is to see how we might supplement the pessimism with resolve-sustaining hope.

5 SUSTAINING HOPE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE By comparison to most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century figures, philosophers and social scientists nowadays are cagey about claims regarding historical or moral progress. There are still a few optimists who contend—on empirical grounds rather than armchair

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reflection—that the technological achievements and apparent moral progress of the last few centuries provide reason to expect that both will continue.20 But most people seem to be inductive pessimists regarding our economic and especially ecological trajectory. Those who feel rationally compelled to such pessimism about our predicament still have a choice about whether to accompany it with, for example, (a) a handwringing sort of despair, (b) a Stoic sort of apathy, (c) a Montaignian-Nietzschean sort of cheerful acceptance, or (d) a resolute Kantian search for what we may still be able to hope, in an effort to sustain our moral resolve. Even if the crooked timber of humanity cannot be straightened to the point where optimism is warranted, the Kantian mind at its best still asks: what may we hope, and what sorts of postures and activities can we take up, while staying within the bounds of reason, in order to sustain such hope? In his works from the early 1790s, Kant offers the moral-psychological argument in answer to these questions. In our own context, the massive literature on the “Anthropocene” is a good place to look for other suggestions.21 Here I have space for just a quick peek. “Anthropocene” refers to the period in natural history when human beings and their effects on the rest of nature become as potent as a geologic force. The term offers, among other things, a new and more evocative way of talking about the Weberian idea that our natural environment can become so rationalized, misshapen, and “disenchanted” that the line between technocratic reason and “Nature” itself is blurred. In the dystopian narratives of the Anthropocene, homo sapiens has been replaced (in the words of sociologist Bronislaw Szerszynski) by “homo consumens, that other-than-human assemblage of humans, technology, fossil fuels, and capitalist relations” (Szerszynski 2012, 175). The German elpistologist Jürgen Moltmann sketched an apocalyptic vision like this back at the turn of the millennium, just as “Anthropocene” was first starting to be used by geochemists, biologists, anthropologists, and geographers to characterize our new geological home (Heimat). Moltmann declared that “It is impossible to make oneself ‘the master and possessor of nature’ if one is still part of nature and dependent on it. The modern culture of mastery has produced its own downside, which reveals its catastrophic effects in the disappearance of natural living spaces” (Moltmann 2004a, 4). And the disappearance, he might have added, of natural living species—faster than in previous mass extinction events, by most estimates (De Vos et al. 2015). Some theorists of the Anthropocene (especially some of the more Marxian and “deep ecology” authors) both expect and welcome the sort of ultimate economic collapse that would, after a period of inevitable disruption, make room for human life that is in greater harmony with non-human nature. But that eschaton is very hard to conceive, and not just from an environmental point of view: here consider Frederick Jameson’s famous suggestion that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. Other theorists argue that we can expect deliverance from such ecological disasters, even within the current economic system, as a result of individual and collective action. One of the most radical individual actions involves refusing to conceive (or “expect”) in the biological way: in progressive pockets across North America (e.g., college towns), it is not unusual to come across the anti-natalist bumper sticker: “Save the Earth, Don’t Give Birth” and birthrates across the developed world are falling.22 On the other hand, optimism about our species’ future is sometimes encouraged by reflection on our collective powers of ingenuity: if only there are enough people (“one billion Americans”?) with the resources and will to face the task.23 Stewart Brand (long-time editor of the Whole Earth Catalog) is now an unyielding techno-optimist who writes in the expectation of a “good

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Anthropocene”—i.e., a time when our environmental plight is viewed as a series of (what Rex Tillerson once called) “engineering problems” that will be overcome by innovation (“two guys in a garage in Palo Alto”).24 So there are expectations on both sides. But, somewhat orthogonally, there are also discussions about the role and power of hope when combined with pessimism. Soon after Moltmann wrote his millennial reflections on “Progress and Abyss” and what he calls, following Bill McKibben, “the end of nature,” there were the 9/11 attacks and other human-made miseries that followed. As the human world was gathering for another set of wars, Moltmann turned away from the abyss and instead wrote hopeful messianic reflections on “The Promise of the Child.”25 Similarly, some ecology-focused geographers and sociologists find it necessary to ignore their long-term pessimistic expectations and do things to cultivate hope, if only in order to sustain moral resolve. Holly Jean Buck is one of the latter: while resisting the slip into Brand’s optimism about the good Anthropocene, Buck calls for more hopeful visions of “the charming Anthropocene”—where “charming” refers to a kind of “reenchanting” that we actively perform rather than seek outside ourselves in “nature.” She asks: “If the Anthropocene were not an anthology of scary tales, drawn from an awkward bricolage of science and preternatural fears, what else could it be?” (Buck 2015, 2). This is in effect the Kantian question about hope applied to our current ecological predicament. It directs our focus away from reasonable but mostly pessimistic expectations regarding the rapacious denizens of the Anthropocene, and invites us to focus in hope on a less likely but perhaps still just possible future in which “human traits like tending, altruism, creativity, art and craftsmanship, and cooperation reclaim their status as basic human nature” (ibid.).26 The generation of people in the global north who came of age around the millennial turn is the first generation most of whose members expect to live less prosperously than their parents. Overall, their attitude is the reverse of the old “middle-class” assumption that (in Moltmann’s words) “the all-important thing was social advancement from one generation to the next” (Moltmann 2004a, 7). There are some emotional downsides to this, to be sure, but one of the positive effects of recognizing our situation in the Anthropocene is that it reduces expectations regarding the self and instead refocuses our minds (in hope) on crucial, large-scale collective ends. This is clearly reminiscent of Kant’s claim that we must—each of us—hope for happiness, but only as part of the collective accomplishment of the highest good, to which we each individually contribute. In keeping with the moral-psychological reflections in the last section, the Kantian millennial mind will look for ways in which local, individual and communal “enchanting practices” might help sustain those hopes, and our moral resolve in general. Buck puts this nicely: “We know about sea level rise and ocean acidification and the changing nitrogen cycle, about planetary boundaries and potential tipping points. Enchanting practices are no stand-in for large-scale political change, but as companion to proactive critique they can help create the critical mass of engagement and care to give humans and nonhumans a habitable Anthropocene” (Buck 2015, 8). Again, the Kantian mind (of any generation) is not interested in self-deceptive pollyanna-ism, but it does seek out—and regard as morally justifiable—reasonable psychological strategies for sustaining moral hope and resolve. As opposed to the “effective altruist” impulse always to seek to identify and do what is most likely to make the largest difference, some of these reenchanting strategies may involve hyper-local efforts that don’t obviously connect to the larger concern. Still, Kant’s argument (as I’ve interpreted it, anyway) allows us to go from those rational hopes to the defeasible Belief

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that our efforts “help create the critical mass of engagement” required to make the Anthropocene more habitable. At the very least, cultivating such hope in the local context can galvanize us to re-enter the global or collective struggle, even if we have no real expectations for ultimate success.

6 EXPECTATION IN THE ESCHATON We have seen how the Kantian account of hope, and the moral-psychological argument against despair, might be applicable in the face of massive and apparently implacable systems of ecological degradation. In this section, I want to look briefly at some prominent contemporary eschatologies that invoke the concept of hope, but end up slipping once again into talk of positive expectation. I mentioned earlier that many historical Christian authors prize hope—it is one of the theological virtues that is infused by God and directed towards the individual and communal life hereafter. I also noted that they often use the concept (elpis, spes) to pick out attitudes that involve much higher probability estimates regarding the end in question (in this case—the end of the world itself!). Moltmann is again the seminal figure here: the publication of his Theologie der Hoffnung (Theology of Hope) in 1964 (English 1967) was a watershed event not only in traditional systematic theology but also liberation theology, Black theology, and political theology circles.27 Moltmann’s main contribution was to develop the Augustinian idea that a proper understanding of the eschaton views it as coeval with the present vale of tears, rather than as some far-off idealized future. The eschaton is adventus: still coming and yet already here. Many readers take him to be speaking (in Kantian terms) “regulatively”—i.e., setting out an ideal in terms of which we can conceive our current moral and political efforts. This thought—that hope could be directed towards a thisworldly outcome which is both already present and “not yet”—also had an impact on theological discussions of the traditional object of hope: the afterlife. Moltmannian elpistology is thus broadly Kantian in a few ways: because of the German Protestantism in which it was fashioned, because it uses a traditional metaphysical idea in a merely regulative fashion, and because it is concerned with the “future life.” But also because it suggests that if the highest good is to obtain at all, then it must in some sense already be upon us. Recall that for Kant, the highest good is a state of perfect justice: everyone is happy precisely in proportion to her degree of worthiness to be happy. But this means that all good and bad acts—and all the joys and sufferings past, present, and future—are partly constitutive of the highest good. All of them figure into the vast fastidious divine calculation by which justice is ultimately done. It is in this (limited) sense that the eschaton, for the Kantian mind, is both already and not yet. Some theologies of hope distinguish clearly between hope and expectation/optimism.28 Moltmann himself, however, is ultimately more influenced by Hegel, Marx, and Bloch than he is by Kant. As a result, in his magnum opus (as opposed to the later messianic essay) it often sounds as though he views the irruption of the eschaton into our present context as grounds for a kind of optimistic expectation (even if it is still called “Hoffnung”). But that, as we have seen, is quite alien to the Kantian mind at its best: the question about hope should be the question about what we can long for, focus on, strive for, and seek strategies to preserve, even if we also reasonably judge it to be completely unlikely. Moltmannian hope, by contrast, seems to slip quickly into Belief/faith (Glaube), anticipation, and even sanguine certainty about the object of hope.

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More recently, theologian David Kelsey (2009) has written a monumental threevolume theological anthropology titled Eccentric Existence in which he takes up the doctrine of eschatology second rather than third. This is very Moltmannian: the account of hope and the eschaton comes directly after the account of creation and before any discussion of sin, atonement, and salvation. Hope and its orientation to the already and not yet thus play an essential role in human flourishing even prior (logically speaking) to the fall into what Kant would call “radical evil” and the tradition would call “Original Sin.” So the vision Kelsey articulates has three stages: first creation, then eschaton, and only after that redemption. With creation comes an awareness of our finitude but not of fallenness or sin. Directly in response to that finitude there is an unexpected promise of individual and collective “consummation.” This promise gives us a sense of our “ultimate context” and turns our day-to-day life-worlds (Kelsey uses the Husserlian term) into “promising proximate contexts in which we live on borrowed time” (Kelsey 2009, 501). Awareness of the promise in turn allows us to see that “personal bodies flourish in appropriate response to God relating to them,” and that “the appropriate response to God relating to them in this mode is hope” (ibid.; my emphasis). This logic of this sequence allows Kelsey to say that the real basis of hope is not a philosophy of developmental psychology such as we find in Erikson, or a philosophy of history such as we find in Hegel, Marx, or Bloch, or even a “theology of hope” like Moltmann’s which, Kelsey thinks, still trades too much in these other modes of discourse. Rather, the hope is an almost involuntary, felt response to the “actuality of God keeping God’s promise”—an actuality which the Christian, anyway, encounters in the life and work of Christ (Kelsey 2009, 504). So “eccentric” hope is not about what is merely possible; rather, it is “grounded in an actuality—namely, the already inaugurated eschatological kingdom” (ibid., 522). Not just “grounded” in but also directed towards that actuality: for Kelsey, “Jesus is in his person the actualization of the eschaton, the end and goal of the project of human subjectivity’s full self-actualization” (ibid., 95). This raises a host of questions, most of which are not important for present purposes. The point I want to highlight is simply that “hope” as discussed by contemporary philosophers is too anemic for Kelsey’s purposes—a “focus on the desired outcome under the aspect of possibility” (Chignell 2023a) is not an adequate response to the “unexpected promise of consummation.” Rather, “eccentric hope” is an “attitude of expectancy that a good and desired transformation of our quotidian contexts, now actually begun, will be fully actualized” and “Joyous . . . a certain glad hopefulness but not a gleeful hopefulness, a happy hope but not a euphoric hope.” It is a “cheerful confidence that is anything but complacency” (Kelsey 2009). This hope also has public effects. It is a “settled and long-lasting attitude . . . that orients personal bodies in the quotidian context as agents, disposing them across extended periods of time to engage in certain types of socially established cooperative human action”; “a disposition to enact certain types of practices publicly”; and “best defined as personal bodies’ orientation that disposes them for enactments of certain practices in public proximate contexts” (Kelsey 2009). If we take this talk of “expectancy” and “confidence” seriously, then it looks like the doxastic component of eccentric hope involves a much higher probability estimate than mere possibility. Sometimes it even sounds close to certainty: an “attitude of expectancy” that eschatological consummation “will be fully actualized.” This makes sense of Kelsey’s (New Testament-style) talk of the accompanying affective state as that of “joyous” or

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“cheerful confidence,” rather than longing, anxiety, or fear. Thus for Kelsey, the public (and often religious) practices that eccentric hope motivates will presumably be much more decisive than the tentative, local efforts at “reenchantment” that Buck recommends as a means of sustaining hope. Put another way: Kelsey explicitly distances himself from Hegel, Marx, and Bloch with respect to his account of eschatological hope, and he is not a determinist-utopian about the future. But in the end his ultra-confident “expectancy” about a divine promise and his focus on the already-actual aspect of it makes the adventus seem just as inevitable as Marx’s revolution. In effect, Kelsey rehabilitates the classical-Christian conflation (or at least ambiguity) regarding elpis/spes that the Kantian mind at its best will resist. If “eccentric hope” (or Christian hope generally) is a joyous expectancy of a flourishing for each and all of us, then it is not what we or Kant mean by “hope” at all, but rather already the assurance of things we might have merely hoped for.29

7 CONCLUSION: HOMO RELIGIOSUS AND HOMO SPERANS Kant says in his lectures on the philosophy of religion, as well as in the published Religion itself, that the “minimum of theology” or “minimum of cognition in religion” is the Belief that God’s existence is really possible (RelPö, AA 28:998; Rel, AA 06:153–154n). This modal commitment is all that is required as part of our duty, but it admittedly seems like a rather low bar for genuine religiosity. That said, the commitment to possibility is accompanied, for Kant, by a sophisticated complex of other attitudes, desires, and affections—including (on my reading) deep, lifestructuring hope for the existence of God, the consummation of creation, and even extramundane assistance—that would not fit well within a baldly atheistic framework.30 It might also involve hope for the advent of a new kind of human being here at the end of all things. This would not be mere homo consumens but rather homo sperans: a being that engages in short-term reenchanting strategies for sustaining resolve—the kind of resolve that in turn supports long-term collective efforts that might make a real difference. The hope for the advent of homo sperans is the hope that we become the sorts of beings whose ecological and geological legacy is less devastating than the one that we now reasonably expect. One main reason to resist the way non-Kantian thinkers (and the OED!) seem to slip between hope and expectation, then, is just for the sake of conceptual tidiness—clearly there are two different concepts here and it’s good to keep them distinct. A more important reason, however, is that doing so makes conceptual room for the idea that an authentic moral-religious life can be based in pessimistic, non-expectant but still tenaciously-lived hope. This is the sort of hope that Kant himself describes in the “Theory and Practice” essay of 1793: It is quite irrelevant whether any empirical evidence suggests that these plans, which are founded only on hope, may be unsuccessful. For the idea that something which has hitherto been unsuccessful will therefore never be successful does not justify anyone in abandoning even a pragmatic or technical aim . . . . This applies even more to moral aims, which, so long as it is not demonstrably impossible to fulfil them, amount to duties. — TP, 08:309–310; my emphasis

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As long as our apparently futile efforts—which are “founded only on hope”—are not demonstrably impossible—we can, and in many cases ought to, keep performing them. For Kant himself, as we know, this hope presupposes Belief in the actual existence of God and the future life of the soul. But in the passages on the “minimum of theology” quoted above, it looks like he is willing to say that Belief in the real possibility of those items is all we need for religious hope. Such a low-bar approach would make it easier for people to train themselves (liturgically,31 perhaps, or through Buck’s “tending” and “enchanting” practices) to focus on the real possibility of good but unlikely outcomes (including even the highest good). That’s the propositional side of deep, activismsustaining hope. There is also a yearning, passionate, affective side that makes it seem like a genuinely religious stance, even if it is in no way certain, expectant, or “eccentric” in Kelsey’s sense. In this way, deep Kantian moral hope is compatible with the pessimistic expectation that the end of all things will indeed turn out to be disastrous and “perverse.” For the Kantian mind in the Anthropocene, then, the “minimum of theology” might be just the right amount.32

NOTES 1.

This chapter is a slightly revised version of a paper that appears in Eckel and DuJardin 2022. It is published here under open access license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/.

2.

Although see Chignell 2021a for a gesture at an argument according to which hope is in fact the primary topic of the third Critique.

3.

This is of course the “Universal Law” formulation of the Categorical Imperative. Allen Wood (1999) has argued that what is really action-guiding for Kant is not this but the much less formal “Formula of Humanity.”

4.

Kant’s term is “real possibility.” I include “practical” here to indicate that it’s not merely what contemporary philosophers call “metaphysical” possibility; rather, the outcome is supposed to be accomplishable by the beings and powers in the actual world. Compare Wood 1999 for the argument that “realizability” is a key part of the argument and Willaschek 2016 for this use of “practical possibility.”

5.

In his contribution to this volume, Günter Zöller appeals to Grimm’s Dictionary to argue that “dürfen” was used not only in the sense of “permission” but also in the sense of “need” (bedürfen), or maybe even “having grounds for” (Grund haben). So the third question may involve questions like “What do I need to hope for?” and “What do I have grounds to hope for?” Thanks to Claudia Blöser for discussion here.

6.

See Chignell 2020 and Chignell 2023b for some efforts to do that.

7.

I use “Belief ” to translate “Glaube”: the latter’s meaning, for Kant, is different in important ways from “belief,” “faith,” and “trust” in contemporary English (see Chignell 2007 and 2021a). But compare Blöser (2021), who prefers to translate “Glaube” into English as “trust.”

8.

In humdrum cases of hope this cognitive condition might be a mere presupposition or taking-for-granted that doesn’t involve the formation of an actual belief. See Chignell 2013 and 2023a for more discussion.

9.

The reader is advised to take a quick look at The Secret on Netflix for a particularly exaggerated form of this kind of doctrine.

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10. Although I think Aquinas gets the claim about mere possibility right, from a contemporary point of view we wonder about his further claims that hope is only properly directed to what is “arduous” and “future.” Aquinas follows the classical tradition (e.g., Cicero) in viewing desire as a movement of appetite towards what is agreeable and not-yet-obtained. He also incorporates the Platonic distinction between passions of the concupiscible and irascible parts of the sensitive soul. This concept of hope takes it to be a passion of the irascible part—the part that “resists the attacks that hinder what is suitable” for us (I.81.2). This is presumably why he says that hope’s object must be “arduous” to obtain. This part of the concept has fallen out of the contemporary conception, however: it seems clear that hope can be directed at something relatively easy to acquire (“I hope we’ll have ice cream after dinner!”). It also seems clear that hope can take the present or past as an object (“I hope my horse won yesterday!”). Thanks to Ryan Darr for discussion of Aquinas here. For helpful studies of Aquinas on hope, see Bobier 2020 and Pinsent 2020; for a criticism, see Wolterstorff 2004. 11. Kierkegaard is rather Thomistic here. He says that “hope is a passion for the possible” (2009, 106ff.). But like Aquinas he clearly delineates this “natural” or “pre-moral” hope—which involves a great deal of uncertainty—from “Christian hope,” which is secure (cf. Fremstedal 2012). 12. To fill this out, it would be worth inquiring further into the notion of “possibility” that Aquinas is using here. 13. See Gallagher et al. 2020 for an account of Snyder and the positive psychology tradition. 14. One exception to this is Wheatley 1958. 15. e.g., in the 1784 essay, “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürglicher Absicht” (Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose). 16. Here I differ from Blöser, who thinks that for Kant our moral hope is “sure.” This threatens to fall back into the classical conflation in a way that the Kantian mind at its best will strive to resist. See Blöser 2021. 17. See Chignell 2020 and 2023b. Robert M. Adams (1979) was one of the first contemporary scholars to defend this broadly psychological version of a moral argument—an argument from the need to avoid despair and “demoralization” in ethical life. For other efforts in a similar direction see Fugate 2014, Ebels-Duggan 2016, Chance and Pasternack 2018, and Pasternack (present volume). 18. Kant’s view differs here from that of the author of the epistle to the Hebrews. Kant thinks that the hope and the faith (Belief) have different objects, whereas the biblical author takes them to have the same object and different epistemic standings (“faith shows the reality of things hoped for”). 19. For more elaborate discussion of this, see Chignell 2020 and 2023b. 20. See Steven Pinker’s recent books, most of which repeat the argument that from the perspective of human health and well-being, things have been getting quite a bit better, and so we can continue to expect more of the same. 21. Particularly relevant here is the collection on Ecology, Ethics, and Hope edited by Brei (2016). 22. Another slightly less memorable phrase is Donna Haraway’s: “Make Kin, Not Babies!” in Haraway 2015. For the most famous recent anti-natalist argument, see Benatar 2008. 23. See Yglesias’ rather US-focused clarion call in his 2021.

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24. Brand’s notorious line in the final edition of his Whole Earth Catalog (1998) is effectively his response to people who question whether we ought to be interfering with the climate in such dramatic ways: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Cf. Hamilton 2015, the title of which is “The Theodicy of the ‘Good Anthropocene.’ ” 25. This is the first chapter of his 2003 book which was translated into English as In the End—The Beginning (2004b). 26. For another vision of the Anthropocene that also includes both dystopian realism and hope (as well as sex, romantic love, and fly-fishing) see Nadzam and Jamieson 2015. 27. Both James Cone and Gustavo Gutiérrez have repeatedly cited Moltmann as an influence and key interlocutor. Cone (1984) makes it clear that despite this common heritage, Black theology and Latin American Liberation theology in that era developed independently. Thanks to Brendan Kolb for pointing this out to me. 28. Thus Cornel West, inspired by Cone: “Hope and optimism are different. Optimism tends to be based on the notion that there’s enough evidence out there to believe things are gonna be better, much more rational, deeply secular, whereas hope looks at the evidence and says, ‘It doesn’t look good at all. Doesn’t look good at all. Gonna go beyond the evidence to create new possibilities based on visions that become contagious to allow people to engage in heroic actions always against the odds, no guarantee whatsoever.’ That’s hope. I’m a prisoner of hope, though. Gonna die a prisoner of hope” (West 2008). 29. It is tempting to think that some Christian authors are thinking of “hope” along the lines of “trust.” They already have expectations (or even certainty) regarding the ultimate providential outcome, but they sometimes have trouble “living into” what they expect, especially when faced with personal challenges and collective injustices. So “hope” becomes the virtue of “arduous” living into what one already expects. It would then not only be compatible with expectation but a kind of affective complement to it. (Thanks to Toni Alimi for making this point to me in conversation.) In future work, I’d like to examine the relationship between hope construed in this way and various contemporary accounts of “trust.” There has also been some excellent work on this recently by Daniel McKaughan and Michael Pace (see Pace and McKaughan 2020). 30. For more on the “minimum of theology” see Wood 1991. On the rationality of hope for extramundane assistance see Chignell 2013 and Pasternack (present volume). 31. For more on this theme, see Chignell 2021a. 32. For helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter, I’m grateful to participants in the “Expectation and Joy” workshop at Yale University (especially John Hare, Jennifer Herdt, Jürgen Moltmann, and Miroslav Volf), to participants in the “Religion, Ethics, and Politics” workshop at Princeton University, and to an audience at the Institute for Philosophy and Religion at Boston University. I’m also grateful to Toni Alimi, Claudia Blöser, Ryan Darr, Alexander Englert, Judah Isseroff, Brendan Kolb, Katerina Mihaylova, and Allen Wood for written comments.

REFERENCES Adams, R. M. (1979), “Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief,” in C. F. Delaney, (ed.), Rationality and Religious Belief, 110–132, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

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Aquinas, T. ([1265–1274] 1920), Summa Theologiæ of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. and transl. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd and revised edn., London: Benziger Brothers. Augustine ([420] 1961), Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, ed. and transl. H. Paolucci, New York: Henry Regnery. Benatar, D. (2008), Better Never to Have Been: The Harm Of Coming Into Existence, New York: Oxford University Press. Blöser, C. (2021), “ ‘Sure Hope’ of Attaining Happiness and its Relation to ‘Wish’ and ‘Faith,’ ” in C. Serck-Hanssen and B. Himmelman, (eds.), The Court of Reason: Proceedings of the 13th International Kant Congress, 1941–1949, Berlin: De Gruyer. Bobier, C. (2020), “Aquinas on the Emotion of Hope,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 94 (3): 379–404. Brand, S. (ed.) (2008), The Whole Earth Catalog, San Rafael, CA: Point Foundation. Brei, A. (ed.) (2016), Ecology, Ethics, and Hope, New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Buck, H. J. (2015), “On the Possibilities of a Charming Anthropocene,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 105 (2): 369–377. Chance, B. and L. Pasternack (2018), “Rational Faith and the Pantheism Controversy: Kant’s ‘Orientation Essay’ and the Evolution of His Moral Argument,” in D. Dahlstrom, (ed.), Kant and his German Contemporaries, vol. 2, 195–214, New York: Cambridge University Press. Chignell, A. (2007), “Belief in Kant,” Philosophical Review, 116 (3): 323–360. Chignell, A. (2013), “Rational Hope, Moral Order, and the Revolution of the Will,” in E. Watkins, (ed.), The Divine Order, The Human Order, and the Order of Nature, 197–218, New York: Oxford University Press. Chignell, A. (2020), “Hope and Despair at the Kantian Chicken Factory: Moral Arguments About Making a Difference,” in L. Allais and J. Callanan, (eds.), Kant on Animals, 213–238, New York: Oxford University Press. Chignell, A. (2021a), “Liturgical Philosophy of Religion: An Untimely Manifesto,” in M. D. Eckel et al., (eds.), The Future of the Philosophy of Religion, Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, 8: 73–94. Chignell, A. (2021b), “Knowledge, Anxiety, Hope: How Kant’s First and Third Questions Relate,” in C. Serck-Hanssen and B. Himmelmann, (eds.), The Court of Reason: Proceedings of the 13th International Kant Congress, 127–149, Berlin: De Gruyter. Chignell, A. (2023a), “The Focus Theory of Hope,” Philosophical Quarterly, 73 (1): 44–63. Chignell, A. (2023b), “Inefficacy, Despair, and Difference-Making: A Secular Application of Kant’s Moral Argument,” in L. Caranti and A. Pinzani, (eds.), Kant and the Problem of Morality: Rethinking the Contemporary World, London: Routledge. Cone, J. (1984), For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church, New York: Orbis. De Vos, J. M., L. N. Joppa, J. L. Gittleman, P. R. Stephens and S. L. Pimm (2015), “Estimating the Normal Background Rate of Species Extinction,” Conservation Biology, 29: 452–462. Ebels-Duggan, K. (2016), “The Right, the Good, and the Threat of Despair: (Kantian) Ethics and the Need for Hope in God,” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, 7: 81–108. Eckel, M. D. and T. DuJardin (eds.) (2022), Faith, Hope, and Love: Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion, and Public Life, vol. 10, Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Fremstedal, R. (2012), “Kierkegaard on the Metaphysics of Hope,” Heythrop Journal, 58: 51–60. Fugate, C. (2014), “The Highest Good and Kant’s Proof(s) of God’s Existence,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 31 (2): 137–158.

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Gallagher, M., J. M. D’Souza and A. Richardson (2020), “Hope in Contemporary Psychology,” in C. Blöser and T. Stahl, (eds.), The Moral Psychology of Hope, 189–207. Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield. Gava, G. (2019), “Kant and Crusius on Belief and Practical Justification,” Kantian Review, 24: 53–75. Gravlee, S. (2000), “Aristotle on Hope,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 38 (4): 461–477. Hamilton, C. (2015), “The Theodicy of the ‘Good Anthropocene,’ ” Environmental Humanities, 7: 233–238. Haraway, D. (2015), “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities, 6: 159–165. Kelsey, D. (2009), Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Kierkegaard, S. (2009), Christian Discourses, ed. and transl. H. Hong and E. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Locke, J. ([1690] 1975), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Moltmann, J. (2004a), “Progress and Abyss: Remembrances of the Future of the Modern World,” in M. Volf and W. Katerburg, (eds.), The Future of Hope: Christian Tradition Amid Modernity and Postmodernity, 3–26, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Moltmann, J. (2004b), In the End—The Beginning, London: SCM Press. Nadzam, B. and D. Jamieson (2015), Love in the Anthropocene, New York: OR Books. Pace, M. and D. McKaughan (2020), “Judaeo-Christian Faith as Trust and Loyalty,” Religious Studies [online first]: 1–31. 10.1017/S0034412520000153. Pinsent, A. (2020), “Hope as a Virtue in the Middle Ages,” in S. van den Heuvel, (ed.), Historical and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Hope, 47–60, Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Seneca, L. (1969), Letters from a Stoic, transl. R. Campbell, New York: Penguin Books. Szerszynski, B. (2012), “The End of the End of Nature: The Anthropocene and the Fate of the Human,” The Oxford Literary Review, 34 (2): 165–184. West C. (2008), Hope on a Tightrope, New York: Hayhouse. Wheatley, J. M. O. (1958), “Wishing and Hoping,” Analysis, 18 (6): 121–131. Willaschek, M. (2016), “Must We Believe in the Realizability of Our Ends? On a Premise of Kant’s Argument for the Postulates of Pure Practical Reason,” in T. Höwing, (ed.), The Highest Good in Kant’s Philosophy, 223–244, Berlin: De Gruyter. Wolterstorff, N. (2004), “Seeking Justice in Hope,” in M. Volf and W. Katerberg, (eds.), The Future of Hope: Christian Tradition Amid Modernity and Postmodernity, 77–100, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Wood A. (1991), “Kant’s Deism,” in P. Rossi, (ed.), Kant’s Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered, 1–21, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wood A. (1999), Kant’s Ethical Thought, New York: Cambridge University Press. Yglesias, M. (2021), One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, New York: Portfolio Press.

CHAPTER THREE

Circulus Volitionis The Hope for Divine Aid in Kant’s Religion LAWRENCE PASTERNACK (Oklahoma State University)

1 INTRODUCTION The Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason)’s Canon of Pure Reason groups all interests of reason into three questions: “What can I know?” “What ought I do?” and “What may I hope?”1 The first of these questions is analyzed in such works as the Critique of Pure Reason and the Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaften (Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science). The second question is examined in such works as the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals), the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason), and Die Metaphysik der Sitten (Metaphysics of Morals). But what of the third question? Although comments on hope can be found throughout much of the Critical corpus, nothing therein comes close to the sort of systematic examination applied to knowledge and morality. We nevertheless know that hope is of particular importance to Kant’s philosophy of religion. This can be seen both from its place within his doctrine of the highest good, which stands as the foundation for his positive philosophy of religion, up through specific targets of religious hope, including the hope pertaining to our becoming “well-pleasing to God” and the hope for divine aid in our efforts towards such a goal.2 We thus find hope appearing at key junctures within Kant’s Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason). Notable examples include passages in the General Remark of Part One, where Kant explores the question as to whether or not divine aid is or is not necessary in order for us to undergo a “change of heart” (e.g., Rel, AA 06:52) and then in Part Three, as he introduces the idea of the “ethical community,” again asking whether or not divine aid is needed in order for such an institution to come into being (e.g., Rel, AA 06:101). It is the purpose of this chapter to explore these two key instances of hope in Kant’s philosophy of religion. While they do not stand alone, independent from the more foundational role of the highest good, they nevertheless reflect two of the most important applications of hope within his religious thought. Accordingly, this chapter will develop as follows. First, we will review the theological backdrop for the hope for divine aid as articulated in Part One of the Religion. Then, we will review the theological backdrop for the kindred hope for divine aid in Part Three. Through these reviews, we will begin to examine some of the noteworthy aspects of Kant’s approach to divine aid and what they 53

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reveal about his picture of religious hope. From there, we will turn to the problematic status of ecclesiastical ritual in his thought, and how the interplay between hope and ritual reflects Kant’s conception of a “Parergon,” i.e., a problem for reason that resides at the boundary between the pure rational system of religion and the doctrines of historical faith.

2 RELIGIOUS HOPE IN PART ONE OF KANT’S RELIGION 2.1 The Aims and Structure of Kant’s Religion Kant’s overall goal in the Religion is to examine core Christian doctrines in order to determine which have “not only compatibility but also unity” (Rel, AA 06:13) with the “pure rational system of religion” (Rel, AA 06:12) and which do not. Those that do have this unity or compatibility are designated as expressions of “genuine religion” (Rel, AA 06:12) while those that do not reflect a “cult” (Rel, AA 06:13) or “religion of rogation” (Rel, AA 06:51). Such as is seen in the passages just cited, one finds this characterization of the Religion’s project in both of its prefaces as well as within its main body.3 The focus of Part One of the Religion is to examine the doctrine of original sin, exploring many of its core tenets, so as to find out whether there is a way in which the doctrine and its constituting tenets might cohere with rational religion. For example, within the scope of this doctrine, there are such specific tenets as radical evil (radix malorum—i.e., whether our individual evil deeds have a more fundamental “root” within us), whether there is a way to understand radical evil in such a way that it is both chosen and innate, whether or not our moral condition is inherited, ultimately from our biblical progenitors, whether or not we are capable of overcoming this moral condition, and whether or not divine aid is needed in order to do so.4 Parts Two through Four then go on to deal with such doctrines as the divinity of Jesus, the distinction between justification and sanctification, the infinite debt of sin, the necessity of belief in some historical salvific event, providence, the need for religious institutions, the role of prayer, churchgoing, and rituals. Throughout, Kant, as he puts it “hold[s] fragments [of historical faith] . . . up to moral concepts, and see whether it does not lead back to the same pure rational system of religion” (Rel, AA 06:12). In some cases, Kant finds “compatibility” or “unity” (Rel, AA 06:13) between the doctrine and rational religion; in some cases, he does not.

2.2 Part One of the Religion: Original Sin For example, in the main body of Part One, Kant offers an interpretation of the moral corruption attributed to our fallen nature as carriers of Original Sin, an interpretation that circumvents tenets of the Augustinian tradition about the corruption of our faculties themselves, offering instead an interpretation where our corruption is a propensity (that we endorse) to prioritize self-interest over morality.5 That is, where proponents of the Augustinian tradition would claim that due to the Fall, our ability to judge right from wrong has been corrupted, as has our capacity to be moved to act on moral grounds, Kant instead holds that neither our ability to cognize the good nor our capacity to will it is itself corrupted.6 Our capacities are intact. But human nature nevertheless includes a “positive principle” (Rel, AA 06:59) that is ineradicable, and, when chosen, has us prioritize selfinterest over morality in our “supreme maxim” (Rel, AA 06:36).

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When Kant rejects the tenet that our state of sin is to be understood in terms of a corruption of our faculties (Rel, AA 06:35), or likewise, when he rejects the tenet that we can biologically inherit our moral condition (Rel, AA 06:40), he does this through the procedure described in the Religion’s prefaces, i.e., holding up such tenets to moral concepts in order to determine their compatibility with moral/rational religion. In this instance, the moral concept is that a person “cannot be judged morally good except on the basis of what can be imputed to him as done by him” (Rel, AA 06:51). Accordingly, both the biological inheritance of an evil disposition and the divinely gifted transformation to a good disposition would violate this moral concept. Moreover, if, as the Augustinian tradition claims, the state of sin is to be understood in terms of the absence or degradation of capacities such that the agent neither has volitional control over their deeds, nor the cognitive powers needed to properly judge them, so likewise these tenets violate moral concepts related to freedom and responsibility. Kant thus writes that we cannot render evil in terms of “a corruption of the morally legislative reason” (Rel, AA 06:35) but must instead “ultimately be sought in a free power of choice” (Rel, AA 06:37).

2.3 Divine Aid and the Change of Heart: The Augustinian View The main body of Part One then concludes with the claim that our moral status must come about through our own willing, and with our capacities for the good intact, “there still remains hope of a return to the good from which he has strayed” (Rel, AA 06:44). That hope, however, triggers for Kant a subsequent question, one that becomes the topic for Part One’s General Remark: specifically, whether or not we can, through our powers alone, undergo a “moral revolution” or “change of heart” by which we overcome our negative moral status, or whether some sort of divine aid is needed in order for this transformation to take place. What Kant claims in this regard is (a) “the moral law commands that we ought to be better human beings now, it inescapably follows that we must be capable of being better human beings” (Rel, AA 06:50). That is, in light of ought implies can, since we ought to undergo this transformation, we can conclude that it is possible; and (b) given that a person “cannot be judged morally good except on the basis of what can be imputed to him as done by him” (Rel, AA 06:51), our efforts must be integral to bringing it about. However, these principles of reason only go so far in answering the question at issue in the General Remark. What remains unanswered is whether or not we can sustain our hope to bring about this transformation through our powers alone. According to the Augustinian tradition (particularly as encountered by Kant through its Lutheran appropriation),7 our moral condition within the state of sin is such that we are without the cognitive capacities needed to accurately distinguish “lesser” from “greater” goods, as well as unable to will other than in accordance with self-interest. But such a picture of our moral condition, according to Kant, gained standing in the tradition because people find “moral labor vexing” (Rel, AA 06:51) and thus prefer to hold on to a “pretext of natural impotence” (Rel, AA 06:51) rather than shoulder the hard work of moral improvement. Kant then goes on to point out that because the tradition presents us as morally impotent, the best that we might be able to eke out of such a condition is to “ask” for divine aid under the presumption that God will thereby restore the capacities lost due to the Fall (Rel, AA 06:51). But such “impure religious ideas” (Rel, AA 06:51), Kant

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concludes, are not compatible with moral religion, and instead align with a “religion of rogation (of mere cult)” (Rel, AA 06:51), i.e., that we become “well-pleasing to God” through supplication rather than moral effort, an issue to which we will return later in this chapter. In effect, we see here a prime example of how the project of the Religion, as described in its prefaces, plays out. The theological tradition tells us that our fallen condition is such that we cannot become well-pleasing to God through our own powers and thus our moral restoration can only be accomplished by way of divine aid. We cannot “contribute more than to ask for it” (Rel, AA 06:51). But when these tenets are held up to moral concepts, they fail. They are found to be not just “impure” (that alone isn’t quite the problem as all doctrines of historical faith are, in a sense, impure insofar as their source is not reason), but rather are adopted or promulgated by those who seek to evade authentic moral efforts, and thus override “moral religion” with a “religion of rogation.” What is lacking, in effect, is that since no person can be “judged morally good except on the basis of what can be imputed to him as done by him” (Rel, AA 06:51), the moral value realized through the change of heart requires that our efforts rather than God’s are at the core of this project.

2.4 Hope, Divine Aid and the Change of Heart: Kant’s View Kant’s view is thus that “everyone must do as much as it is in his powers to do” (Rel, AA 06:52) and, at least in one respect, operate under the “hope that, by the exertion of his own power, he will attain to . . . a fundamentally improved disposition” (Rel, AA 06:51). But this hope is, by far, not the end of the story. For if it were, we could place Kant quite simply on the other end of the traditional theological spectrum from Augustinianism to Pelagianism. Further, Kant’s position, as we shall see, also does not fall into the middleterritory of Semi-Pelagianism. Instead, the General Remark of Part One reflects the epistemic caution of Kant’s Critical philosophy. For we rather find here a recognition that “[h]ow it is possible that a naturally evil human being should make himself into a good human being surpasses every concept of ours” (Rel, AA 06:44–45; my emphasis). All that we know, once again, is that (a) since “the moral law commands that we ought to be better human beings now, it inescapably follows that we must be capable of being better human beings” (Rel, AA 06:50); and (b) a person “cannot be judged morally good except on the basis of what can be imputed to him as done by him” (Rel, AA 06:51). From (b), we can claim that our efforts are morally necessary and divine aid cannot on its own be sufficient. But we are unable to further settle this issue: i.e., the resources of practical reason are inadequate to telling us whether or not we can bring about the change of heart on our own, or whether for some reason (a reason we will discuss shortly), divine aid might still be needed. Hence, moral religion faces an unknown, something that it has an interest in answering, but is unable to do so. The General Remark thus concludes by casting our hope in the form of a conditional. Given Kant’s rejection of the Augustinian view, our hope for our moral transformation would not be a hope for divine aid simpliciter. That is, we do not merely transfer our hope to become better human beings into a hope for God’s aid. That, too, is opposed by Kant for reasons we will discuss towards the end of this chapter— namely, how an interest in gaining divine favor is a threat to religion, risking its degradation into a “religion of rogation,” a “servile faith” of piety and ritual.

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Instead, Kant cautions us with regards to this unknown, reminding us that we are not so situated epistemically as to know the limits of our moral capacities, and thus we cannot know whether or not divine aid is needed. Accordingly, Kant asserts that “everyone must [still] do as much as it is in his powers to do” (Rel, AA 06:52), rather than have us underestimate what we might be able to accomplish on our own and prematurely defer to God as doing the rest. While that still may be the exact situation that we are in, viewing ourselves that way puts us at risk of doing less than we genuinely ought to and can do. So, he concludes instead by directing us to do as much as we can, and carry just a conditional hope with regards to divine aid. We should still hope to be able to bring about the change of heart through our powers alone—and act as if that were so. But, at the same time, recognizing our ignorance here, we must also carry the conditional hope that should our powers turn out to not be sufficient, a person is to “hope that what does lie in his power will be made good by cooperation from above” (Rel, AA 06:52).8

2.5 The Circulus Volitionis One final issue to discuss before moving on to the place of hope in Part Three is to consider what it is about our agency such that divine aid might be needed. Given that Kant has rejected the Augustinian picture, we can’t say that God is needed to restore capacities damaged or lost to us due to original sin. Kant is clear that the human being is not “corrupted fundamentally” (Rel, AA 06:44), “despite a corrupted heart yet always possesses a good will” (Rel, AA 06:44), there is no “lost incentive for the good” (Rel, AA 06:46) and “whatever his temporal circumstances and entanglements . . . through no cause in the world can he cease to be a free agent” (Rel, AA 06:41). But given that, we have the question: what is then stopping us from bringing about the change of heart through our own powers, powers that should, it seems, be sufficient to achieve this end? To answer this, let us first recall how Kant portrays our state of sin, namely, that until we undergo a change of heart, we govern ourselves by way of a “supreme maxim” wherein we have given priority to self-interest over morality. Accordingly, what takes place when one undergoes the “moral revolution” of a change of heart is that they reset their supreme maxim to one that restores our fundamental incentives to their proper order, i.e., to the prioritization of morality over self-interest. In light of this model, the question becomes: whether we can, through our powers alone, change this order of incentives or whether divine aid is needed in order to do so?9 To see why there is a problem here, why a change in this ordering is not so straightforward, consider the following. First, let us say that I have an interest in being liked and I also have an interest in upholding the truth. I might live by the maxim: always uphold the truth even at the risk of being unliked; or I might live by the maxim, don’t risk people not liking you by speaking unpopular truths. In either case, I presumably can reflect on my values and move from one to the other. The same would be the case between most competing interests: pleasure vs a healthy diet, convenience vs buying only environmentally friendly products, etc. But the situation is different when one comes up against one’s supreme maxim. In more mundane cases, we can appeal to our more fundamental values to adjudicate between competing interests. But when the interests at issue are the most fundamental, or when the interests at issue are operating at the most fundamental level of how we order the values in our life, then reversing their order presumably would only come by way of the interests at issue. So, if I live in a state of sin, I live with a supreme maxim that gives

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priority to self-interest over morality. If I face the question: should I reverse this order and grant morality priority over self-interest?, consider the situation that I am in when I look upon this question. It is a situation where morality is telling me that I ought to reverse this order while I operate according to the prioritization of self-interest over morality. Hence, from the standpoint I am in, one that prioritizes self-interest over morality, of course I would reject the call of morality, for I would (presumably) see it as contrary to my self-interest for me to subordinate my self-interest to morality. In other words, I live according to the logic: despite the value of morality, I value myself more—and thus when morality tells me to value myself less, I would from the standpoint I am in—say “no.” That just follows from the logic of one’s own supreme maxim: so long as self-interest has priority, it would reject the call to subordinate self-interest to morality. What, then would be required for me to choose differently, choose to prioritize morality over self-interest? That, presumably, would be the choice I would make from a standpoint where I have given morality priority over self-interest. But until I enter into this new standpoint, I would continue to reject it. Thus, the only way I can choose to take on this new standpoint is if I have already adopted it: for not until I have given priority to morality over self-interest would I choose to prioritize morality over self-interest. In other words, the change of heart reflects a principle of volition that is supposed to be the outcome of the choice rather than what initiates it. For not until that choice has been made could I be within the volitional standpoint needed to make that choice— hence, we face here a sort of catch-22, or volitional circularity—a circulus volitionis. This, let me propose, is how best to understand the problem Kant is struggling with in Part One’s General Remark. For while he rejects the picture of original sin advanced within the Augustinian tradition, a picture built upon a conception of agency where our inability to bring about a change of heart is due to the damage done in the Fall to our moral and volitional capacities, given that, for Kant, our capacities remain fully intact, the problem instead has to do with the bind we are in due to the logic of our supreme maxim. The change of heart is aptly described by Kant as a moral “revolution,” a spontaneous transformation that is not gradual or emergent out of a pre-existing commitment to the good. For what is required is a radical break, an act of spontaneity that instead of bringing to fruition something that one has already chosen, is rather a new choice, a fundamentally new choice, for it is a choice to take on a new principle of choice, a new standard by which choices are made. But, given the catch-22 described above, Kant also quite aptly wonders whether or not it is something we could ever achieve. He thus writes: “[h]ow it is possible that a naturally evil human being should make himself into a good human being surpasses every concept of ours” (Rel, AA 06:44–45) and so in the face of this unknown, he leaves us to postulate, if needed, “a higher assistance inscrutable to us” (Rel, AA 06:45), a “hope that what does not lie in . . . [one’s] power will be made good by cooperation from above” (Rel, AA 06:52). The point of this hope is thus that it “surpasses every concept of ours” as to how we can get out of this volitional circle. Ought implies can tells us that it must be possible, but we are at a loss as to how to accomplish it. Maybe somehow we can defy its logic and find our own way out. Or maybe it requires an agency beyond ourselves. Practical Reason requires our commitment to its possibility and thus it has an interest in how it can be done. But with our inability to discern the how, we are left instead with the hope that should our powers be inadequate, there will be some “cooperation from above” (Rel, AA 06:52).

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3 RELIGIOUS HOPE IN PART THREE OF KANT’S RELIGION 3.1 Moral Evil and Our Predisposition to Humanity Where Part One of the Religion focuses on the doctrine of original sin, Part Two focuses on doctrinal issues related to salvation and Part Four focuses on ecclesiastical practices, Part Three addresses the social-historical aspects of religion. As stage-setting for this topic, Kant returns to the problem of our moral condition and the challenges we face in its overcoming. But this time, rather than the structure of our individual agency being the focus, he is concerned instead with our social relations and how those relations need to be reshaped through new institutions in order for humanity as a whole to make moral progress. In Part One, as Kant reviews our three “predispositions to the good,” the second of these being our predisposition to humanity, he remarks that while it is the basis for our need to be in community with others, that need brings with it a darker side. For the flip side of our desire for social acceptance is a fear of social rejection. Hence, our natural need to “gain worth in the opinion of others” opens us up as well to insecurity, insecurity that we will be rejected, that our social acceptance makes us beholden to others, and thus rather than merely looking for a mutuality of acceptance, the power that this need gives to others is a power we will want to take back by gaining a higher social status, an “ascendancy” over others (Rel, AA 06:27).10 Part Three thus is concerned with how in light of this dynamic human beings “mutually corrupt each other’s moral dispositions and make one another evil” (Rel, AA 06:94), how “malignant inclinations” (Rel, AA 06:93) arise within each person “as soon as he is among human beings” (Rel, AA 06:93)—and how these socially embedded moral challenges can be overcome. So, while there is within us a natural and healthy kind of competition where we each strive to ascend socially, this “unsocial sociability” (Rel, AA 06:20), as coined by Kant in his earlier Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, means that the normative structures that shape society (economic hierarchies, workplace hierarchies, reputations and prestige, etc.) are built upon our predisposition to humanity, both its more healthy desire for community as well as the hierarchies that result in winners and losers, those with success and those without, and in turn, resentment, pridefulness, “[e]nvy, addiction to power, avarice” (Rel, AA 06:93).

3.2 The Mutuality of Evil and Our Social Duty Kant’s answer to this problematic, is, in part, one to be addressed at a personal level along the lines we have already discussed: how to change our supreme maxim so that we subordinate self-interest to morality. But when the forces that interfere with these efforts come as well from the influence that others have upon us, another dimension to the problematic is added. Now, in order for us to fulfill what, in Part One, Kant says is required of us, that “everyone must do as much as it is in his powers to do,” that means that we must also make use of our powers to find a way to not merely mitigate our reactivity to others (i.e., mitigate their triggering effects which foment within us our more “malignant inclinations”), but we must also act beyond ourselves so as to try to reshape society. In other words, we must also find a way for our predisposition to humanity, our need to be within community, to be fulfilled in a manner that aids—rather than impedes—our moral growth. Kant thus articulates in this light “a duty sui generis not of human beings towards human beings but of the human race towards itself,” a duty “destined to a common end,

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namely the promotion of the highest good as a good common to all” (Rel, AA 06:97). Think of this as follows. A reason why our more common social dynamics are a moral threat to us is because most institutions employ hierarchies of personal success and failure. There are better and worse paying jobs, bosses versus subordinates, lists of top universities, top departments, top journals, and so forth. Our predisposition to humanity is such that our personal sense of well-being “involves comparison” (Rel, AA 06:27) so that these hierarchies lead us to feel more or less successful, more or less happy, more or less important, and so forth. Hence, our social systems reflect our prioritization of self-interest over morality. We each strive within the hierarchies in which we dwell, driven by selfinterest, to increase our standing and/or take down those who we perceive as a problem for our efforts at ascendancy. In light of this, Kant recognizes that our efforts towards a change of heart are impeded by institutions that are built around our unsocial sociability. It may be a fact of our nature, but rather than, say, a healthy competition between individuals who mutually respect one another, there are so many ways in which the darker elements of our predisposition to humanity manifest and trigger even those trying to be morally better. What, therefore, is needed is a change in how society itself operates. Rather than being defined by forms of competition where one person’s relative success can only come by way of another’s relative failure, what must come into being instead is a system defined by an end where success is shared. That is, rather than discordant ends, each one about each individual’s own personal interests, there needs to be a corporate end, an end that pertains to the wellbeing of all, such that each person’s effort towards that end, rather than being a threat to others, is instead to their common betterment. This might happen in isolated contexts, a healthy friendship or marriage, perhaps a Kibbutz or other such communities, but hardly is it the way of the world in general. However, in order for there to be a broad transformation along these lines, Kant proposes that “the presupposition of another idea, namely of a higher moral being through whose universal organization the forces of single individuals, insufficient on their own, are united for a common effect” (Rel, AA 06:98). He thus appears to here hold that our corporate promotion of this ideal, what he refers to as the “ethical community,” requires divine aid in its establishment. So, while each person must “so conduct himself as if everything depended on him,” the ethical community is “a work whose execution cannot be hoped for from human beings but only from God himself,” no matter how much we do as individuals, such efforts will always remain “insufficient on their own” (Rel, AA 06:100). But note here an important difference from what Kant says about hope in Part One. There, our hope is located within a conditional: if it is the case that our moral efforts are insufficient, then we have license to hope for divine aid. Here, however, Kant presents the ethical community as not possibly realizable through human efforts alone, and thus our hope for it is mediated by our hope for divine aid without corresponding conditionality. That is, Kant presents the hope as one we can know requires divine aid.

3.3 Hope, Divine Aid and the Ethical Community Before we move on to what insights we may garner about the nature of hope in light of these discussions, let us first discuss why Kant shifts from the conditionality of divine aid in Part One to the assertoric claim of Part Three. To help address this quandary, let us fill in a few more details as to the nature and function of the ethical community.

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Kant presents the ethical community as necessary to offset the dynamics of unsocial sociability that would otherwise perpetuate our “malignant inclinations” (Rel, AA 06:94). He further links it with the highest good and our “sui generis” duty as a species to promote this end. Although this might not seem an especially important moment in Kant’s philosophy of religion, it is in fact quite central, particularly once one sees the relationship between our propensity to evil and our predisposition to humanity. In this light, consider the difference between living within a community where individual striving and success puts us at odds with one another versus living within a community where members share a common end, one in which, through each individual’s striving, the moral betterment of all is promoted. The former case is shaped by our innate unsocial sociability where there are winners and losers, a hierarchy of power, all striving for ascendancy, perpetuating our prioritization of self-interest over morality. By contrast, imagine a social dynamic which gives priority to a corporate end, an end that through each individual’s striving towards it, the moral betterment of all is promoted. In such a system, rather than one person’s success coming at the failure of another, success is always mutual; and thus rather than the efforts and successes of others triggering “anxiety” about others diminishing oneself, and rather than a dynamic defined by “jealousy and rivalry” (Rel, AA 06:27), in an ethical community, we each can look upon the other without fear because each member is instead committed first and foremost to an end that is good for all. Accordingly, we would not see the success of another as a threat to oneself, but rather as a communal good. The question, however, is why Kant believes that human beings cannot on their own bring such a social system into being.11 While he leaves it as an open question as to whether or not human beings are capable of bringing about a moral revolution within themselves as individuals, he asserts that such a revolution, at the social level, cannot happen without divine aid. Why?

3.4 The Circulus Volitionis in Perpetual Peace One piece of the answer, let me propose, is a kindred “catch-22” where if individuals approach one another with mistrust and rivalry, how could they enter into a cooperative social system? It seems what would be needed first would be that such mistrust has ceased, but its cessation may require that the mistrust has already ceased.12 Kant, in fact, articulates very much this problematic in the “Antinomy between Politics and Morals” found at the end of Zum ewigen Frieden (Towards Perpetual Peace). Therein, he argues that a federative union between nations faces the catch-22 where the trust needed to enter into such a union “is possible only within a federative union” (ZeF, AA 08:365). In fact, this specific problematic is found in the Religion as well, as Kant writes that our propensity to evil underlies “the state of constant war” (Rel, AA 06:34) and those who regard human nature as inexorably morally corrupt have “universally derided as sheer fantasy” all “hopes for a state of perpetual peace based upon a federation of nations” (Rel, AA 06:34). Perpetual Peace concludes without a resolution to this antinomy. For in place of a federative union, Kant holds instead that our everlasting condition of war permits at best a mutually self-interested “peace pact” (ZeF, AA 08:356), a “negative surrogate” for a federative union in the form of an international “league that averts war . . . though with constant danger of its breakout” (ZeF, AA 08:357). Self-interest, in other words, can get us to such stability, as it can substitute commerce for violence (ZeF, AA 08:358, 364)

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and in other ways drive an “ethico-civil” state governed by “public juridical laws” (Rel, AA 06:95), i.e., laws of conduct, rather than inner “laws of virtue” (Rel, AA 06:95).

3.5 Conditional vs Absolute Hope Consider now the catch-22 related to our individual moral transformation. Even if we have adopted a supreme maxim which gives priority to self-interest over morality, Kant maintains that this priority endures only so long as we continue to reaffirm it. On this he writes: “whatever his previous behavior may have been, whatever the natural causes influencing him, whether they are inside or outside them, his action is yet free and not determined” (Rel, AA 06:41). Likewise, he maintains that it “must equally be possible to overcome this evil, for it is found in the human being as acting freely” (Rel, AA 06:37). So, while the logic of self-interest would have us always reaffirm its priority over morality, not only is the power to reverse this order never abolished, but an ongoing willing through self-interest in required for its continued priority. Yet what this tells us, and here is where the catch-22 with respect to our change of heart is distinct from the societal catch-22, is that the ongoing priority of self-interest is fully in our own control. There is no power we individually lack to either perpetuate it or overcome it, though were it overcome, that would require that the agent has a way through what Kant finds to be the point of mystery: viz., how, after binding oneself to the logic of self-interest, could a self-interested agent will to no longer be self-interested? By contrast, with the societal catch-22, the problematic involves a plurality of agents, and no individual agent has control over the willing of another. Hence, while it is conceptually possible that an individual agent could undergo a change of heart through his/her own powers, the mutuality of transformation involved in the establishment of the ethical community exceeds every individual’s solitary will. Accordingly, Kant claims that there is need for “the presupposition of another idea, namely of a higher moral being through whose universal organization the forces of single individuals, insufficient on their own, are united for common effect” (Rel, AA 06:98). Or put more succinctly, “[t]o found a moral people of God is, therefore, a work whose execution cannot be hoped for from human beings but only from God himself ” (Rel, AA 06:100). Just as Kant claims with respect to the Highest Good that the postulation of God and the immortality of the soul are necessary for its possibility, and thus our hope for its realization invests us in a faith that these postulates obtain, so likewise here, since the possibility of the ethical community demands the postulation of God, our hope for its realization likewise carries such an investment in faith. Because the mystery of the change of heart was left open as possibly realizable through our own efforts, our hope for divine aid is thus in that instance just conditional, should our powers not suffice such that divine aid is necessary. But in the case of the ethical community, for the reasons here analyzed, Kant holds that our powers are, in fact, not sufficient and thus our hope for its realization invests us likewise in a hope that God will do what is needed, once, that is, our own capacities, though on their own still insufficient, are fully invested.

4 RELIGIOUS HOPE AND ACTS OF PIETY 4.1 Hope Without Place in Thought or Action? Although there are differences between Part One’s proposal that “everyone must do as much as it is in his powers to do” (Rel, AA 06:52), and Part Three’s “Each must . . . so

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conduct himself as if everything depended on him” (Rel, AA 06:101), in both cases Kant makes the seemingly paradoxical claim that while we may hope for divine aid, we must act as if no aid is forthcoming. Normally, though, we are not proscribed from acting in accordance with our hopes. If I hope to retire rich, I would presumably take action to increase my net worth. If I hope to live a long life, I would presumably take action with respect to my health. Likewise, if I hope that I will receive help from another person, I would likely express this desire to them, perhaps do them favors, or otherwise entice them into assisting me. Yet, that is not the case with respect to either our hope for aid in bringing about the change of heart or in establishing the ethical community. Either in entertaining the possible need for divine aid in the former case or a confidence in such a need in the latter, Kant in both cases—and in fact with more forceful language in the latter—tells us to instead attend to our own moral efforts. One reason for this, of particular significance to the former, but also of relevance to the latter is that a person “cannot be judged morally good except on the basis of what can be imputed to him as done by him” (Rel, AA 06:51). Hence, while there is a place for hope in divine aid in both cases, in neither instance does this preclude some role for our efforts, and because these efforts involve either our individual or collective moral betterment, that betterment must substantially involve our own willing and doing, even if insufficient to realize the end at issue. Relatedly, because we do not know the extent of our capacities (though we know in the latter case they are insufficient), Kant does not want us to do less than the utmost that is in our power. That would not only diminish our moral merit, but it also raises the question that perhaps our maximal efforts are necessary, though not sufficient to realize the ends at issue. But there is also one more concern Kant has with regards to the slope between our moral efforts and our hope for divine aid. As noted above, hope is often associated with conduct towards a goal. So, in hoping for divine aid, one might naturally then want to engage in some sort of conduct intended to procure God’s help. This issue, in fact, is of key concern to Kant in the Religion, as he repeatedly raises concerns about its dangers to moral religion. So, when he calls upon us to do our utmost and even act as if everything depended upon our efforts, he is also pushing away from what he regards as the slippery slope to a “religion of rogation,” i.e., an approach to religion where in the place of moral efforts we seek God’s favor through rituals and piety. Such a danger is not incidental or just a contingent phenomenon that manifests within historical faiths. Rather, Kant sees it as built into the dynamics of our religious interests, much in the same way that transcendental illusion is an inevitable consequence of theoretical reason’s need for the unconditioned condition.

4.2 Hope’s Dangers and the Unmet Needs of Reason This problematic can be understood as follows. Appended to the end of Part One in the Second Edition is a brief explanation of the function of the General Remarks in each of the Religion’s four parts. Kant there refers to these remarks as “parerga to religion within the boundaries of pure reason; they do not belong within it yet border on it” (Rel, AA 06:52). That is, reprising the imagery of the two concentric spheres in the Preface to the Second Edition, where the inner sphere is that of rational religion and the outer sphere is

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that of historical faith, Kant presents the General Remarks or parerga as operating on the boundary between the inner and outer spheres. These boundary issues are generated by the inner sphere, but reach beyond it, as there are needs of rational religion that cannot be met by reason, but still find a kind of satisfaction through the “extravagant ideas” (Rel, AA 06:53) of historical faith.13 All four parerga concern specific sets of issues related to God’s role where some difficulty flows out of our legitimate rational needs but, unable to be resolved therein, we look to the doctrines of historical faith to “make up for this lack” (Rel, AA 06:53). For example, in Part One, we face the question as to whether or not our human efforts are sufficient to bring about a change of heart. So, we have a need to know what is required of us, what we are capable of and what we are not capable of with respect to the realization of moral goal. Reason can tell us, in light of ought implies can, that the change of heart is possible. Reason also tells us that since this transformation is one that changes our moral status, and moral imputations depend upon our willing and doing, our efforts must be salient here. But reason does not tell us whether or not they are sufficient. That question is left unanswered by reason alone and thus in light of our need to find an answer, we turn to the “extravagant ideas” of religious doctrine. So, should it be the case that we do need divine aid, our hope that it is forthcoming would naturally motivate us to try to earn it. But since we are already enjoined to do all that is within our power to do, our concern that that is not enough directs us instead to rituals and rules of piety, as if the sacrifice of an animal, dietary restrictions, Baptism, or Communion could win God’s favor. This is, in fact, a worry of paramount importance for Kant. Not only does it underlie the entire project of the Religion as an inquiry into which doctrines cohere with rational religion versus which promote instead cultic “rogation,” but he also discusses the moral hazards of ritual in every part of the text (Rel, AA 06:51– 53, 72–78, 104–107, 125–129), including the entire second half of Part Four (Rel, AA 06:167–202). The path that Kant seeks to weave is thus to recognize the need for religious hope, a need that is rooted in the incompleteness of rational religion, but a diversion away from the sort of conduct that this need would otherwise engender. For while a need unmet draws us towards the “extravagant ideas” of religious doctrines, we should not “incorporate them into its maxims of thought or action” (Rel, AA 06:52). Religious hope, we might say, has its motivational significance in that it furthers our confidence that our end will be realized, but with this comes the temptation to defer to the agent of that hope. Therein lies its danger and thus to keep hope in its proper place, as a support for our own efforts rather than a deferment to God’s work on our behalf, Kant advances the critique of this deferment as one of the central themes of the Religion. This does not mean that Kant outright opposes religious ritual (as one might imagine given the anecdotes about his refusals to personally involve himself), but he sees them as practiced, or understood, wrongly. Ritual finds its value, for Kant, in how it can, potentially, make one more “receptive” (Rel, AA 06:178) to divine aid, or as well to cultivate a sense of community and fellowship among a congregation. Prayer and meditation, for example, might help one examine oneself and further one’s “moral disposition” (Rel, AA 06:178). There is also the hope for moral insight or strengthening thereby, but in no way should ritual or pious acts be understood as means to win God’s favor, to make one “well-pleasing to God” through their performance. For as Kant famously writes “Apart from a good life-conduct, anything which the human being

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supposes that he can do to become well-pleasing to God is mere religious delusion and counterfeit service of God” (Rel, AA 06:170–171).

5 CONCLUSION Kant’s understanding of religious hope is subtle and complex, perhaps unsurprisingly so. While his comments about the nature of hope are scattered and not particularly systematized, the importance of this attitude to his philosophy of religion should not be minimized. Not only is the highest good and our hope for its realization the foundation of his pure rational system of religion, but the specific manifestations of hope that we have here explored provide us with significant insight into his understanding of the relationship between human and divine labors. What is perhaps most remarkable here, however, is the unique path Kant forges away from the more conventional picture of hope for divine aid as promoting pious devotion. For while he recognizes that historical faith tends to exploit our hope for divine aid in steering people towards practices that are morally inconsequential but believed necessary to please God, Kant, on the one hand, diagnoses this tendency as borne out of unmet needs of rational religion, but on the other hand, as with the dialectical illusions of theoretical reason, he warns us away from the “extravagant ideas” that so tempt us in light of this unmet need. While in the Critique of Pure Reason the dangers of transcendental illusion and error have to do—at least most directly—with our philosophical ventures, Kant wants us to recognize that transcendental illusion and error can also endanger our practical lives. This is briefly considered in the Critique of Practical Reason where Kant discusses the vice of subreption (KpV, AA 05:116, 120), but it is integral to the overall project of the Religion as it seeks to protect “genuine religion” from those “extravagant ideas” of historical faith that are so seductive because they offer answers to questions that arise in reason but reason cannot solve. For while each faith shares some overlap with rational religion, the needs of rational religion, unmet by reason, make us vulnerable to “priestcraft,” “counterfeit service” and “enthusiasm.” This, we may say, is the other side of hope’s coin: hope and anxiety, the desire for some end and the fear that it might not come into being, are intertwined within us. The challenge we therefore face is that of rational faith, for it provides a “moral certainty” (A829/B857) as counterpoint to this anxiety. Our hope for divine aid when tempered with such faith should thus give us the surety that not only is there no need to try to win God’s favor through morally irrelevant pious deeds, but that that is the path of “moral unbelief ” (Rel, AA 06:63) and ultimately the substitution of “moral religion” with “ritual superstition” (Rel, AA 06:118) and a religion of rogation.

NOTES 1.

Kant of course eventually adds a fourth question: “What is a human being?” (LJ, AA 09:25, Br, AA 11:429, ML2, AA 28:534, etc.). Unless otherwise noted, English quotations will be from the Cambridge Edition of the works of Immanuel Kant, general editors Paul Guyer and Allen Wood.

2.

That the highest good is the foundation of Kant’s positive philosophy of religion is evident in all three Critiques and beyond, given that we postulate God and immortality for the sake

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of the highest good. This point is also supported by the Religion, with the highest good’s foundational role presented, for instance, in the lengthy footnote towards the opening of its first Preface (Rel, AA 06:6–8n), culminating in the claim that “morality leads inevitably to religion” (Rel, AA 06:8n). That is, Kant uses the Highest Good as the bridge through which morality leads to religion (see Pasternack 2017). The phrase, “well-pleasing to God” is found throughout the Religion, reflecting the status of those who have undergone a “change of heart.” 3.

While I regard the text as very clear with regards to the agenda of the Religion, some interpreters promote alternative readings which hold that “Kant is not engaging in [any] theological speculation” whatsoever (DiCenso 2012, 117). According to these interpreters, the aim of the Religion is to reflect on how Christian doctrines can be rendered as symbols for our moral ideals in “imaginatively enhanced or pictorial form” (DiCenso 2012, 28). Allen Wood, in his recent Kant and Religion, likewise adopts this position, stating that within the Religion, Kant is merely exploring how Christian doctrines can be understood as symbols whose function is to help us gain “a meaningful and emotionally enriched way of relating to our own past” (Wood 2020, 145), and so in this light, we should not read it as an inquiring into the question of which doctrines accord with rational religion and which do not. For when understood merely as symbols, “everything in revealed (Christian) faith is compatible with rational faith” (Wood 2020, 20). As I have argued elsewhere, I believe that such semiological interpretations of the Religion ignore the express language of the text as well as fail to recognize that the Religion falls within a legacy of philosophical treaties on religious doctrines, including those crafted by Kant’s contemporaries and recent German predecessors. For a critique of Wood’s and DiCenso’s approach, see Pasternack 2022.

4.

Unfortunately, there is a legacy of scholarship on the Religion that treats it more as a reservoir of philosophically interesting claims about our agency amidst a muddled and outdated project. Much of my work over the past decade has aimed at trying to rebut such reductive and dismissive approaches to the Religion, arguing instead that its “pure rational system of religion” is both internally consistent and compatible with the core tenets of Kant’s broader philosophical system. Accordingly, my discussions of hope in his chapter emerge out of this hermeneutic, one I likewise use in my commentary on the Religion (Pasternack 2014) and much of my work since.

5.

The “Augustinian tradition” is certainly not monolithic, just as Augustine’s own writings offer a variety of views on the nature of our moral corruption. Nonetheless, the thesis that our cognitive and volitional capacities are corrupted to the extent that divine aid is necessary for our moral improvement is found in many of Augustine’s works (De gratia et libero arbitrio, De Genesi ad Litteram, and De Spiritu et Littera), and as the concern here is really with Kant’s response to this tradition, at issue is primarily how core Reformation figures took up this tradition. Accordingly, we find in Luther (Small Catechism and Book of Concord) and Calvin (Canons of Dort, Westminster Confession, and the essential Calvinist credo, commonly known by the acronym of TULIP), the sort of extreme picture of corruption Kant examines and rejects in Part One of the Religion. Readers interested in Augustine on original sin may consult Couenhoven 2013. Readers interested in the differences between Augustine and Reformation Augustinianism on the nature of sin, see McGrath 2005. For additional discussion of Kant’s relationship to the Augustinian tradition, see also Mariña 1997, Clem 2018 and Pasternack 2020.

6.

Note that Kant’s rejection of such a corruption of our faculties has been overlooked by a sizable amount of the scholarship on the Religion, most notably the so-called “conundrum”

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interpretation originating in Quinn 1988, Wolterstorff 1991, Hare 1996, and Michalson 1990. According to this interpretative convention, the theological system presented by Kant in the Religion is vitiated by an internal contradiction between his putative adherence to an Augustinian picture of our moral corruption while at the same time a “Stoic Maxim” that reflects a more Pelagian position, one that holds that our moral improvement must come through solely our own powers without any divine aid. I challenge both of these presuppositions of the Conundrumist interpretation in “On the Alleged Augustinianism of Kant’s Religion” (Pasternack 2020). As I there argue, neither of these tenets reflect what Kant actually claims in the Religion. That is, both pieces of the Conundrumist problematic are based upon interpretative error. 7.

Note that while Kant was brought up within the Lutheran Pietist tradition, he surely would have gained an understanding of how the Pietists differed from orthodox Lutheranism. We see glimmerings of this in the Der Streit der Fakultäten (Conflict of the Faculties), in his discussions of Moravianism and Spener’s Pietism, as well as in his discussions of the relationship between Justification and Sanctification, a topic central to the divide between Lutheran orthodoxy and Pietism.

8.

However, this does not mean that Kant maintains that our moral transformation is solely on our own shoulders, i.e., what the Conundrumists refer to as his “Stoic Maxim.” Kant’s view is rather that while our own efforts must be central to this transformation, and that we must do all that is within our own power (Rel, AA 06:51), it is best to see this as maintaining that our efforts are necessary but their sufficiency is an open question. That is, rather than adopting a stance of the sort that reflects the terrain between the Augustinian and Pelagian doctrines about moral transformation (i.e., Sanctification), Kant’s view is rather that we have guidance from practical reason which tells us that (a) since we ought to become morally better, it must be possible; and (b) since moral status requires our earning/meriting that status through our own efforts, we can conclude that the change of heart is possible and that the merit attached to it comes out of the effort we put in towards its realization. But, what we cannot determine through practical reason is whether or not our powers alone are sufficient.

9.

The most common alternative reading is that of the Conundrumists, as discussed above. More recently, however, Andrew Chignell (2014) takes for granted the Conundrumist interpretation as he tries to carve out a place for hope by proposing that while the “conundrum” seemingly makes it impossible, it is not outside the scope of logical possibility—and thus hope reaches beyond what we think plausible. As noted above, and as discussed in detail in Pasternack 2020, my view is that the “conundrum” interpretation is textually unwarranted and thus Chignell should not have taken it for granted. Consider for a moment the claim of the “Stoic Maxim”—that praiseworthiness requires that what one accomplishes involves no aid whatsoever. That is, the Stoic Maxim would hold that should I receive any help, that nullifies the attribution of merit to what has been achieved. But neither does Kant claim this nor does it seem even plausible. My moral development may come by way of insights I gained through conversations with friends, teachers, etc. In fact, given the role Kant assigns to moral examples, surely we must acknowledge a role for other agents. On this topic, again see Pasternack 2020.

10. For a more detailed discussion of how our predisposition to humanity informs our propensity to evil, see Anderson-Gold 2001 and Wood 1999. 11. Note that there is a body of literature which—despite the direct textual evidence to the contrary—opts to read the ethical community as a secular institution. See Reath 1988, Kleingeld 2012, Rossi 2019.

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12. For a more detailed discussion of this, see Pasternack 2021. 13. For further discussion of the Parerga of the Religion, see Palmquist 2015 and Muchnik 2019.

REFERENCES Anderson-Gold, Sharon (2001), Unnecessary Evil: History and Moral Progress in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Albany: State University of New York Press. Clem, Stewart (2018), “Dropping the Debt: A New Conundrum in Kant’s Rational Religion,” Religious Studies, 54 (1): 131–145. Couenhoven, Jesse (2013), Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ: Agency, Necessity, and Culpability in Augustinian Theology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chignell, Andrew (2014), “Rational Hope, Possibility, and Divine Action,” in Gordon Michalson, (ed.), Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: A Critical Guide, 98–117, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DiCenso, James (2012), Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: A Commentary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hare, John. E. (1996), The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1800] 1992), “The Jäsche Logic,” transl. J. Michael Young, in J. Michael Young, (ed.), Lectures on Logic, 520–640, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1793] 1996), “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,” transl. George di Giovanni, in Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni, (eds.), Religion and Rational Theology, 55–215, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1788] 1996), “Critique of Practical Reason,” transl. Mary J. Gregor, in Mary J. Gregor, (ed.), Practical Philosophy, 134–271, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1795] 1996), “Towards Perpetual Peace,” transl. Mary J. Gregor, in Mary J. Gregor, (ed.), Practical Philosophy, 316–351, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1781/1787] 1998), Critique of Pure Reason, transl. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kleingeld, Pauline (2012), Kant and Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mariña, Jacqueline (1997), “Kant on Grace: A Reply to His Critics,” Religious Studies, 33 (4): 379–400. McGrath, Alister (2005), Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Michalson, Gordon E. (1990), Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Muchnik, Pablo (2019), “Clipping our Dogmatic Wings: The Role of Religion’s Parerga in our Moral Education,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51 (13): 1381–1391. Palmquist, Stephen (2015), Comprehensive Commentary on Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, Chichester: Blackwell. Pasternack, Lawrence (2014), Kant on Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: An Interpretation and Defense, London: Routledge. Pasternack, Lawrence (2017), “Restoring Kant’s Conception of the Highest Good,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 55 (3): 435–468. Pasternack, Lawrence (2020), “On the Alleged Augustinianism in Kant’s Religion,” Kantian Review, 25 (1): 103–124.

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Pasternack, Lawrence (2021), “The Ethical Community in Kant’s Pure Rational System of Religion,” Philosophia, 49 (5): 1901–1916. Pasternack, Lawrence (2022), “What is Wrong with the Recent Semiological Interpretation of the Religion,” Kantian Review, 27 (1): 91–99. Quinn, Philip (1988), “In Adam’s Fall, We Sinned All,” Philosophical Topics, 16 (2): 89–118. Reath, Andrews (1988), “Two Conceptions of the Highest Good in Kant,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 26 (4): 593–619. Rossi, Philip (2019), The Ethical Commonwealth in History: Peace-making as the Moral Vocation of Humanity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolterstorff, Nicholas (1991), “Conundrums in Kant’s Rational Religion,” in Philip Rossi and Michael Wreen, (eds.), Kant’s Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered, 40–53, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wood, Allen (1999), Kant’s Ethical Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, Allen (2020), Kant and Religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Kant, Beck, and the Highest Good FIACHA D. HENEGHAN (Vanderbilt University)

1 INTRODUCTION The broad tendency of modern interpreters and followers of Kant’s ethics is antimetaphysical and anti-theological in two senses. In one sense, there is a tendency to think that Kant himself, despite abundant written evidence to the contrary, was actually wary of the metaphysical, theological baggage he appears to attach to his ethics, especially in the Critique of Practical Reason. More importantly, to the extent that Kant himself was sincere in, for example, his belief in immortality of the soul, the existence of a moral deity, and the transcendental freedom of the will as “practical postulates” necessary to make morality coherent, he erred in interpreting his own doctrine. There is a core set of ethical insights to be found in Kant’s corpus that can be cleanly disjoined from what might be called “Kantian moral religion,” and from this arises the second tendency in contemporary Kantianism, namely, Kantians who endorse and defend something called a “Kantian” ethics toward which a certain prevailing anti-metaphysical sentiment can be sympathetic. This was not always so, and, as I will argue in this essay, one prominent early interpreter of Kant’s philosophy, Jacob Sigismund Beck, provides an intriguing example of a Kantian willing to endorse Kant’s ethics and all of its metaphysical-theological messiness even while going against Kant in the sphere of theoretical philosophy.1 In his Commentar über Kants Metaphysik der Sitten (Commentary on Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals; hereafter “CMS”), Beck argues that a philosophical doctrine of right is one that begins from transcendental (i.e., critical) moral philosophy and thus views the human being in two lights: as a social animal in nature but also as a transcendentally free being, a “son of heaven.” In the “Conclusion” to the Doctrine of Right, Kant argues similarly, though without invoking the practical postulates, that practical reason can tip the scales in favor of a certain presumption for the sake of action. When the end of action is a morally necessary one, Kant thinks this necessity serves as the foundation for a certain kind of hope for the possibility of a moral future. In Beck’s view, the perceived necessity of Kant’s concept of the “highest good” as the final object of a moral will grounds a kind of existential hope in a perfectly moral future that in turn presupposes the conditions for its possibility outside of the realm of experience. Thus, in other words, the experience of having a conscience is the source and foundation of Kantian moral religion without thereby usurping phenomenological immanentism in the realm of explanation.2 71

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Beck’s Kant is not metaphysically deflationary, but he is also not committed to irrationalism. The anti-metaphysical tendency in Kant interpretation was driven in part by a broader suspicion of metaphysics but also by the worry that the concept of the highest good itself rendered large parts of Kant’s ethics incoherent. I will survey two reactions to this worry, one, to do away with the highest good completely, the other to reinterpret as a fully “secular” doctrine. In accordance with the latter strategy, many Kantians turned away from a reading of Kant that had him committed to a robust, transcendental moral realism—one that could make sense of a “theological” conception of the highest good—toward a constructivist reading, wherein Kantian ethics emerge from the rational features of human beings qua natural creatures. I will argue that Beck’s Kant, though strongly opposed to these tendencies in contemporary Kantianism, is not as riddled with philosophical problems as is sometimes alleged. Moreover, I will suggest some ways in which this more “metaphysical” or “theological” interpretation of Kant might have some advantages, interpretationally and philosophically. What I argue here is by no means intended to be a decisive case; it may be that in the final accounting, “secular” Kantianism is the superior moral philosophy. I am nevertheless interested in exploring what, if anything, such a secular Kantianism gives up relative to its theological counterpart. In the same spirit that Kant claims to forego knowledge to make room for belief, it seems that on Beck’s reading of Kantian practical philosophy, we forego optimism to make room for hope.

2 ANTI-METAPHYSICAL INTERPRETATIONS OF KANT’S HIGHEST GOOD Kant insists that the moral law in the form of the categorical imperative is “the supreme principle of morality” (GMS, AA 04:392).3 Because the supreme principle of morality is, indeed, the supreme principle governing human practical reason, it must be entirely binding on all subdomains of human activity. Thus, Kant says that there is and can be no conflict between the realm of the ethical and that of the political. What must be done morally cannot be ignored for the sake of political prudence—the specious claim that moral obligations simply cannot be operative in the sphere of the political because it would be impracticable to observe them (ZeF, AA 08:370). In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant says that the “unconditioned totality of the object of pure practical reason” is the “highest good” (KpV, AA 05:108). This is what is designated, in the Critique of Pure Reason, a “pure concept of reason” or a “transcendental idea” (A321/B378). The highest good, in other words, is the object of the dialectic of pure practical reason, the practical unconditioned or “absolute.” It is the concept of an object for the sake of which all other things are to be desired and that, in turn, is not desired for the sake of any other object. Kant believes the determinate content of the highest good is “happiness distributed in exact proportion to morality (as the worth of a person and his worthiness to be happy)” (KpV, AA 05:110–111). Because Kant takes it as empirically obvious that, in fact, virtue and happiness have no robust causal connection to one another, this state of affairs appears impossible as a natural occurrence (ibid., 113). It is only because I am justified in regarding myself “as a noumenon in a world of the understanding” that I can see the highest good is not impossible (ibid., 114–115). Because the moral law serves as a “purely intellectual determining ground of my causality,” I am justified in believing (glauben) that noumenal factors make it such that my happiness will be directly proportional to my

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moral worth through the efficacy of a moral deity—Kant’s so-called doctrine of the practical postulates. Putting this all together, we can say that if the moral law must be the governing principle of human practical life and if the moral law points us toward the highest good, then the final end of our living together—our social existence—must also be the highest good. As Kant had put it earlier according to the Collins lecture notes, “The final destiny of the human race is moral perfection” (MorCo, AA 27:470). And this moral perfection, Kant seems to believe, in some way implicates a radically transcendent aspect of humanity. This is all fairly heavy-duty. Yet, Kant’s political writings of the 1780s and the Doctrine of Right in 1797 display a keen sense of the human being as a natural, political animal. Despite his resolute stance that the moral has sway over the political, the political writings seem in some way divorced from the rational religion that follows from the Critique of Practical Reason. It is easy to become convinced that there are a core set of ethical insights at play that can be made independent of the religious undertones Kant apparently thinks they imply in other places. This is all to the good for contemporary Kantians. Not only are we apt to be suspicious of the explicitly religious concepts Kant employs, we are also wary of metaphysical excess per se. Talk of transcendental concepts, absolutes, noumena, and so on are best to be avoided, is the general mood, and Kantians are no exception here. We can characterize two broad trends especially in twentieth-century Kant interpreters, when anti-metaphysical sentiment was at its height. On the one hand, there are those who, seeing the doctrine of the highest good as the source of many of the transcendental components to Kant’s view, think that it should be abandoned altogether. On the other, there are attempts to reinterpret Kant’s highest good as a purely secular doctrine, leaving aside the more theological aspects. Let us look at these in turn.

2.1 Against the Highest Good The staunch opponents of Kant’s concept of the highest good had their heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. Their usual target was John Silber’s vigorous and repeated defense of the centrality of the concept of the highest good to Kant’s ethics.4 According to Lewis White Beck (1960), Kant cannot claim that it is a duty to promote the highest good in any straightforward way. Since the concordance of virtue and happiness in which it consists can only be effected by “a moral governor of the universe,” promoting the highest good can be nothing more than striving for moral virtue. Thus, the concept of the highest good adds no content to our ethical lives over and above the dictum to make the categorical imperative one’s maxim (L. W. Beck 1960, 244–245). Jeffrie Murphy (1965) comes down on Beck’s side, arguing additionally that the content the highest good is supposed to give to a human will is, in fact, at odds with common, everyday moral experience. That is, any effort on our parts to actually bring about an earthly proportionality of virtue and happiness would be destructive to the kinds of praxis (especially in the political sphere) that Kant ultimately endorses. Thomas Auxter (1979) takes this line of argument to its conclusion: the natural impossibility of obtaining the highest good, which Kant presupposes, precludes it serving as a moral ideal for human beings. A moral ideal, the argument goes, must guide practical judgments in subsuming sensible, particular circumstances under intelligible, universal rules. But if, ex hypothesi, the particulars could never, in principle conform to the intelligible rules proposed, the latter must be false (Auxter 1979, 123–129). Nor can the

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concept be saved by regarding it as an ideal in order to encourage moral striving, as Silber had previously argued (1959, 486–492). For this would, as Auxter points out, subvert the purity of moral motivation that is at the heart of Kant’s view (1979, 129–131). This last point, I think, encapsulates some of what is at stake in considering the significance of the concept of the highest good. Because the distinctive core of Kant’s ethics is occasionally taken to be something called “deontology,” in which we are asked to set aside the question of our ends when determining our moral obligations. But in the canonical discussion in the second Critique, Kant presents the highest good as in some way necessary for us to make sense of our moral condition. The moral law is the sole “determining ground of the pure will,” but because it is “merely formal,” it does not meet the requirement of a human will that it has an object. In less technical terms, the moral law tells us how to conduct ourselves, but not what to aim for (KpV, AA 05:109). For this, the highest good is required as “the whole object of a pure practical reason, that is, of a pure will,” after the latter has been determined by the moral law (KpV, AA 05:109; emphasis in original). One reading of this might suggest that Kant has contradicted himself by introducing the notion of an object of the will into the heart of his ethics, and this seems to be the direction of interpretation that sees the doctrine of the highest good in toto as a philosophical blunder. Kant, at least, is not unaware of the potential misapprehension. For him, the key point is the order of determination of the will. So long as the highest good qua object of a moral will includes the moral law as a “supreme condition,” there is no problem with the highest good serving not only as its object but also as its determining ground (KpV, AA 05:110). The moral person, in other words, can act so as to promote the highest good without giving up the autonomy that is supposed to come from taking the moral law as her maxim. Since, in this case, adherence to the form of moral action is taken to be the conditio sine qua non for the pursuit of any end, the highest good, in Kant’s view, is both autonomous determining ground of the will as well as material object: happiness conditioned by moral virtue.

2.2 The Secular Reinterpretation of the Highest Good Not all interpreters wary of the theological aspects of the highest good wish to jettison it entirely. Among these, a popular strategy is to read Kant’s position as uneasily containing a supernatural, transcendent, otherworldly, or theological dimension alongside a natural, immanent, this-worldly, or secular dimension. This line of interpretation has its roots in a different concern about the consequences of a metaphysically heavy-duty doctrine of the highest good. Specifically, promoting the highest good would seem to require us, in some way, to promote the proportionality of virtue and happiness that is its content. But this would require that we reward and punish people for their moral dispositions. Aside from simply being rather distasteful, the main difficulty is epistemic. Recognition of this is present in Kant’s writings: “The real morality of actions (their merit and guilt), even that of our own conduct . . . remains entirely hidden to us” (A551/B579). We might suppose, as Silber does in his earlier views on the subject, that the activity of meting out happiness and misery according to moral virtue or vice is implicit in our everyday social practices. “In rearing children, serving on juries, and grading papers,” Silber argues, “one tries to do and actually can do something ‘about apportioning happiness in accordance with desert’ ” (1963, 183). But this misses the full import of what the highest good requires. As Murphy argues, in Kant’s view, virtue is the measure of

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desert, and virtue is a property of a disposition (Gesinnung) rather than a property of an action (Handlung); that is, virtue is a question of morality rather than legality (Murphy 1965, 107). Kant draws a distinction between the two as respectively manifesting in “virtus noumenon” and “virtus phaenomenon” (Rel, AA 06:14). Clearly, it is the former that Kant is referring to whenever he characterizes virtue as “worthiness to be happy,” as it appears in his concept of the highest good. But since we cannot, according to Kant, be sure even of our own dispositions (Rel, AA 06:51), it is unclear how we could ever hope to go about apportioning happiness in accordance with the dispositions of others. Pretending to judge the inner moral worth of our fellow human beings in order to adjust their happiness in accordance therewith is not only distasteful but impossible to do accurately. That Kant so consistently considers the concept of the highest good as the point of contact between his ethics and his philosophical doctrine of religion is, in part, reflective of his cognizance that achieving the highest good cannot be a task undertaken by human beings alone. The bar is, so to speak, too high to clear, and so the highest good is not a purely mundane aspiration. At least, that would seem to be the upshot of a reading that takes the theological dimensions of Kant’s highest good seriously. But another way to get around the epistemic impossibility problem, as we might designate it,5 is to lower the bar on what the highest good requires. The fruits of this strategy are what are now known as “secular interpretations” of the concept of the highest good. John Rawls argues that Kant’s doctrine of the highest good brings him dangerously close to violating oughtimplies-can: if we are to have a duty to promote the highest good, then we must have the ability to do so, and so we ought to conceive of it in secular terms (2000, 316). Several Kantians in the Rawlsian camp follow this line of thinking, with the most systematic treatment appearing in Andrews Reath’s “Two Conceptions of the Highest Good in Kant” (1988). According to Reath, Kant is in fact torn between two alternative and logically distinct conceptions of the highest good. Earlier in his career, Kant is more sympathetic to a “theological” version of the highest good, and it is this version that Kant generally characterizes in terms of a proportionality between virtue and happiness, especially in the “canonical” presentation in the Critique of Practical Reason. There is, however, another, “secular” version that, although incipiently present throughout Kant’s career, becomes predominant especially in his later writings. In its secular version, the highest good is nothing more than the totality of morally permissible ends a human being might adopt. That is, the highest good is the systematic arrangement of our ends through our practical reason such that our wishes are subordinated to moral ends. In Reath’s view, this is, in fact, what follows naturally from Kant’s analysis of the concept of the good and its relation to the moral law in the second Critique (cf. KpV, AA 05:57–66). The notion of proportionality between virtue and happiness, on the other hand, is of alien extraction— perhaps, argues Reath, an attempt at shoehorning in a traditional Christian notion of desert (1988, 600–601). Thus, he concludes, the highest good can be defined in purely secular terms by referring only to human actions, and it can be conceived of “as a social goal to be achieved in history” (ibid., 602–603). Picking up on this thought, Onora O’Neill asks, “might we not construe the task of moral progress [toward the highest good] as a this-worldly, shared and historical, perhaps incompletable task, rather than as one that will provide each of us an occupation for an eternal afterlife?” (1996, 286–287).6 O’Neill argues that in his more political moods, Kant indeed conceived of the highest good in just such a way.

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This secular, political conception of the highest good is an attractive view for many Kantians: the highest good offers a way to make Kant’s ethics more concrete by providing it with an object in addition to a law, and if it can be coherently conceptualized without reference to theological or other heavy-duty metaphysical concepts, it will be all the easier to defend to a contemporary philosophical audience. Moreover, it even appears to enjoy some textual support from Kant’s writings, such that it might be said to be a view with a pedigree, rather than a creative misappropriation.7

3 J. S. BECK AND THE METAPHYSICAL OR “THEOLOGICAL” INTERPRETATION OF THE HIGHEST GOOD Given the advantages of the family of “secular” interpretations of Kant’s concept of the highest good, is there anything to be said in favor of their more theological alternatives? For one, there is the virtue of prima facie interpretive plausibility. It is hard to escape that, at first blush, Kant’s doctrine of the highest good is unambiguously presented as a foundationally religious concept. From the impossibility of fully achieving the highest good through natural causal mechanisms, Kant infers that we are justified in believing whatever noumenal concepts are necessary to explain its possibility from causes outside of nature: the noumenal posits of god, the immortal soul, and a transcendentally free will are, Kant says, theoretically undecidable because they lie outside the ken of our cognition, but our practical interest in hoping for the highest good tips the scale in favor of belief over agnosticism. Unsurprisingly then, the highest good plays a pivotal role in Kant’s Religion, where he indicates the highest good as the proportionality of happiness to virtue is the unavoidable practical concept by which morality leads directly to rational religion (Rel, AA 06:5–6). So, whatever its demerits, the “theological” conception of the highest good is the one that jumps off the page when reading Kant on the subject. Whether there is, in addition to the “theological” conception of the highest good, a less obvious “secular” conception present in Kant’s writings is another question. Recently that idea has come under some scrutiny on interpretive grounds. Lawrence Pasternack (2017) argues that the textual support for the presence of the “secular” conception is thinner than has been supposed. In particular, as Pasternack notes, the proportionality of happiness to virtue—which Reath thinks is distinctive of the “theological” conception—is a characterization of the highest good Kant uses throughout his work, including the writings of the 1790s, and nowhere does he disavow it (ibid., 443–447). In short, there are strong arguments in favor of the “theological” interpretation of the highest good as a reading of Kant’s position. In what follows, I will be more interested in the question of philosophical viability. Is there any reason to think that Kant might have preferred to conceive of the highest good in transcendent terms not merely because of his religious upbringing and milieu? More generally, is there any reason to resist the urge to purge metaphysics from the highest good (whether or not that metaphysics gets cashed out, as it does in Kant, in overtly Christian or theological terms)? To evaluate this question, I would like to consider the interpretation of Kant’s highest good found in one of his earliest and most sympathetic expositors, his student Jakob Sigismund Beck. Beck’s reading of the highest good in his Grundriß der Critischen Philosophie (Foundations of the Critical Philosophy; hereafter

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“Gr.”) is credulous with regard to the transcendental scope of Kant’s discussion of the highest good and its implications but points the way to reconciling this concept in its full register with a Kantianism that is not metaphysically extravagant.

3.1 Beck’s Practical Dualism Perhaps surprisingly, Beck seems to find no conflict between this doctrine and his characteristic modification of the critical philosophy, namely the “Doctrine of the Standpoint” (Standpunktslehre). As a Standpunktslehrer, Beck sought to eradicate from transcendental idealism any remaining influence of the thing-in-itself in the sphere of theoretical philosophy, such that the Kantian dictum that knowledge can only be of things as they appear is fully adhered to. As Ingrid Wallner puts it, “Beck sets out, finally and decisively, to close the remaining gap between phenomena and their logos that had been left even after Kant” (1979, 16). Beck at least finds no conflict between some form of Kantian “moral religion” in the practical sphere and a thoroughgoing immanentism in the theoretical one (i.e., where the explanatory terms are fully restricted to phenomena). In this sense, we find at least one example of a Kantian endorsing what Reath calls the “theological” conception of the highest good while holding to a generally anti-metaphysical philosophical disposition. Beck’s interpretation of the highest good is marked by its endorsement of the dualism inherent in the so-called theological conception of the highest good. This dualism can be understood in an anthropological sense as well as a practical one. The anthropological sense here is not merely that of Kant’s “practical anthropology,” which he calls the “empirical part of ethics” (GMS, AA 04:488) or of the “pragmatic anthropology” he characterizes as “knowledge of the [human] world” (Anth, AA 07:122n). Rather, the relevant sense of anthropology is that which answers the basic question, “What is the human being?” (LJ, AA 09:25). Here, the relevant description of the human being is that of a creature with a divided nature. Kant puts it thus: The human being is a needy being [bedürftiges Wesen], insofar as it belongs to the sensible world, and to this extent its reason certainly has a commission from the side of its sensibility which it cannot refuse, to attend to its interest and to form practical maxims with a view to happiness. . . . But it is nevertheless not so completely [an] animal as to be indifferent to all that reason says on its own and to use reason merely as a tool for the satisfaction of its needs as a sensible being. . . . [R]eason would, in that case, be only a particular mode nature has used to equip the human being for the same end to which it has destined animals, without destining [the human being] to a higher end. — KpV, AA 05:61–62 One of Kant’s favored designations for this creature is that of “finite rational being” (cf. KpV, AA 05:25, 05:110; KU, AA 05:450), but strictly speaking this does not fully capture the distinction. There are, in fact, three elements that make up the nature of humankind, Kant later says: its animality, “as a living being”; its humanity, as a “rational being”; and its personality, as a “responsible being” (Rel, AA 06:26). It is the last feature that makes the human being not merely a biological calculator but a genuinely moral creature that can be said to have a “conscience” (cf. R6096, AA 18:450). In describing a philosophical doctrine of right (philosophische Rechtslehre) in CMS, Beck makes a similar distinction. If a doctrine of right is to be a true “doctrine of wisdom,” it must regard the human being in two lights: on the one hand “as inhabitant of the earth, on which nature

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set him with others of his kind,” but on the other also as “a son of heaven, which place it is that the concepts of duty and obligation . . . have their origin” (CMS, 517–518). In the Grundriß (§ 213), Beck puts it more explicitly. The human being thinks of itself in two lights, both of which are objectively valid though seemingly at odds. On the one hand, the human being is a natural creature: “Each of his actions is determined as event natural, and accordingly the rule of the manner of action of every man may be collected by observation from experience.” On the other, each person “refers all his actions and their whole empirical character, consequently his nature, to a substratum of nature, and in this reference appropriates to himself an intelligible [intelligibilis] character” (emphasis mine). The practical sense of this “dualism” (i.e., the contrast between the sensible and intellectual aspects of the human being, with the latter understood in moral terms) emerges directly from the anthropological one. Human beings have the capacity to choose whether the maxim of their will is sourced purely from reason or whether it is predicated on some aspect of their animality. Here is what Kant has to say: Either a rational principle is already thought as in itself the determining ground of the will without regard to possible objects of the faculty of desire (hence through the lawful form of the maxim), in which case that principle is a practical law a priori and pure reason is taken to be practical of itself. . . . Or else a determining ground of the faculty of desire precedes the maxim of the will, which presupposes an object of pleasure or displeasure and hence something that gratifies or pains, and the maxim of reason to pursue the former and avoid the latter determines actions which are good with reference to our inclination. — KpV, AA 05:62 When the will is determined by pure practical reason, it is said to be absolutely good; when it is determined by the principles governing the pursuit or avoidance of some object of the faculty of desire, its goodness is logically dependent on the goodness of that object. This is not to say that the practical principles of an absolutely good will—that is, moral principles—make no reference to the physical in their content. Rather, Kant’s idea is that for a principle to be a moral one, it must be categorical in its modality and thus cannot be contingent on the pursuit or avoidance of some physical object the goodness of which is entirely dependent on its use or disadvantage to a particular organism. This is, in effect, the scaling out of the idea that it would be absurd for me to assert that a moral principle is whatever principle of action effectively secures me chocolate ice cream. The goodness of chocolate ice cream is a goodness only in reference to my desire for it. Likewise, even if there were any one thing desired by each and every human being (and it is not clear that there is), we should not assert that the principles governing its securement are moral ones. Moral principles, Kant thinks, are practical principles that are absolutely valid for any being with a conscience. They thus cannot be formulated by first looking into the objects of pleasure and pain, which vary according to the organism in question.8 The practical dualism that results is thus a sharp dichotomy between moral principles (given a priori by pure practical reason) and prudential principles (governing the pursuit and avoidance of desires and aversions). Let us see what Beck has to say on this. The determination of moral principles is an “original use of practical reason” according to the category of freedom (Gr., § 214). Consequent to the anthropological dualism that Beck presupposes with Kant, when a person acts ethically, one and the same intention can be viewed in two parallel lights. Every action, of course, is “an event of nature, and stands, in this quality, under the law of causes and effects” (Gr., § 217). To understand an action

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in this light, we might say, is to adopt the mode of explanation. But, Beck says, “If, however, secondly, I judge a man as morally good or bad [in this action], I refer his whole phenomenal existence [phaenomenon] to an intelligible [intelligibilis] ground” (Gr., § 217). According then to the practical dualism of Beck’s Kant, the moral agent belies a supranatural—noumenal, that is—ground of action without thereby excepting its actions from the course of nature. This is the Kant of the second Critique, for whom the concept of freedom follows from the cognizance of conscience. It is not that a moral action is inexplicable according to natural laws or that it constitutes, somehow, a kind of contracausal “swerve” in the course of nature, to borrow an Epicurean concept, but that the first-personal awareness of our answerability to moral demands suggests a freedom that would be undetectable from a third-personal perspective. As Kant puts it, “one would never have ventured to introduce freedom into science had not the moral law, and with it practical reason, come in and forced this concept upon us” (KpV, AA 05:30).9

3.2 Beck’s Interpretation of the Highest Good A formal definition of Kant’s concept of the highest good is that it is the final object of a morally determined will. Beck follows this. “The aim of the morally good man,” he says, “is the order of the moral world,” and, he continues, “He wills accordingly that he, who has made himself worthy of felicity, ought to participate of it” (Gr., § 235). The components of the highest good, “felicity and worthiness thereof,” or simply, in Kant’s terms, “happiness and virtue” are the objects of striving for the two practical aspects of human beings. As natural, finite creatures, their desires pick out, in part anyway, features of the natural world necessary to their survival and flourishing as an organism. As noumenal, moral creatures, their conscience restricts the range of permissible actions they can take in pursuit of those desires. The dual character of the human being is thus imported into its final end. As Beck puts it, “Though the morally good man is influenced by the formal determinative of the moral law alone, the order of the moral world, in which felicity and worthiness thereof are in harmony, is nevertheless the object of his will” (Gr., § 235). What would be ideal, that is, for the human being, is if it could discharge the moral obligations it imposes on itself without being thereby limited in its attainment of happiness. How realistic is such an ideal? Kant thinks not at all and potentially to the great detriment of morality. Virtue and happiness, being distinct from one another, can only be combined synthetically if they are to be combined at all, and therein lies the problem. Since these are practical concepts—effects of our action—it would need to be the case that there somehow existed a causal connection between the two: either happiness would incentivize virtue or virtue would be the effective cause of happiness (KpV, AA 05:113). The first option is “absolutely impossible,” Kant says, which is in effect a restatement of the thesis that the moral law must be a categorical imperative and thus not founded on the contingent objects of happiness. The second also appears to be impossible, and this is a baleful empirical claim: [A]ny practical connection of causes and effects in the world, as a result of the determination of the will, does not depend upon the moral dispositions of the will but upon knowledge of the laws of nature and the physical ability to use them for one’s purposes; consequently, no necessary connection of happiness with virtue in the world, adequate to the highest good, can be expected from the most meticulous observance of moral laws. — KpV, AA 05:113–114; emphasis added

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Kant’s solution is to argue that while one synthetic combination of virtue and happiness, happiness as the incentive to virtue, is absolutely false, the other is only false for the transcendental realist. Like with the Antinomies of Pure (Theoretical) Reason, a solution is open to us so long as we do not assume that the world of our experience represents the way things are in themselves. For the transcendental idealist, it is possible that virtue can be the efficient cause of happiness in another, noumenal world. Because this is an article of rational faith—rational, that is, because our conscience warrants our belief and because it is not, strictly speaking, impossible—and not of knowledge, the highest good is the gateway to Kant’s rational religion or moral theology. Beck adopts this moral theological stance without reservation in the Grundriß: “When the morally good man represents to himself the aim of his exertion [the highest good], he is conscious that he aspires to attain something which cannot be reached in nature” (Gr., § 234; cf. § 235). Our experience tells us that there can be no exact correspondence between virtue and happiness in the natural course of things. In some cases, they are even negatively correlated. Thus, our conscience directs us beyond nature, “whose mechanism has no reference to moral good conduct” (Gr., § 237). How is it that Beck can endorse this unapologetically religious, indeed metaphysical, doctrine in practical philosophy without being inconsistent? That is, how can the “theological” interpretation of the highest good exist alongside the doctrine of the Standpunkt, which Beck introduces to close the problematic gap between phenomena and the transcendental conditions of their possibility he imputes to Kant’s theoretical philosophy? My hypothesis is that Beck reads the doctrine of the highest good according to the same immanentist lines he does the categories of the understanding. Specifically, Beck recognizes that what distinguishes Kantian moral religion from revealed religion is that it is exclusively first personal in its justificatory grounds. Kantian moral religion is a program of philosophical consolation, a way of reconciling the two divergent halves of human practical reason. This it attempts to do on the strength of moral reason’s claim on our conduct: we are certain that a state of affairs, the highest good, is not attainable through purely natural means and is morally required but we are not certain that this state of affairs is impossible through non-natural means. Thus, we are called to believe that this state of affairs will obtain non-naturally, a theoretical claim supported on practical grounds. Our belief in the non-natural mechanisms that could bring this state of affairs about warrants our hope that it will obtain, which is to say that the answer to the question “What may I hope?” is “That the highest good, in which we are worthy of and in possession of happiness, will obtain.” Thus, says Beck, “The morally good man is of himself the true believer” (Gr. § 242). Kantian moral religion is grounded on immediate cognizance of the validity of the moral law, rather than the converse. In this sense, it is not at odds with the doctrine of the Standpunkt. The Kantian’s religious belief is born of a phenomenological experience, namely, that of the validity of the dictates of conscience. That is, rather than morality being reinforced by religious doctrine—by cognitive assent to the truth of certain propositions—religious beliefs get their solidity from the felt necessity of moral imperatives (along with an understanding of the necessary conditions for their fulfillment).

4 HOPE AND FEAR But the theological interpretation of the highest good would not arise at all if we saw the laws of nature reflect the laws of morality. In other words, Kantian moral religion exists

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in the gap between is and ought.10 It is the creed of a practically bifurcated being that subjects itself to moral commandments potentially at odds with its physical needs and, noticing the conflict between its ethics and its prudence, further commits itself to the belief in the conditions necessary to hope for their reconciliation. When Kant asserts that “[t]he final destiny of the human race is moral perfection,” he is analyzing human beings qua natural, practical creatures (MorCo, AA 27:470). But in so doing, he notes something about the unusual kind of creature they are, namely, that they are creatures who take themselves to be practically oriented toward an object outside of nature. According to Beck’s Kant, human beings attempt to mend this discrepancy through moral religion.

4.1 Kantian Constructivism and the Secular Interpretation This is starkly at odds with the “secular” interpretation of the highest good. When, for example, O’Neill asks why we ought not regard progress toward the highest good “as a this-worldly, shared and historical, perhaps incompletable task” she gestures toward a very different way of mending the gap between humanity’s aim and its natural capacities (1996, 286–287). The secularization of Kant’s highest good is, in effect, a deflationary program. If our moral aim is naturally impossible, we ought to lessen our ambition. Contra Kant, the natural impossibility of the highest good is not proof of the invalidity of the moral law, but rather that we have misunderstood the nature of the moral law itself. Unsurprisingly then, the secular interpretation of the highest good is a natural fit with Kantian constructivisms. If the Kantian moral law is not straightforwardly a “fact of reason” (KpV, AA 05:31), a Beckian phenomenological awareness of the transcendental orientation of our conscience, it must instead be something that emanates purely from the natural characteristics of its authors. Thus, Rawls argues that principles of justice are the principles that would be agreed to by rational agents in accordance with a “reasonable procedure” (1980, 516), the specifics of which depend on “a relatively complex conception of the person” (ibid., 560). In Political Liberalism, Rawls declares that the reasonableness of persons, which in turn grounds the moral principles on which they agree, consists in the fact that “they are ready to propose principles and standards as fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them willingly, given the assurance that others will likewise do so” and that they are willing to recognize “the burdens of judgment” responsible for reasonable disagreement (1993, 49). As O’Neill reads Rawls, the move from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism reflects a making explicit of the normative ideal of the human being that constructs moral principles. It is a natural consequence of this transition that the characterization of the human being, in becoming more concrete and explicit, becomes more local (O’Neill 1989, 208–211). O’Neill’s constructivism seeks to articulate a Kantian ethics for all human beings but still conceived as having purely natural ends. As she states this ambition: “Kant is revered for his unswerving defense of human freedom and respect for persons, and his insistence that reason can guide action. He is also reviled for giving a metaphysically preposterous account of the basis of freedom. . . . Many contemporary proponents of ‘Kantian’ ethics want the nicer bits of his ethical conclusions without the metaphysical troubles” (ibid., ix). In O’Neill’s view, the content of morality can be derived from the rational assessment of what she calls “the very predicament of a plurality of uncoordinated agents” (2002, 358). Morality is thus the answer to a coordination problem. Since human beings qua agents cannot identify any particular shared belief on which to establish moral authority

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as a principle of reason, they must abstract from their particular beliefs and, if they are reasonable, grant unrestricted (categorical) authority only to those principles that could be accepted by everyone. The payoff for unburdening Kantian ethics of its metaphysical baggage via the move to constructivism is often thought to be a wider range of palatability, especially through an accommodation for the fact of reasonable disagreement. Not everyone, allegedly, feels the pull of an abstract moral law. But everyone finds themselves in circumstances of needing to coordinate action, à la O’Neill, or of needing to make coherent the fact that they confer value on things in the world and expect others to recognize that fact, à la Christine Korsgaard, who argues that recognizing human beings as ends-in-themselves is a precondition for rational choice itself: “when we choose things because they are important to us we are in effect taking ourselves to be important” (Korsgaard 1996, ix–x). As I argue, however, an additional psychological benefit of the Kantian constructivist position is the leveling down of our moral ambitions. The object of the morally determined will, indeed, of the human species, is not “moral perfection,” according to the constructivist, but rather rational consistency, a “this-worldly” but incompletable historical task, or perhaps simply the obtainment of “the fair terms of social cooperation as given by the principles of justice agreed to by the representatives of free and equal citizens when fairly situated” (Rawls 1993, 97). The problem of the highest good does not arise here because the gap between is and ought disappears; ought has been reined in by is.

4.2 Transcendentalism and Human Destiny So, if Kantian constructivism and the secular conception of the highest good promise to get us objectivity in ethics and a palatable-enough moral ideal without committing us to heavy-duty metaphysical views, is there any philosophical reason in favor of the theological conception of the highest good? I have suggested, in explaining Beck’s embrace of the theological conception of the highest good in the context of the doctrine of the Standpunkt, that the metaphysical cost may not really be so high. True, the theological conception of the highest good entails our belief in the transcendental conditions of its possibility, but these are explanatorily inert for all of our experiences. Kant’s doctrine of the primacy of practical reason leaves phenomenally immanent theoretical reason intact within its ambit, and Beck consequently feels no compunction in adopting it into his system. Whether the so-called practical postulates then are still too metaphysically heavy a price to pay for the theological conception of the highest good is a question I will leave to one side. I will instead focus in this section on the affective costs and benefits of the competing interpretations of the highest good. By leaving the gap between is and ought in place, Beck’s Kant is a kind of pessimist in a way the secularist about the highest good is not. It is simply the case, Kant argues, that in the natural course of things, our final moral ambitions cannot be reached. There is no way for we human beings to manipulate the natural world so that agents are maximally virtuous and, consequently, maximally happy. Yet, Kant thinks, the strength of our commitment to this ideal is such that upon it can rest the edifice of a moral religious doctrine. The sort of moral commitment that grounds Kantian moral religion is not the only thing central to the human experience that is abandoned by the retreat from the theological conception of the highest good. Kantian belief is the ground for a kind of hope, specifically

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hope for the highest good. We can also say that this particular hope exists as the overcoming of a particular kind of fear or angst. This is the angst that the existence per se is fatally flawed from a moral perspective. It is not just that our final moral ends—as individuals, communities, even as a species—are objects of uncertain but attainable striving, but that indeed they are truly and firmly out of our grasp. This angst, I think, lies at the heart of philosophical nihilism. It is the suspicion that seeing things as they really are requires setting aside our conscience as the teller of fairy tales. As Kant puts it, it is the suspicion that “the moral law, which commands us to promote [the highest good], must be fantastic and directed to empty, imaginary ends and must therefore in itself be false” (KpV, AA 05:114). In short, then, one attractive dimension of the theological conception of the highest good is that, unlike the secular conception, it has a story to tell about what we might call the “theological” affects of hope and fear.11 That deep fear is not an ungrounded one, it says. It is true that as far as one knows, the felt validity of moral imperatives is chimerical—perhaps the residue of some evolutionary path or a vestige of a cultural dead end—and that getting clear about what agents in the original position would agree to is not going give it solidity. But Beck’s “true believer” nevertheless finds that is not an insurmountable fear. The answer is not more knowledge but belief that fosters hope: specifically, hope for the highest good as we conceive it in our hearts. This is the hope that Kant and Beck believe overcomes fear that we cannot create a moral world through our actions. The secular conception of the highest good appears to evaporate that fear by removing the conditions for its possibility. Nothing, it says, is required of a moral agent but what can be accomplished in accordance with its own constructed principles of coordinated action. But on closer reflection, this is not so much a solution to as an affirmation of the fear that our moral calling orients us toward the seemingly impossible. And in acquiescing to fear, it euthanizes hope, replacing it with the banal expectation that we will be good enough because, ultimately, there is no grand conflict within our practical reason between virtue and happiness.12

NOTES 1.

For a brief, helpful overview of Beck’s life and his personal and professional relationship with Kant, see Wuerth 2016. For Beck’s most notable innovation on Kant’s philosophy, his so-called “doctrine of the Standpoint [Standpunkt],” see Wallner 1979; 1984; 1985.

2.

“Phenomenology” is Beck’s terminology. What I mean here is the idea that the course of nature can be totally explained by recourse only to the immanent laws of its operation, without, that is, invoking supernatural causes.

3.

Translations of Kant are from the Cambridge edition of the works of Kant. Translations of Beck are in some cases mine, in some cases emendations of J. Richardson’s (originally anonymous) translations in Beck 1797. Richardson was an early propagator of Kant’s views in Great Britain during the eighteenth century. Beck’s works are available in German via Aetas Kantiana.

4.

Silber (1963) is representative of this side of his position in this debate.

5.

Epistemic impossibility is, obviously, only one difficulty a would-be human author of the highest good might face. The other principal one is ontological in nature. Even if we did have insight into the inner moral dispositions of our fellow human beings, it looks to be

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far beyond our powers to arrange the world in such a way as to actually effect a proportionality of happiness to virtue. 6.

O’Neill is referring here to Kant’s argument that we must believe, as a “postulate,” the immortality of the soul in order to envision ourselves making endless progress toward moral perfection (KpV, AA 05:122–124).

7.

Though the advantages of this are surely more sociological than philosophical.

8.

This is, again, different from saying that the content of moral principles, given by pure practical reason, cannot reference pleasure and pain, as, for example, duties of charity do. If, for example, pure practical reason dictates that we promote the ends of morally worthy beings, then we can specify what this looks like in terms of concrete action by examining the ends and circumstances of our fellow persons. But we did not formulate the moral law in this case by first examining the specific objects of pleasure and pain for human beings.

9.

As a descriptive psychological claim, it is not clear whether this is true. Consider, for example, Hume’s alternative explanation for the concept of “liberty”: “The prevalence of the doctrine of liberty may be accounted for, from another cause, viz. a false sensation or seeming experience which we have, or may have, of liberty or indifference, in many of our actions. . . . We feel, that our actions are subject to our will, on most occasions; and imagine we feel, that the will itself is subject to nothing, because, when by a denial of it we are provoked to try, we feel, that it moves easily every way, and produces an image of itself . . . even on that side, on which it did not settle” (Hume [1748] 1999, 158n18).

10. In this context and below where I invoke the same contrast, “is” is confined strictly to the Kantian world of experience. “The highest good is unattainable” is a descriptively accurate claim, Kant thinks, of the state of affairs of the natural world. It is not descriptively accurate simpliciter, or so the argument goes, because Kant thinks it is coherent to believe that the highest good is attainable in a non-natural, i.e., noumenal, context. 11. It is not, I should note, that the secular conception of the highest good cannot make sense of all hope. Some hopes are central to the projects of various constructivisms: hope that we can agree to principles of coordinated action, that we can articulate the principles of justice for a pluralistic, well-ordered society, that our practical reason can be internally coherent. But these are not the same as the theological variety of hope at play in Kantian moral religion. Whether we should give up on this kind of hope is a question for another paper; my aim here is merely to argue that moving from the theological to the secular conception of hope will indeed require such a giving up. 12. As Katrin Flikschuh notes, “hope makes sense only against acknowledged absence of knowledge in relation to the object of one’s hope. There is a difference between saying that I believe in God’s grace and saying that I know of it. I hinted above that, from a Kantian perspective, my belief in God’s grace makes hope in relation to it possible; my knowledge of it renders hope redundant. Hope does not consist in the attempt, practically or otherwise, to overcome or work around lack of knowledge. . . . To hope is in that sense to relinquish a certain kind of (epistemic) control. Oddly, relinquishment of control does not amount to an expression of defeat but counts, to the contrary, as a sign of the refusal to give up” (2010, 106). Flikschuh herself argues for a form of Kantian practical faith that is not fully religious in Kant’s sense but nonetheless retains some of the “transcendent connotations” to which many commentators and Kantians are allergic (ibid., 98).

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REFERENCES Auxter, Thomas (1979), “The Unimportance of Kant’s Highest Good,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 17 (2): 121–134. Beck, Jakob Sigismund (1797), The Principles of Critical Philosophy, Selected from the Works of Emmanuel Kant and Expounded by James Sigismund Beck. Translated from the German by an Auditor of the Latter, London: J. Johnson, W. Richardson. Beck, Jakob Sigismund ([1798] 1970a), Commentar über Kants Metaphysik der Sitten [CMS], Aetas Kantiana, 19, Brussels: Impression Anastaltique. Beck, Jakob Sigismund ([1796] 1970b), Grundriß der Critischen Philosophie [Gr.], Aetas Kantiana 21, Brussels: Impression Anastaltique. Beck, Lewis White (1960), A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Flikschuh, Katrin (2010), “Hope as Prudence: Practical Faith in Kant’s Political Thinking,” in Jürgen Stolzenberg and Fred Rush, (eds.), Internationales Jahrbuch Des Deutschen Idealismus: Glaube Und Vernunft, 95–117, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Hume, David ([1748] 1999), An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1800] 1992), “The Jäsche Logic,” transl. J. Michael Young, in J. Michael Young, (ed.), Lectures on Logic, 515–640, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1788] 1996a), “Critique of Practical Reason,” transl. Mary J. Gregor, in Mary J. Gregor, (ed.), Practical Philosophy, 133–276, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1785] 1996b), “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals,” transl. Mary J. Gregor, in Mary J. Gregor, (ed.), Practical Philosophy, 37–108, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1793] 1996c), “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,” transl. George di Giovanni, in Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni, (eds.), Religion and Rational Theology, 39–216, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1795] 1996d), “Toward Perpetual Peace,” transl. Mary J. Gregor, in Mary J. Gregor, (ed.), Practical Philosophy, 311–351, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1774–1777] 1997), “Moral Philosophy: Collins’s Lecture Notes,” transl. Peter Heath, in Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind, (eds.), Lectures on Ethics, 37–222, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1781/1787] 1998), Critique of Pure Reason, transl. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1790] 2000), Critique of the Power of Judgment, transl. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel (2005), Notes and Fragments, ed. Paul Guyer, transl. Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer and Frederick Rauscher, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1798] 2007), “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,” transl. Robert B. Louden, in Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden, (eds.), Anthropology, History, and Education, 227–429, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Korsgaard, Christine M. (1996), Creating the Kingdom of Ends, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Murphy, Jeffrie G. (1965), “The Highest Good as Content for Kant’s Ethical Formalism: Beck versus Silber,” Kant-Studien 56 (1): 102–110.

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O’Neill, Onora (1989), Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Neill, Onora (1996), “Kant on Reason and Religion,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/o/oneill97.pdf. O’Neil, Onora (2002), “Constructivism in Rawls and Kant,” in Samuel Freeman, (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, 347–467, Cambridge Companions to Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pasternack, Lawrence (2017), “Restoring Kant’s Conception of the Highest Good,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 55 (3): 435–468. https://doi.org/10.1353/hph.2017.0049. Rawls, John (1980), “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory: The Dewey Lectures 1980,” The Journal of Philosophy, 77 (9): 515–572. Rawls, John (1993), Political Liberalism, expanded edn., New York: Columbia University Press. Rawls, John (2000), Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, Barbara Herman and Christine M. Korsgaard, (eds.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reath, Andrews (1988), “Two Conceptions of the Highest Good in Kant,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 26 (4): 593–619. https://doi.org/10.1353/hph.1988.0098. Silber, John R. (1959), “Kant’s Conception of the Highest Good as Immanent and Transcendent,” The Philosophical Review, 68 (4): 469–492. https://doi. org/10.2307/2182492. Silber, John R. (1963), “The Importance of the Highest Good in Kant’s Ethics,” Ethics, 73 (3): 179–197. https://doi.org/10.1086/291447. Wallner, Ingrid M. (1979), “Jacob Sigismund Beck’s Phenomenological Transformation of Kant’s Critical Philosophy,” diss., McGill, Montreal. http://search.proquest.com/ philosophersindex/docview/1854791435/abstract/98866B8FF08B48A4PQ/23. Wuerth, Julian (2016), “Beck, Jacob Sigismund (1761–1840),” in Heiner F. Klemme and Manfred Kuehn, (eds.), The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers, 52–55, London: Bloomsbury Academic. http://www.bloomsburyphilosophers. com/eopcol/article.

CHAPTER FIVE

Between Faith and Reason Is J. H. Tieftrunk’s Concept of Hope a Postulate? INGOMAR KLOOS (Independent Researcher) Translated by ANNA EZEKIEL

1 INTRODUCTION According to Kant, the question “What is the human being?” (LJ, AA 09:25) is defined and articulated by the answers to the following questions posed by the interest of reason: “1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?” (A805/B832).1 As a knowing, right-acting and faithful/hoping being, the human being is invested in metaphysics (pure theoretical reason), morals (pure practical reason) and religion (rational faith). In an expanded formulation of the third question—“If I do what I ought to do, what may I then hope?”—Kant connects acting and hoping. In this formulation, the entitlement (having permission) to hope is considered under the condition of morality. Practical reason, as the systematic site for morals, and religion, as the systematic site for the question of hope, are brought together.2 With respect to the interest of practical reason, the object of hope lies in “transcendental theology.”3 In Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), Kant’s philosophy of religion is supposed to present how Kant “thinks he sees the possible unification [of Christianity] with the purest practical reason” (Letter to Karl Friedrich Stäudlin, 4 May 1793, Br, AA 11:429.21–23).4 According to The Critique of Practical Reason, the key statement of his concept of religion is that religion is “cognition of all duties as divine commands” (KpV, AA 05:129).5 The jurisdiction of practical reason (cognition of duty) is therefore connected to the jurisdiction of religion. The subject of this paper is how Kant’s conclusion—“all hoping aims at happiness” (A805/B833)—in conjunction with subsidiary questions (e.g., regarding the forgiveness of sins) is developed and justified by Tieftrunk. This paper first sketches the basic outline of Kant’s philosophy of morals and religion, in relation to which Tieftrunk’s theory of hope, and its proximity to Kant, can be evaluated. Then, after short notes on Tieftrunk’s life and work, the paper traces the development of the concept of hope in Tieftrunk’s religious-philosophical writings, in chronological order of publication.

2 CONDITIONS OF KANT’S TRANSCENDENTAL THEOLOGY Kant’s proposed moral theory of religion has three presuppositions: (1) the limitation of knowledge “to make room for faith” (Bxxx); (2) the autonomous self-legislation of the 87

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moral subject through practical reason; (3) the doctrines of the ideas and postulates. Short remarks on these topics must suffice here. Regarding 1: Kant’s program of critical philosophy applies to the “metaphysics of the ancients,”6 which, as the natural metaphysical predisposition of human reason (metaphysica naturalis), is taken to be reality (B22), but, as science, requires a critique of its conditions of possibility. As an outcome of the Critique of Pure Reason, the central teachings of traditional (speculative) metaphysics, such as ontology as a foundational discipline (metaphysica generalis; philosophia prima) and the themes of special metaphysics (metaphysica specialis)—God, freedom, and the immortality of the soul—have their usual claim to cognition revoked. (A) Ontology collapses in the Transcendental Analytic,7 as the categories and principles of the pure understanding, qua their a priori derivation from the functions of the understanding as constituents of objects of possible experience, are shown to be restricted to the latter. (B) The objects of special metaphysics could be thought of as possible concepts in the theoretical use of reason but are rejected as objects of possible cognition because they are neither given in the intuition of space and time nor generated by human beings. For the purposes of pure speculative reason, transcendental judgments are debunked as illusion in the investigations of the Transcendental Dialectic (A297–298/B354). Thus, the realm of knowledge is limited. Regarding 2: In addition to its theoretical interest, pure reason also pursues a practical interest in a possible practical use of metaphysical/transcendental concepts that are unprovable to theoretical reason. Thus, for example, the core of practical reason is freedom, which, after the resolution of the cosmological antinomy (natural causality in the world of experience [mundus sensibilis] versus the causality of freedom with respect to the noumenal character of human beings [mundus intelligibilis]) (A532f./B560f.) can be declared a logical possibility. Practical reason secures the objective reality of freedom through the fact of pure reason as the immediately given consciousness of obligation. The latter manifests in a categorically (unconditionally) commanding imperative as the cause (or “causality” [Causalität]) that determines the will (with respect to morals) (KpV, AA 05:55.15ff.): “freedom, among all the ideas of speculative reason, is also the only one whose possibility we know a priori: . . . I wish only to point out that whereas freedom is indeed the ratio essendi of the moral law, the moral law is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom” (KpV, AA 05:4 and n). The moral law of the moral subject (self-legislation through pure practical reason), which is based on freedom, receives its (general) validity from the fact that it must satisfy a claim that is analogous to a natural law. Regarding 3: How does reason arrive at the ideas of the soul, the universe, and God? How does the transition from these to faith in the immortality of the soul, freedom and God (as moral/practical demands or postulates) take place? According to Kant, pure (speculative) reason8—using the specific categories acquired in the transcendental analytic (cf. A321–322/B378)—derives the transcendental concepts of reason, as representations of the unconditioned (ideas),9 in a prosyllogism based on rational inferences, which follow the categories of relation (categorical, hypothetical or disjunctive): Now there will be just as many kinds of pure concepts of reason as there are kinds of relations that the understanding presents by means of the categories. And hence we shall have to search for an unconditioned: first, of the categorical synthesis in a subject; second, of the hypothetical synthesis of the members of a series; third, of the disjunctive synthesis of the parts in a system. — A323/B379

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This yields: (a) from the unity of the thinking subject: the idea of the soul, as the object of speculative psychology; (b) from the unity of the conditions of appearance: the idea of the universe, as the object of speculative cosmology (as mundus phaenomenon and mundus intelligibilis); (c) from the system of the highest totality: the idea of God, as the object of rational theology. If used metaphysically, as objects of cognition, these ideas come to nothing: that of the soul leads to paralogisms, that of the universe to antinomies, and that of God disintegrates in the impossibility of finding a proof for God. Thus, they have no constitutive meaning that can ground cognition, but merely a regulative function for the understanding:10 “so as to express the systematic unity that is to serve us as a guideline for reason’s empirical use” (A675–676/B702–703). The ideas have the same regulative function for practical reason as they do for theoretical reason, at least as applied to reason’s interests. Practical reason demands (postulates) their objective reality, in order to ensure that there is a sense to morality and that there is a possibility of its being realized. The achievement of moral perfection necessarily requires the soul to be immortal. The practical interest in the cosmological idea of the world arises from the intelligible aspect of non-natural causality, from freedom, which is the necessary condition of moral (autonomous) action. God, as a transcendental ideal, is required to be really existing, in order to guarantee happiness adequate to moral perfection (the highest good) and thereby to ensure that hope is realizable. The merely conceivable ideas of pure speculative reason thus receive objective reality for pure practical reason as postulates (see esp. KpV, AA 05:132).11 Postulating is “an assent from a pure practical point of view, i.e., it is a moral faith” (KU, AA 05:470.5–7; see also KpV, AA 05:132.13–18). The three questions mentioned at the start of this chapter correspond to Kant’s program of transcendental philosophy in a broader sense, namely that of the new metaphysics based on critical principles. After Kant had determined the limits of knowledge (first question) and justified the primacy of practical reason (second question) (KpV, AA 05:119f.), he finally saw the highest point of transcendental philosophy in transcendental theology12 (third question). In the jurisdiction of religion, hope gains a meaningful position in the area targeted by Kant’s system in his development and justification of the thesis: hope “aims at happiness” (B22).13 At this point, we will not provide more detail on Kant’s concept of hope, which is oriented towards justified participation in the highest good (happiness commensurate with worthiness for happiness, which corresponds to the fulfilled moral law) (e.g., KpV, AA 05:123). However, this concept will be drawn on in the discussion of Tieftrunk’s further development of his concept of hope.

3 TIEFTRUNK’S JUSTIFICATION OF POSTULATED HOPE AND ITS DERIVATIVE POSTULATES 3.1 Tieftrunk’s Biography and Work Johann Hinrich (Heinrich) Tieftrunk was born in Öftenhäfen (Öftenhäven) on May 15, 1760.14 He received his schooling at the Latin School (Latina) of the Francke Foundations in Halle.15 From 1778 he studied theology (especially with the Enlightenment theologian and historical-critical Bible scholar Johann Salomo Semler [1725–1791]), philology and philosophy. Meanwhile, he taught at the Latin School. In 1781 he became Rector of the Municipal School in Joachimsthal (Uckermark) and was appointed afternoon preacher by

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the Frederician Minister of Culture, Karl Abraham Baron von Zedlitz und Leipe (1731–1793). He applied himself to studying Kant’s philosophy. In 1792, at his own wish, he was appointed full professor of philosophy in Halle by Johann Christoph von Wöllner (1732–1800), a follower of Zedlitz, with permission to hold theological lectures.16 This permission was revoked in 1799 by Eberhard Julius Ernst von Massow (1750–1816), a follower of Wöllner, because of the rationalist tendencies of his approach. From that point until the end of his life, Tieftrunk’s occupation was limited to philosophy, especially Kantian philosophy.17 He published minor writings on this topic with Kant’s consent (Kant, Letter to Tieftrunk, 13 October 1797, Br, AA 12:207f.). In addition to theological themes, his teachings encompassed all areas of theoretical and practical philosophy (within the framework of Kant’s philosophy, as he adopted it), natural science, anthropology and empirical psychology. He held “philosophical conversations” (Konversatorium) until shortly before his death on October 7, 1837.18 Tieftrunk’s work on philosophy of religion from his short theological period, which lasted eight years, was first addressed by contemporary reviewers and theological colleagues. In more recent times (in the twentieth century and until today), it has only been considered by a few theologians and philosophers of religion.19 Among experts, his remaining work has received only incidental attention limited to specific questions. He ranks among the largely forgotten early Kantians in Halle (see Kloos 2015b, 7ff.).

3.2 Tieftrunk’s Concept of Hope in his Work on Philosophy of Religion20 Although this is generally overlooked, Tieftrunk first published on the philosophy of religion at the end of 1788 with his anonymously published text “Einzig möglicher Zweck Jesu” (The Only Possible Purpose of Jesus; hereafter Zweck Jesu I).21 This text is a short, exploratory version (96 pages) of an expanded book-length edition (176 pages; second edition 250 pages), Einzigmöglicher Zweck Jesu aus dem Grundgesetze der Religion entwickelt (The Only Possible Purpose of Jesus, Developed from the Principle of Religion; hereafter Zweck Jesu IIA/B), which appeared a year later under his name.22 Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason had already been published in 1788. Before the publication of Zweck Jesu II, Tieftrunk published (anonymously) his polemic Unumstößlicher Beweiß daß Kleucker so wenig als Michaelis[,] Leß und Semler die Wahrheit des Christenthums gerettet haben (Irrefutable Proof that Neither Kleucker, Michaelis, Leß or Semler Have Saved the Truth of Christianity) (Tieftrunk 1789b).23 In this text Tieftrunk explicitly references and highlights Kant, e.g., with the plea “think for yourself!” (Kant’s sapere aude) (ibid., 5), the mention of “great masters” like Kant (ibid., 6), reference to the “immortal Kant” (ibid., 30), deliberations on (moral) rational faith in connection with the moral law and the highest good, the postulate of “a wise and highest lawgiver” and “faith in God” as “a necessary product of pure practical reason” (ibid., 31) and—not least—with his avowal, defending Kant, that the latter had “revealed the unfounded pretensions of philosophy” and “constructed the truths of worldly wisdom . . . on much firmer foundations” (ibid., 70). This documents Tieftrunk’s knowledge and absorption of Kant’s works and of the religious doctrine that Kant developed from his moral doctrine, insofar as this is laid out in the Critique of Practical Reason (e.g., KpV, AA 05:122–132).24 3.2.1 Einzigmöglicher Zweck Jesu (1788/1789; 1793) In Zweck Jesu I, Tieftrunk begins his philosophical work on religion on the foundation of a doctrine of Jesus that is yet to be proven. According to the table of contents, the text is

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concerned with the relationship of the Enlightenment to religion, the concept of religion and the doctrine of Jesus, the principle of religious research, the moral teachings of Jesus; freedom (in the moral as well as the transcendental sense), supersensible existence and immortality, and the being and cognition of God.25 The line of argument in Zweck Jesu I is as follows: Careful scrutiny will show whether the basis of the doctrine of Jesus demonstrates “inner firmness,” such that it warrants obedience (Teiftrunk 1788, 102). This basis is a principle given by Jesus himself. Tieftrunk explains religion as “the relationship of the human being to God,” that is, (a) as a doctrine of God’s will (commandment, moral teachings) and (b) as a doctrine of God’s properties and his relationship to the world (theology) (ibid., 108). Following in the “footsteps of Jesus” (ibid., 109), Tieftrunk identifies the law of Jesus as “Love God . . . and your neighbors as [you love] yourself,” which “Christ presents to us as the highest principle of our obligations and prohibitions” (ibid., 133), and “the commandment of God” as the “unique law of our spirit.” The exhortation that “You should love God” as the giver of the law26 corresponds to the “character of our self-active spirit” (ibid., 134). Because of the limitation of our “supersensual way of acting by sensual nature,” “the law of our spirit” is transformed “into a commandment of God” (ibid., 135), which is cognizable by everyone because of its universal necessity (ibid., 139). The divine law—and the “law of our spirit,” which is identical with it—contains the holiness that the human being acquires through submission to the law, as well as the advancement to happiness through the law’s commandment of love. In recognizing the divine law, one finds oneself in the realm of God (ibid., 200), where the freedom that has been presupposed is a commandment given by Jesus (ibid., 219). The negative expression for supersensual, necessary and eternal existence is “immortality,” for mortality only affects the sensual world (ibid., 222–223). Conviction in immortality depends on recognizing Jesus’ law as the principle of our conduct, which necessarily connects immortality and the moral law (ibid., 225). However, immortality is not conferred, but revealed in Christ’s law, and obedience to the latter entitles one to the happy expectation of the former (ibid., 227). Faith in the existence of God is also connected to Jesus’ moral law, for it is commanded by the highest lawgiver (ibid., 229). Analogously to Kant’s correlative connection between freedom and the moral law (KpV, AA 05:4n), in Zweck Jesu I Tieftrunk defines the law of Jesus as “ratio essendi” as well as “recognoscendi Dei” (Tieftrunk 1788, 232n). From commensurability with the moral law, there arises a corresponding blessedness, an infinite blessedness that “in the strictest sense [befits] God alone” (ibid., 234). God, as the “only blessed one” and “original source of all derivative blessedness” (ibid., 238) confers “blessedness upon morality, grace and benevolence upon worthiness,” according to “the infallible measure of his holy law” (ibid., 241). According to this summary of the relevant ideas of Zweck Jesu I, the theme “hope” remains marginal and oriented to the (Kantian) postulate of the immortality of the soul. This immortality is immanent in Christ’s law and can justifiably be expected if one follows the latter. The happiness to which hope is oriented in Kant (A805/B833) is not thematized here by Tieftrunk as the object of hope but is considered a self-evident consequence obtained analytically from the concept of the law and the nature of God. Kant’s dictum that religion is “cognition of all duties as divine commands” expresses the double character of morality as both the content of the doctrine of Jesus and autonomous self-legislation. This dictum thus presents a critique of theology, which declares that morality is grounded by religion alone. This critique reconciles faith with reason.

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The “Zusätze und Erläuterungen zum einzigmöglichen Zweck Jesu” (Additions and Expansions on the Only Possible Purpose of Jesus) (Tieftrunk 1789c) contains a clarification regarding the highest good and the moral self-legislation of the free subject. What is remarkable is that Tieftrunk relates hope—which here becomes assurance (Zuversicht)—to God’s granting of happiness; thus far this agrees with Kant. But for Tieftrunk, hope (now assurance) depends on our insight into the moral governance of God. This separates his account from Kant’s postulate of the existence of God, which must be presupposed for the realization of happiness to be possible (see, e.g., KpV, AA 05:124.8–19).27 The text suggests that Tieftrunk had already absorbed Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason into his thought. However, he does not mention Kant’s name here, but only in his publications on the philosophy of religion from 1797, after he entered into written correspondence with Kant.28 Sections 1–8 of the text published in book form (Zweck Jesu IIA) are identical with the shorter edition published in the Berlinisches Journal für Aufklärung. There are also additional new chapters: “The Highest Good of Free Beings,” “God’s Grace,” “Happiness,” and “Appendix: Enthusiasm and Naturalism” (Tieftrunk 1789a). In these chapters, the theme of hope is made more concrete, although admittedly Tieftrunk’s thought on the topic must be extracted from his circuitous deliberations. The result, insofar as it offers something new compared to the above, may be summarized thus: Human beings attain piety and virtue from obedience to the divine command (Tieftrunk 1789a, 102). Because of the “holiness of the law,” it is “apodictically certain” that “holiness is the highest good” (ibid., 105). Even so, for human beings obedience is a struggle between freedom and nature (ibid., 107).29 From the fulfillment of duty, however, there follows no entitlement to “enduring wellbeing” (ibid., 112) as the latter (happiness) is not contained analytically in the concept of piety. This is because “the law of piety excludes and prohibits all sidelong glances at enduring wellbeing from the motives of obedience.” But the “pure understanding” connects piety and happiness into a synthetic unity, which, absent the human capacity for its realization, can only be effected by and awaited from the grace of God (ibid., 116). Trust in God’s providence is the only possible additional condition, if one does not want to throw away one’s hopes. Hope must be distinguished from entitlement (ibid., 120). Because God, with his unchanging character, is a wise ruler, our justified expectation for a commensurate apportionment of happiness transforms into infallible assurance. Because we need happiness and must prove ourselves worthy of it, it follows that God “must and will apportion” happiness according to the degree of our worthiness (ibid., 122). The law of love, which includes self-love and neighborly love, produces the connection of heavenly law and earthly conditions (ibid., 128).30 The publication of Tieftrunk’s Zweck Jesu IIA contains hardly anything essentially new with respect to the above. However, it should be emphasized that in this text Tieftrunk eliminates entitlement in connection to the hope of attaining happiness, pointing instead to the grace of God. He allows no doubt in the granting of acts of grace. The second edition, Zweck Jesu IIB, contains a newly inserted ninth section, in which are presented numerous pieces of evidence from the gospel for the necessary connection of the law and happiness (Tieftrunk 1793b, 122ff.). In this respect, the fourteenth section, “Gradations of Assent in Christianity” is of interest. This includes a variation on Kant’s three questions (A805/B832f.): “scrutinizing” reason “arises from knowledge, transforms from this into faith, and ends in hope.” Thus, religious doctrine contains the answer to the three questions “What must I know? What can I believe? What may I hope?” (Tieftrunk 1793b, 186). (1) The moral law of Christian doctrine is known as the law of freedom. (2)

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Assenting or believing (apart from the law, objectively) “can only be thought as the condition of possibility of the law itself.” Within human beings, this is “freedom, supersensual existence, intelligible character, personality” (ibid., 188); outside human beings, it is the “existence of God,” through which alone “happiness can be effected in relationship to morality” (ibid., 189). (3) Christianity promises (or allows to hope for “under the condition of a presupposed morality”) “a divine providence and moral government” that apportions happiness according to worthiness (ibid., 190). Tieftrunk now postulates providence: “In itself, the thought of providence is problematic. It could be or not be. But I wish that it would be” (ibid., 191–192).31 “Thus,” he claims, “Christianity advances through a piece of evidence (in the law) through faith (in God, freedom, immortality) to trust in providence and to hope in a finite resolution of all things to the glorification of God and the world” (ibid., 194). What are the predicates that define the concept of hope? Expressions like “justified expectation” and “infallible assurance,” which are underpinned by trust in the providence of the divine lawgiver, can help explicate this. Hope is grounded in religious conviction, which is fed by insight into the perfect divine law. From Tieftrunk’s perspective, Kant’s well-known phrase that religion is the cognition of all duties as divine commands means: religion is the cognition of the divine command in the principle of Jesus as the moral command of our reason.32 Tieftrunk’s proximity to Kant and his critical philosophy can be taken from certain remarks in Zweck Jesu IIB, which we have just considered. On maintaining “too great an adherence to a certain philosophical school” (Tieftrunk 1793b, 16), he concedes that through his long study of critical philosophy its language has become interwoven with his own. He adds distinctly that he “adheres to no particular system without my own judgment.” Everything from “sharp thinkers” and “thorough men” that he strings together with his “way of thinking” is a “free handling” by his spirit (ibid., 17). With that, he rejects the appearance of “partisan adherence.” The expressions “fell at his feet” (he remarks casually). In relation to accusations of plagiarism, which the reviewer and opponent of Kant, Johann Christian Schwab (1743–1821) (see Parthey 1842, 26–27), exposed in detail regarding Tieftrunk’s later text “Grundriß der Logik” (1801, esp. 158–160), I am struck by a place in Tieftrunk’s Zweck Jesu IIB, which reminds me of a sentence from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Both reject the idea of punishment and reward as a principle for a maxim of action:

Tieftrunk, Zweck Jesu IIB

Kant, Critique of Practical Reason

[The commandment of holiness requires full submission of our will,] i.e., where the mere representation of a law is the sufficient ground of action. No fear or hope . . . should hinder us or drive us. (Tieftrunk 1793b, 200)

[H]ere, too everything remains devoid of self-interest and based only on duty; and does not have to be based on fear or hope. (KpV, AA 05:129; emphasis mine)

3.2.2 Versuch einer Kritik der Religion und aller religiösen Dogmatik (1790) Now that we have acknowledged the broad expanse of Tieftrunk’s Zweck Jesu, in order to present the concerns of his philosophy of religion in detail we will concentrate on the development and substantiation of the concept of hope in his work.

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The text Versuch einer Kritik der Religion und aller religiösen Dogmatik (Attempt at a Critique of Religion and of All Religious Dogmatics) was announced, with an excerpt,33 in the journal Berlinisches Journal für Aufklärung under the title “Versuch einer Kritik der Religion und aller religiösen Dogmatik, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf das Christenthum. Vom Verfasser des Einzigmöglichen Zwecks Jesu” (Attempt at a Critique of Religion and of All Religious Dogmatics, With Particular Consideration of Christianity. From the Author of the Only Possible Purpose of Jesus) and appeared in the same year as a book (Tieftrunk 1790b; [1790c] 1796). The concept “critique of religion” contained in the title was, as far as we can see, first used by Tieftrunk as a title concept.34 The concept can be understood in the sense of Kant’s Critiques35 as the (self-)scrutiny and (self-)evaluation of the content and application of the faculty of reason. The critique of religion is, accordingly, an investigation, internal to religion, of the doctrine of Jesus with respect to its compatibility with reason. The essential content is roughly indicated by the following headings: “The Double Character of the Human Being as a Sensual and Spiritual Being”; “Relationship of the Unconditioned Law of Freedom to the Finitude of Human Forces (Disproportion)”; “Fundamental Universal Law of Religion”; “The Religious Systems of Deism and Theism”; “The Character and Purpose of Religion”; “15 Theses to Prove the Harmony of the Doctrine of Jesus with the Critique of Religion.” Here, we notice again the abovementioned theorem of the “love of the law.” The biblical citation “Love is the fulfilling of the law” (e.g., Rom. 13.10) attests that Christianity’s demand for the will to be determined through the pure law of reason corresponds to moral sentiment (Tieftrunk [1790c] 1796, 280). The connection between “respect for the law” and “love for the law” is well-known in relation to moral duty in Kant (e.g., KpV, AA 05:83f.). In Kritik der Religion, Tieftrunk did not yet make this distinction. The topic obtains greater significance at later points, when he investigates the postulate of the forgiveness of sins, which has primacy over happiness. According to Kritik der Religion, in our pursuit of the topic of hope we should consider a broader agreement of the moral law with Christian faith in the existence of God and immortality as “conditions of the moral law.” Both ground “the Christianity of the faith of Christians in God and their hope in a future life” (Tieftrunk [1790c] 1796, 315; see Rom. 8.11). It should be noted that, in establishing agreement between the objects of faith and hope with those postulated by practical reason, Tieftrunk does not differentiate between the respective grounds of validity for these objects. Biblical sources attest, but do not establish (rationally); practical reason justifies, but does not attest. 3.2.3 Censur des christlichen protestantischen Lehrbegriffs nach den Principien der Religionskritik (Parts I–III, 1791–1796) Compared to the Kritik der Religion, Tieftrunk’s Censur des Christlichen Protestantischen Lehrbegriffs nach den Principien der Religionskritik (Censor of the Christian Protestant Doctrinal Concept According to the Principles of the Critique of Religion) offers a further methodical and systematic step, information on which is provided by his introduction to this text.36 While Zweck Jesu aimed to discover the principle contained in Christian doctrine as the highest precept of religion, according to Censur I, the Kritik der Religion is to justify this (Tieftrunk [1791b] 1796, 3, 4). For critique has to precede the dogmatics that the system presents37: “Critique of religion is in fact nothing other than the propaedeutic to all religious dogmatics, which shall emerge as science” (ibid., 39).38 As “censor,” Tieftrunk will “judge the individual dogmas of our doctrinal religious concepts

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according to their inner contents and their relationship to religion overall” (ibid., 41). The function of the censor is, for Tieftrunk, “a scrutiny, as it were, of the critique of religion” (ibid., 43). Döderlein’s (1785ff.) and Morus’ (1789) textbooks, the dogmatic theological content of which we will not consider here, serve as a guiding thread for Tieftrunk’s inquiry. The contents of the three-part Censur text are indicated by the following headings: (Censur I:) “Religion and Its Differentiations”; “Revealed and Natural Religion”; “Relationship of Theology to Religion and Reason”; “Christian Religion and Its Sources (Bible)”; “Credibility of Miracles,39 Prophecies, Inspiration and the Basic Articles of Christian Religion”; (Censur II:) “The Doctrine of God”; “The Concept of God (Transcendental and Teleological Theology40)”; “Propositions of Textbooks, Especially Those by Döderlein and Morus”; “The Trinitarian God and His Relationship to Human Beings”; “ ‘Inscrutable Things,’ ” “ ‘Holy Secrets’ of God the Father and the Son of God (‘Logos Enfleshed’)”; (Censur III:41) “Holy Spirit”; “Results of the Doctrine of the Trinity”; “Creation, Angels, Sins, Mercy; Baptism, Communion, Edification etc.” With Tieftrunk’s Censur, the presuppositions of the object of hope, “happiness,” come more strongly to the fore. The attainment of proportionately apportioned happiness is necessarily connected to the worthiness for happiness that is obtained through morality (by fulfilling the law). Correspondingly, the possible impediment to this, namely guilt incurred during the process of moral improvement, must be considered, as well as the question of the redemption of guilt or the remission of punishment (pardon). The improvement of human beings is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the forgiveness of guilt, “according to which [the human being] may hope for forgiveness, and consequently the restoration of divine beneficence.” The “comforting hope” that exists under the condition of improvement is, according to Censur I, “a proposition of both reason and revelation” (Tieftrunk [1791b] 1796, 101). In this way, Tieftrunk establishes the agreement of practical reason and revelation with respect to hope. In Censur I, the moral demands on the self-improving human being are strengthened by the justification of the possible redemption of guilt through the “ideal of a moral way of thinking,” which consists “in the love for the law.”42 This love, which is considered really possible, presupposes pardon by the “holy lawgiver,” so that reason “(a priori) demands redemption of guilt, i.e., establishes the faith that it will be redeemed as the principle of the unity of reason with itself ” (Tieftrunk [1791b] 1796, 164). The hope for happiness thus rests on a postulate of reason. In Censur II the theme of hope in relation to divine grace is taken up again. According to Tieftrunk, as the extra-legal beneficence of God, grace is accessible to faith, not the insight of reason. Hence the promise that our hope extends “beyond legal expectation” (Tieftrunk 1794, 193). Nevertheless, the object of faith, the “promise,” exceeds the knowledge of our duties and grants us only “weak glimpses into the realm of the supersensual” (ibid., 194). The only conditions under which we “hope to participate in [God’s] indulgence” are actions out of free obedience to the law of duty (ibid., 234–235). The “justified hope” in happiness can “appeal to neither holiness (of divine lawgiving) alone, nor God’s goodness alone, nor God’s justice alone” (ibid., 288–289). Thus the basis of hope lies in the fulfillment of the moral command, and ultimately in the law. The Censur text shows Tieftrunk’s appropriations from theoretical pieces by Kant, especially Critique of Pure Reason, with the greatest clarity so far. For example: his definition of religion as “observation of the moral law as a divine command” (Tieftrunk [1791b] 1796, 65; cf. Rel, AA 06:153.28f.); the claim that reason will “form three ideas,

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first the absolute unity of the thinking subject” (Tieftrunk [1791b] 1796, 82; cf. A322– 323/B379); and the statement that “[t]he concept of God emerges . . . through the prosyllogism of the disjunctive conclusion of reason.”43 3.2.4 “Ist die Sündenvergebung ein Postulat der praktischen Vernunft?” (1797) and “Ist irgend eine wesentliche Religionswahrheit nicht a priori?” (1798) These two texts are considered together here because of their shortness and shared subject.44 The essay “Ist die Sündenvergebung ein Postulat der praktischen Vernunft?” (Is the Forgiveness of Sins a Postulate of Practical Reason?) appeared in the first year of Tieftrunk’s correspondence with Kant (Tieftrunk, Letter to Kant, 20 June 1797, Br, AA 12:755), and makes explicit reference to Kant and his work.45 Among Tieftrunk’s writings on philosophy of religion, these two essays present the most soberly succinct and stringent treatment of the theme of hope in Tieftrunk’s investigation of the doctrine of reconciliation. However, we learn almost nothing new. Tieftrunk investigates the possibility of forgiveness46 with regard to the required moral improvement. The remission of sins, as well as the remission of punishment, are conceivable on condition of this improvement,47 that is, on condition of returning to the law. A person’s guilt cannot be redeemed by that person themselves, through their future improvement, because the latter cannot annul their inherent guilt and punishability; nor can it be redeemed by a surrogate (God, through Jesus Christ). According to “Sündenvergebung,” the latter follows from the fact that, for the redemption of guilt, the subject’s quality of “unworthiness” would have to be annulled, and with it their personality, at which point it would be unnecessary to annul guilt (Tieftrunk 1797, 139f.). According to “Ist irgend eine wesentliche Religionswahrheit nicht a priori?” (Is Some Kind of Essential Religious Truth Not A Priori?), it follows from the fact that, in taking on guilt, the holy lawgiver, who stands unconditioned and perfect under his own laws, would have to stand outside these laws, which would be a self-contradiction (Tieftrunk 1799, x). The still-open possibility of the forgiveness of sins as a problematic sentence is to be translated into an assertoric sentence. In so doing, revelation is discarded, because an assertoric expression of the remission of guilt contradicts reason, if the latter cannot confirm it. Because the answer concerns a question of practical reason, it must lie in the practical law of reason. This posits an end-goal for us. Happiness is a necessary goal of finite beings, which consists in morality and the happiness commensurate with it (the highest good). A commensurability of thinking and acting with the principle of all practical lawgiving, effected by the will for the sake of the law (holiness), is the goal of all finite free beings. The affection for the law that is effected a priori from this state of the person is “love of the law.” According to Vernunftwahrheit, the moral heights of the “love of the law” cannot be achieved alongside consciousness of irredeemable guilt and depravity (the subjective moment) before the law (the objective moment). The subjective necessity of the forgiveness of sins can be inferred as objective because the law does not stop demanding this highest goal of love and consequently exempts nobody from it. This subjective necessity becomes practically necessary through the claim of the law. According to “Sündenvergebung,” “love of the law,” as a need of the person, consists in the required forgiveness (postulate). Proof 1: The end-goal of the law (the highest goal of the moral being) must be achievable. Pardon is its sufficient ground. Proof 2: The end-goal of the moral law is lost without the postulate of the forgiveness of sins. But because the law and its end-goal are always equally necessary, the reality of the forgiveness of sins follows. But theoretical possibility (freedom from contradiction) does not suffice in practical terms,

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because the latter gives a concept of something that could really be. If practical reason posited the end-goal assertorily (or even apodictically), then it would establish the categorically commanded end-goal itself as problematic, if it were to try to explain the inescapable condition of the reality of the goal as merely possible. If the end-goal were merely possible, its positing or non-positing would be discretionary and its purpose would be arbitrary, which would contradict reason.48 If pardon results from the end-goal, the highest constituent of which is “love of the law,” then the condition of pardon would also result from the concept of the end-goal. The assertion of the remission of guilt with the status of a postulate remains problematic; the forgiveness of sins remains a holy secret. The progress of morality in infinite regress can at no point in time be thought of as accomplished in its totality. Only reflection on moral sentiment and the immutability of its way of thinking can ground the hope in justification before God. We shall briefly consider the abovementioned doctrine of the “love of the law,” to which Tieftrunk here ascribes a significant role. First, our attention is drawn to the genitive form of “love of the law” (Liebe des Gesetzes), which is grammatically unfamiliar in German, and which may be read in three ways: (1) love, which demands the law (the command of love); (2) love of the loving lawgiver (God), who is immanent in the law; (3) love of the law—fulfillment of the law not only out of respect, but out of love for it. Kant uses the expression in the sense of the third version, consistently using the formulation “love for the law” (Liebe zum Gesetz); only in one passage do we read: “The highest goal of the moral perfection of finite creatures, which is never completely attainable for human beings, is, however, the love of the Law [Liebe des Gesetzes]” (Rel, AA 06:145). With the statement “to this level of the moral attitude no creature can ever attain” (KpV, AA 05:84) Kant loses interest in this idiom. 3.2.5 Die Religion der Mündigen (1800) Following the advice of Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and “this text’s moral content,”49 Tieftrunk recapitulates his program of philosophy of religion in the Introduction to Die Religion der Mündigen (The Religion of the Mature). The plan of using reason to scrutinize the doctrine of revelation first requires an answer to the question of the purpose of this doctrine (Zweck Jesu). The principles of evaluation are then developed with the guidance of this basic idea (Kritik der Religion). With these principles, Christian doctrine can then be scrutinized with respect to the moral tendencies it contains (Censur). In the meantime, the route is a propaedeutic to a religion that lies within reason (Religion der Mündigen), which can now be imagined. “Mature” (mündig) here means guided by reason, without guidance from an authority, according to (Kant’s) sapere aude.50 Thus the route from critique to “doctrinal business” is opened up. Religion der Mündigen is a thematically sweeping Christian dogmatic theology. The content of the first volume is concerned with the sources and site of religious cognition and with the concept of religion. The second volume is occupied with the purposiveness of the world according to principles of the power of judgment (aesthetic, teleological) and the doctrine of religion, including, most importantly, discussion of the original being (Urwesen): God. This volume contains a version of Kant’s doctrines (in Tieftrunk’s words and interpretations) from the Critique of Judgment, supplemented with teachings from the Critique of Pure Reason and the texts “Über das Mißlingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodicee” (On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy) (1791) and “Das Ende aller Dinge” (The End of All Things) (1794). Tieftrunk explains in the foreword to Volume 2 of Religion der Mündigen:

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Perhaps I have managed, as far as it is part of my plans, to elucidate, if not expand on . . . some ideas from Kant’s Critique of Judgment. It is self-evident that in the third section the Critique of Speculative Theology in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, as well as his treatises on the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy and the End of All Things,51 have been consulted. — Tieftrunk 1800, vi This large-scale, big-picture, systematic work contains no new grounds for further determining the concept of hope. These should not be expected, because the systematic exposition here more firmly establishes the results worked out in the previous texts. At the end of the work in Volume 2 we find an appendix, “On the Future” (Tieftrunk 1800, 524–534), which awakens our interest. There the questions are posed: “what will become of [the world] and the beings within it, what do we have to hope and to expect?” Tieftrunk’s concisely formulated answer goes beyond everything said previously and is cited here by way of example: The basis of hope therefore lies in the supersensual, in the moral way of thinking, and because there should be a proportion between happiness and worthiness, the human being must imagine a rewarding benevolence and a punishing justness, and because he must think these, he must also think of a life outside time, i.e., a moral existence (immortality), of which life in time, whether it is short or long or eternal, is only the appearance and consequence. For phenomenal life . . . the moral human being may . . . not promise himself anything other than that for which he has prepared the ground through his own morality. In order to make the reality of this practical statement comprehensible, the human being imagines a personified benevolence, which has as its goal the happiness of worldly beings; but also a personified holiness, which holds off the goodness so that it is not bestowed on the unworthy. By this means reason leads to [the idea of] a judge who, in order not to compromise his benevolence with holiness, tests the moral worth or unworth of worldly beings most precisely, and then pronounces his judicial sentence; thus to [the idea of] a personified justice.—These ideas are practical and valid for humanity in general. Therefore one may not imagine that they will only gain force and validity in some epoch of existence, such as before death or after it. — Tieftrunk 1800, 529 According to the above, hope is grounded in moral faith, which, according to Tieftrunk (and Kant), is a rational faith. The justificatory propositions of human hope are derived from the sequence of their necessity for thought. However stringent the inferences, it must not be overlooked that these fall under the premise of the questionability of the fulfillment of what is hoped for. Because hope is the last anchor of human striving for meaning, it can only be made valid as a rational inference. Hope postulates its own presuppositions. The work ends with the sentences: Prophecy is not allotted to human beings; but prognostication must be based on laws we can cognize. The laws of nature and morality allow us to prognosticate as much as is necessary to fulfill our duty on earth; everything else is lost in dark and ambiguous prospects. . . . Just do your duty in the sphere that you can oversee, and trust the rest to the laws of nature. — Tieftrunk 1800, 534

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4 TIEFTRUNK’S CONCEPT OF HOPE AND ITS POSITION IN RELATION TO KANT’S DOCTRINE OF RELIGION In Zweck Jesu, hope related to immortality as a “happy expectation” which, in view of God’s governance, was designated a “comforting hope” and “unwavering assurance.” In Kritik der Religion, God and immortality became the basis for hope for a future life. Censur introduced a more thoroughgoing differentiation: hope for happiness presupposes the worthiness for happiness, improvement (return to the law), and redemption of guilt (forgiveness, reconciliation), where improvement first permits the “comforting hope” for forgiveness. Tieftrunk emphasized that neither the holiness of God (in the law) nor his benevolence or justness justify hope for happiness; instead, the latter is grounded in following the law, and thus in the law. With Religion der Mündigen, Tieftrunk gave hope a place in a chain of justification of postulated conditions, the fulfillment of which lead to the highest object of hope: happiness. That Tieftrunk, who was suspected—and in individual cases convicted—of plagiarism, closely adhered to Kant’s work proves his thorough knowledge of the latter. The fact that both thinkers deal with special themes chronologically with great agreement in their arguments, concepts and formulations may suggest a mutual influence. In order to explain such an influence, we should pursue Winter’s question: “Who depends more on whom here: Kant on Tieftrunk or Tieftrunk on Kant?” (Winter 2000, viii; see also Zweck Jesu IIA/B). However, to answer this would require a broader investigation. It is certain, for example, that Kant, alerted by Kiesewetter, procured Tieftrunk’s Kritik der Religion immediately after its publication in January 1790 and lent it to his friend Borowski.52 Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, published in 1793, should be investigated for traces of Tieftrunk’s text. Both saw hope as directed at happiness, the guarantor of which was God. Without the postulate of the existence of God, “our happiness remains only ever a wish, without . . . this ever being able to become hope” (Rel, AA 06:482.13–16). For Tieftrunk, “our hope [is] infallible; for God is a wise ruler; . . . thus our justified expectation that God will apportion happiness commensurate to our piety transforms into infallible assurance.” The apportionment of happiness must “occur through a third factor; and this is nothing other than the grace of a wise ruler” (Zweck Jesu IIB, 181). Kant regarded the grace that enters into play here with more reserve: [W]e will not be able to make any further use of the idea [of grace] beyond the general presupposition that grace will work in us what nature cannot, if we have only made use of the latter (i.e., of our own forces) as much as possible. We will not be able to use [the idea of grace] either to draw its cooperation to ourselves (other than by constantly striving for a good way of living), nor to determine on what occasions we might expect it.—This idea is wholly overwhelming; and, moreover, it is healthy to stay at a respectful distance from it as if from somewhere holy. — Rel, AA 06:191 For Tieftrunk, among the intermediate steps that must be fulfilled (e.g., improvement, forgiveness of sins), which are presupposed by the apportionment of happiness, the “love of the law” receives a particular meaning, as we have seen. He introduces this teaching with Censur I: “the love of the law . . . is the highest goal of morality” (Tieftrunk [1791b] 1796, 169). In Religion der Mündigen I he adds: “there must therefore be something in the holy maxim [of a way of life conforming to the law] which the deed represents, and by appropriating which the human being can gain love of the law and trust in its

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end-goal” (Tieftrunk 1800, 316). Kant incorporated “love for the law” in a limited form as “respect for the law.” The former seemed to him (in contrast to Tieftrunk) impossible to achieve: “To love God, in this signification, means to fulfill his commands gladly. . . . To this level of the moral attitude no creature can ever attain.” For a “creature” has “to base the attitude of his maxims on moral necessitation . . ., on respect, which demands compliance with the law . . ., rather than on love. . . . Yet [it is also necessary for the creature] to make this love—viz., mere love for the law, . . . the constant though unattainable goal of his endeavor” (KpV, AA 05:83, 84). Tieftrunk may have taken the motif of “love of the law” from the Critique of Practical Reason, which was published two years before Censur, but he developed it further independently. To conclude, in Tieftrunk we see an ambivalent philosophical character, who, on the one hand, absorbed Kant to the point of repeating his teachings word for word, while partly radicalizing them, and, on the other hand, expanded this interpretation with his own, thoroughly original thoughts. He is one of the true followers of Kant, occupying a special position among his Kantian colleagues at his university, the Academia Fridericiana Halensis, insofar as he was permitted to teach at the theological faculty for over seven years. His significance as a philosopher of religion means that he stands out among the circle of early Kantians in Halle.53 This position is due to the attention to and engagement with his religious teachings by, above all, theologians, which continues until the present day (see above, fn. 19). Where theologians have reservations, the basis of these lies in the character of Tieftrunk’s philosophical teachings on religion, in which mere reason investigates biblical objects of revelation theology from the perspective of a moralphilosophical interest. An appearance of artificiality attaches to this philosophical engagement. Tieftrunk, for his part also a theologian, had to overcome the risk of slipping off the ridge between philosophical and biblical theology into the latter. However, practical reason is directed to the former, in order to close the justificatory gap in the apportioning of happiness regarding that which moral human beings cannot effect themselves. This copestone, the “holy mystery”54 called grace, can hardly be demanded (postulated), because such a claim would eradicate the essence of grace. Equating hope with a postulate, insofar as both aim at the same goal, must overcome a difficulty: hope offers no certainty that what is hoped for will occur, while, after all, a postulate, by logical necessity, requires what is demanded. In the end, hope thus seems to be radically intensified, becoming indispensable as a figure of thought, in order to be able to attribute meaning to the end-goal of the moral law.

NOTES 1.

See also: LJ, AA 09:25; Letter to Carl Friedrich Stäudlin, 4 May 1793, Br, AA 11:429.13f. Direct quotations from Kant’s Critiques are from Werner S. Pluhar’s translations in Kant [1790] 1987, Kant [1781/1787] 1996, and Kant [1788] 2002.

2.

Admittedly, religion is treated here “within mere reason” (that is, insofar as it is answerable to critique) and is subject to practical reason as its intrinsic consequence.

3.

On the concept “transcendental theology,” see, e.g., A631f./B659f., A640f./B668f.; ReflM, AA 17:742f.

4.

For the “possible unification” of the religion of revelation with the religion of reason, see Kant’s image of “concentric circles” (Rel, AA 06:12). The “mere reason” in the title means “free from what is foreign to reason” as well as “without faith based on revelation.”

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5.

This definition was already outlined in the Critique of Pure Reason (A819/B847) and recurs in, e.g., Critique of Judgment (KU, AA 05:481.12f.), Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Rel, AA 06:153) and Metaphysics of Morals (MS, AA 06:440).

6.

i.e., Leibniz and his followers (see, e.g., Feder 1783, 387).

7.

“[T]he proud name of an ontology . . . must give way to the modest name of a mere analytic of pure understanding” (A247/B303).

8.

Reason as the capacity to make inferences (A330–331/B387) and as the capacity for principles (A300/B356).

9.

Ideas are “categories expanded up to the unconditioned” (A409/B436).

10. “[R]eason initially . . . deals with the understanding in order to provide the understanding’s manifold cognitions with a priori unity through concepts” (A302/B359); “Reason properly has as its object only the understanding and the purposive engagement thereof ” (A643–644/B671–672). 11. It would be misguided to regard postulates as illusions (self-deception) or as pragmatic/ useful fictions, in the sense of Hans Vaihinger’s “As-If ” ([1911] 1927). 12. “Transc. phil.’s highest standpoint [is] Transc. Theology” (Op, AA 22:63). 13. Those theorems of the Critique of Judgment that have not yet been exhaustively investigated regarding the question of hope (e.g., “Appendix: Methodology of the Teleological Power of Judgment” §84–91) are not considered here. 14. Various birth years (from 1758 to 1760) have been given for Tieftrunk in the secondary literature; however, his exact date of birth has only recently been investigated (Kloos 2015a, 626–631). Other incorrect biographical information, spread from unchecked sources, has been corrected. 15. Admission 3 April 1773. Archive of the Francke Foundations, Halle/Saale, AFSt/S, Sign. L5. 16. His installation took place on 10 January 1792. 17. Selected texts from Tieftrunk’s writings on theoretical and practical philosophy include: Erste Gründe der lateinischen Sprache (First Principles of the Latin Language) (1784); Ueber Recht und Staat (On Right and State), part 1 (1796); Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Privat- und öffentliche Recht, zur Erläuterung und Beurtheilung der metaphysischen Anfangsgründe der Rechtslehre von Herrn Professor I. Kant (Philosophical Investigations on Private and Public Rights, For the Explanation and Judgment of the Metaphysical Starting Points of the Doctrine of Right by Professor I. Kant), part 2 (1797–1798); Grundriß der Logik (Outline of Logic) (1821a); Grundriß der Sittenlehre (Outline of the Doctrine of Morals) (1803); Das Weltall nach menschlicher Ansicht (The Cosmos from a Human Point of View) (1821b); Die Denklehre in reindeutschem Gewande, auch zum Selbstunterricht für gebildete Leser; nebst einigen . . . die Fichtesche Philosophie betreffenden Aufsätzen von Immanuel Kant (The Doctrine of Thought in a Purely German Form, also for Self-Teaching for Educated Readers; Beside Some . . . Articles Concerning Fichtean Philosophy by Immanuel Kant) (1825). 18. On the courses, see: Anon., Half-year and year-long schedules, Universitätsarchiv (UAH), Rep. 3, Nr. 257ff. and Cat. Lec. Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Halle (ULB), Manuscript Section; see also the Hallisches Tageblatt, Hallische Zeitung esp. Hallisches patriotisches Wochenblatt of the corresponding year, which published course announcements (Förstermann 1837).

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19. The first (and so far only) monograph on this topic is Kertz 1907, 26. Although Kertz had contact with Tieftrunk’s grandchildren, the section “Tieftrunk’s Life and Development” (4–27) includes some incorrect information which recurs in subsequent publications by other authors who cite Kertz. Other notable publications include: Wenz 1984 (in which pages 246–259 are dedicated to the controversy between Tieftrunk and the theologian Friedrich Gottlieb Süskind [1767–1829] on the forgiveness of sins); Wenz 2000, 26ff, 119ff.; Wenz 2005, 115–18; Seban 1996; Winter 2000, 24f., 457f.; D’Allessandro 2001, 641–48; Lehner 2007. 20. Our investigation considers the following texts by Tieftrunk: “Versuch einer Kritik der Religion und aller religiösen Dogmatik, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf das Christenthum” (Attempt at a Critique of Religion and of All Religious Dogmatics) (1790b); Versuch einer Kritik der Religion und aller religiösen Dogmatik, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf das Christenthum ([1790c] 1796); Censur des Christlichen Protestantischen Lehrbegriffs nach den Principien der Religionskritik (Censor of the Christian Protestant Doctrinal Concept According to the Principles of the Critique of Religion), part 1 ([1791b] 1796), part 2 (1794), part 3 (1795); “Ist die Sündenvergebung ein Postulat der praktischen Vernunft?” (Is the Forgiveness of Sins a Postulate of Practical Reason?) (1797); “Ist irgend eine wesentliche Religionswahrheit nicht a priori?” (Is Some Kind of Essential Religious Truth Not A Priori?) (1799); Die Religion der Mündigen (The Religion of the Mature), vols. 1 and 2 (1800). Tieftrunks’ writings on the fringes of his treatises on philosophy of religion/ theology are not considered here. These include: “Briefe über das Daseyn Gottes, Freyheit und Unsterblichkeit” (Letter on the Existence of God, Freedom and Immortality) (1790a and 1791a); De modo Deum cognoscendi quaerit suasque simul indicit lectiones per hoc semestre aestium habendaerolini (On the Mode of Perception of God, Inquiry According to the Indicated Lectures for the Summer Semester) (1792); Dilucidationes ad theoreticam religionis christianae partem ita ut libelli D. S. F. N. Morus V.C., (Explanations of One Part of the Christian Religion, According to the Booklet by D. S. F. N. Morus V. C.) vols. 1 and 2 (1793). 21. In 1789, Tieftrunk added “Additions and Explanations” in response to remarks by Riem (Tieftrunk 1789c). 22. The second edition was published in 1793. 23. The title refers to Johann Friedrich Kleuker (1749–1827), Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791), Gottfried Leß (1756–1797), and Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791). The title is clearly a modification of the text published anonymously in Halle (by the publisher Friedr. Christ. Dreyßig), Ueberzeugender Beweis, daß die Kantische Philosophie der Orthodoxie nicht nachtheilig, sondern ihr vielmehr nützlich sei (Convincing Proof that the Kantian Philosophy is not Disadvantageous to Orthodoxy, But Is Useful To It). To ascribe this to Tieftrunk’s authorship would be rash speculation. 24. Lehner’s remark that there is here “hardly any reference to Kant and also no positive application of his teachings” (2007, xi) is therefore untenable. 25. At the end of Section 8, Riem, the co-editor of the Berlinisches Journal für Aufklärung, interrupted Tieftrunk’s text with the promise of a later continuation, which never appeared. Instead, Tieftrunk’s “Additions and Explanations” was published (Tieftrunk 1789c). 26. Tieftrunk’s theorem of the “love of the law,” discussed later in this paper, is already inherent in this.

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27. Tieftrunk’s angle is theological and directed towards the principle of Jesus regarding the law of God, and from there towards the connection with (human) practical reason; for Kant, it is logical, and directed towards the intellectual claim of practical reason (morality leads to religion). Kertz remarks that Tieftrunk “came to moral exegesis along a different path to Kant” (1907, 45). However, let us not forget that Tieftrunk is here discussing the principle of Jesus, which dictates his perspective. 28. In his letter to Kant of 20 June 1797, Tieftrunk shared that he had “long studied critical philosophy” (Br, AA 12:755.14–15). 29. The same is true for Kant in KpV, AA 05:84. 30. From this, I derive Tieftrunk’s determination of the relationship between piety and happiness, which posits an empirical reference of what is possible on earth to the hoped-for happiness. This contrasts with a religio-philosophical/ideal connection of holiness (perfect morality) and happiness, which is only conceivable in a moral existence that is extended into the unconditioned. 31. In Zweck Jesu IIB, Tieftrunk broadens hope, which is “only conjecture” but has “morality in itself,” to include “reunification with one’s friends” in the realm of God (Tieftrunk 1793b, 193). 32. In his Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Kant explains that religion belongs to morality “because through it is expressed only the relationship of reason to the idea of God, which reason makes for itself ” (MS, AA 05:487). 33. Section 10, number 9 of the advance copy of the text of the book. 34. According to the title, the Censur I text of 1791 concerns “principles of the critique of religion.” In the same year, the theologian Carl Friedrich Stäudlin (1761–1826) published Ideen zur Kritik des Systems der christlichen Religion (Ideas for a Critique of the System of Christian Religion). 35. Kant’s Critique of Judgment appeared in the same year. 36. Unfortunately, I did not have the first (1791) edition of Censur I at my disposal, so I had to use the second edition. Because this was published in 1796, after the second and third parts (1794, 1795), which were not re-issued, I found myself in the disadvantageous position of not being able to cite the improvements made in the second (amended and expanded) edition. Because in 1793 Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason came on the market and to Tieftrunk’s knowledge, his reception of this in the second edition of Censur I had, so to speak, leapfrogged the other parts. Tieftrunk professed to having considered reviews in his revisions (Censur I, 2f.). 37. According to Tieftrunk in Censur I, a dogmatic thinker applies theorems without having justified their principles (Tieftrunk [1791b] 1796, 7n). 38. In such phrases, Tieftrunk is speaking the language of the Critique of Pure Reason (e.g., A11/B25; A841/B869). 39. Lehner thinks that the doctrine of miracles belongs to “Tieftrunk’s best and intellectually sharpest treatises” (2007, xxii; see also Zweck Jesu IIA/B). 40. This use of the concept “transcendental theology” (theologia transscendentalis) is noteworthy. This is a new term, introduced by Kant, for a theology developed from transcendental concepts within the framework of regulative reason, in which the expression “transcendental” is to be understood in the modern sense of “condition of possibility.”

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41. Censur III continues the second part without restarting the numbering of sections and chapters. 42. Tieftrunk’s recurring motif of the “love for the law” (Liebe zum Gesetz) or even “love of the law” (Liebe des Gesetzes) radicalizes Kant’s restrained evaluation of the love for the law (cf. KpV, AA 05:83f.). 43. Tieftrunk 1794, 15 (Censur II); cf. A576/B604. To trace all Tieftrunk’s borrowings from Kant would require a broader investigation. 44. “Religionswahrheit” contains a shorter version of the content of “Sündenvergebung.” 45. Tieftrunk does not fail to emphasize his independence in “Sündenvergebung”: “even if I do not need Kant’s explanatory hypothesis,” “still Kant’s doctrine [is] mine too” (Tieftrunk 1797, 174–192). 46. Forgiveness of sins, reconciliation, pardon and justification are equivalent terms here, as are the theological concepts “sin,” contravention of the law, neglect of duty etc. The law is always to be understood as the will of God in agreement with the moral law of reason. 47. This thought emerges more strongly, with the status of a postulate, in “Religionswahrheit” (Tieftrunk 1799, viii and xif.) than in “Sündenvergebung” (Tieftrunk 1797, 123f.). 48. It would be a self-contradiction of reason to posit a purpose that could not be perceived. 49. The sixth page of the unpaginated “Foreword.” Tieftrunk adds: “For they are the basis of my work, but without prejudice to the freedom of my own judgment” (seventh page). 50. Tieftrunk reproduces the essentials of Kant’s text “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung” (Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?) (1784) without naming Kant. He employs Kant’s formulations using other words (e.g., instead of “selfimposed minority [Unmündigkeit]”, Tieftrunk writes “self-imposed guardianship [Vormundschaft]”). 51. These two treatises are included in Tieftrunk’s Immanuel Kant’s vermischte Schriften (Immanuel Kant’s Miscellaneous Writings) (Tieftrunk 1799a). 52. Ludwig Ernst von Borowski (1740–1831); Johann Gottfried Karl Kiesewetter (1766– 1819). See Br, AA 11:126, 140. 53. Before Tieftrunk’s appointment, the Halle-based early Kantian Ludwig Heinrich von Jakob (1759–1827) had published a text on philosophy of religion, Beweis für die Unsterblichkeit der Seele aus dem Begriffe der Pflicht (Proof for the Immortality of the Soul from the Concept of Duty) (1790). 54. Kant employed the concept in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Rel, AA 06:138f.).

REFERENCES Anon. (n.d.), Half-year and year-long schedules, Universitätsarchiv (UAH), Rep. 3, Nr. 257ff. and Cat. Lec. Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Halle (ULB), Manuscript Section. Anon. (n.d.), Ueberzeugender Beweis, daß die Kantische Philosophie der Orthodoxie nicht nachtheilig, sondern ihr vielmehr nützlich sei, Halle: Friedr. Christ. Dreyßig. Döderlein, Johann Christoph (1785ff.), Christlicher Religionsunterricht nach den Bedürfnissen unserer Zeit, 8 vols., Altdorf: J. E. Monath and J. F. Kußler.

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D’Allessandro, Guiseppe Carmine (2001), “Kant und Tieftrunk: Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der Vernunft. Ein Beitrag zur Enstehungsgeschichte der Religionsphilosophie Kants,” Akten des IX Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, 3 (Berlin and New York): 641–648. Feder, J. G. H. (1783), Logik und Metaphysik, Vienna: Johann Christian Dieterich. Förstermann, D. Karl Eduard, on behalf of the Armen-Direction, (ed.) (1837), Hallisches Tageblatt, Hallische Zeitung esp. Hallisches patriotisches Wochenblatt, Halle: Commission der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses. http://digitale.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/zd/9059307. Jakob, Ludwig Heinrich (1790), Beweis für die Unsterblichkeit der Seele aus dem Begriffe der Pflicht, Züllichau: N. S. Frommanns Erben. Kant, Immanuel ([1781/1787] 1996), Critique of Pure Reason, transl. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett. Kant, Immanuel (1784), “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung,” in F. Gedike and J. E. Biester, (eds.), Berlinische Monatsschrift, 481–494. Kant, Immanuel ([1788] 2002), Critique of Practical Reason, transl. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett. Kant, Immanuel ([1790] 1987), Critique of Judgment, transl. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett. Kant, Immanuel (1799), Immanuel Kants vermischte Schriften, ed. Johann Hinrich Tieftrunk, 8th edn., 3 vols., Halle: Renger. Kertz, Gustav (1907), Die Religionsphilosophe Joh. Heinr. Tieftrunks. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Kantischen Schule (Kant-Studien, supp. 4), Berlin: Reuther & Reichard. Diss., Halle, 1906. Kloos, Ingomar (2015a), “Biographische Rätsel um den halleschen Kantianer Johann Heinrich Tieftrunk sind gelöst,” Kant-Studien, 106: 626–631. Kloos, Ingomar (2015b), Frühkantianer an der Academia Fridericiana Halensis. Philosophisches Denken in Halle, section 1, Philosophen des 18. Jahrhunderts, vol. 5.1, ed. Günter Schenk and Regina Meÿer, Halle: Hallische Philosophische Bibliothek e.V. Lehner, Ulrich L. (2007), Religion nach Kant. Ausgewählte Texte aus dem Werk Johann Heinrich Tieftrunks (1759–1837), Religionsgeschichte der frühen Neuzeit, vol. 3, Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz. Morus, Samuel Friedrich Nathanael (1789), Epitome Theologiae Christianae, Leipzig: Svmtv E. B. Schwickerti (Schwickert). Parthey, Gustav (1842), Die Mitarbeiter an Friedrich Nicolai’s Allgemeiner Deutscher Bibliothek nach ihren Namen und Zeichen . . ., Berlin: Nicolaischen Buchhandlung. Seban, Jean Loup (1996), “Le primat de la raison practique chez Johann Heinrich Tieftrunk (1759–1837),” Analecta Bruxellensia, 1: 158–181. Stäudlin, Carl Friedrich (1791), Ideen zur Kritik des Systems der christlichen Religion, Göttingen: Vandenhoek- und Ruprechtschen Verlag. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1784), Erste Gründe der lateinischen Sprache, Berlin: Friedrich Maurer. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1788), “Einzig möglicher Zweck Jesu,” Berlinisches Journal für Aufklärung, 1: 97–144, 197–244. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1789a), Einzigmöglicher Zweck Jesu aus dem Grundgesetze der Religion entwickelt, 1st edn., Berlin: Kön. Pr. akad. Kunst- u. Buchh. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1789b), Unumstößlicher Beweiß daß Kleucker so wenig als Michaelis[,] Leß und Semler die Wahrheit des Christenthums gerettet haben, Frankfurt and Leipzig: n.p.

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Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1789c), “Zusätze und Erläuterungen zum einzigmöglichen Zweck Jesu,” Berlinisches Journal für Aufklärung, 2 (2): 118–153. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1790a), “Briefe über das Daseyn Gottes, Freyheit und Unsterblichkeit,” Deutsche Monatsschrift, 3: 51–58. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1790b), “Versuch einer Kritik der Religion und aller religiösen Dogmatik, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf das Christenthum. Vom Verfasser des Einigmöglichen Zwecks Jesu,” Berlinisches Journal für Aufklärung, 6: 167–220. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich ([1790c] 1796), Versuch einer Kritik der Religion und aller religiösen Dogmatik, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf das Christenthum, vom Verfasser Des Einigmöglichen Zwecks Jesus, 2nd revised and expanded edn., Berlin: Kön. Pr. akad. Kunst- u. Buchh. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1791a), “Briefe über das Daseyn Gottes, Freyheit und Unsterblichkeit,” Deutsche Monatsschrift, 3: 198–210. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich ([1791b] 1796), Censur des Christlichen Protestantischen Lehrbegriffs nach den Principien der Religionskritik mit besonderer Hinsicht auf die Lehrbücher von D. J. C. Döderlein und D. S. F. N. Morus, part 1, 2nd revised and expanded edn., Berlin: Kön. Pr. akad. Kunst- u. Buchh. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1792), De modo Deum cognoscendi quaerit suasque simul indicit lectiones per hoc semestre aestium habendaerolini, Berlin: Friedrich Vieweg sr. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1793a), Dilucidationes ad theoreticam religionis christianae partem ita ut libelli D.S.F. Morus V.C., vols. 1 and 2, Berolini: Friedrich Vieweg sr. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1793b), Einzigmöglicher Zweck Jesu aus dem Grundgesetze der Religion entwickelt, 2nd edn., Berlin: Kön. Pr. akad. Kunst- u. Buchh. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1794), Censur des Christlichen Protestantischen Lehrbegriffs nach den Principien der Religionskritik mit besonderer Hinsicht auf die Lehrbücher von D. J. C. Döderlein und D. S. F. N. Morus, part 2, Berlin: Kön. Pr. akad. Kunst- u. Buchh. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1795), Censur des Christlichen Protestantischen Lehrbegriffs nach den Principien der Religionskritik mit besonderer Hinsicht auf die Lehrbücher von D. J. C. Döderlein und D. S. F. N. Morus, part 3, Berlin: Kön. Pr. akad. Kunst- u. Buchh. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1796), “Ueber Recht und Staat,” in Ferdinand Christoph Weise, (ed.), Die Grundwissenschaft des Rechts, 111–137, Zerbst: Commission bey Jak. Friedr. Heerbrandt. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1797), “Ist die Sündenvergebung ein Postulat der praktischen Vernunft? Beantwortet, nebst einem Anhange über die absolute Erwählung,” in Carl Friedrich Stäudlin, (ed.), Beiträge zur Philosophie und Geschichte der Religion und Sittenlehre überhaupt und der verschiedenen Glaubensarten und Kirchen insbesondere, vol. 3, Lübeck: Johann Friedrich Bohn, 112–201. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1797–1798), Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Privat- und öffentliche Recht, zur Erläuterung und Beurtheilung der metaphysischen Anfangsgründe der Rechtslehre von Herrn Professor I. Kant, part 2, Halle: Renger. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1799), “Ist irgend eine wesentliche Religionswahrheit nicht a priori?” (Prefacing) Disquisition (1798) in Johann Gottfried August Kroll, (ed.), Philosophisch-kritischer Entwurf der Versöhnungslehre, Halle: Gebauer. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1800), Die Religion der Mündigen, vols. 1 and 2, Berlin: Kön. Pr. akad. Kunst- u. Buchh. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1803), Grundriß der Sittenlehre, 2 vols., Halle: Curt. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1821a), Grundriß der Logik, Halle: Curt. Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1821b), Das Weltall nach menschlicher Ansicht, Halle: Gebauer.

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Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich (1825), Die Denklehre in reindeutschem Gewande, auch zum Selbstunterricht für gebildete Leser; nebst einigen . . . die Fichtesche Philosophie betreffenden Aufsätzen von Immanuel Kant, Halle and Leipzig: Reinicke und Compagnie. Vaihinger, Hans ([1911] 1927), Die Philosophie des Als Ob. System der theoretischen, praktischen und religiösen Fiktionen der Menschheit . . ., 10th edn., Leipzig: Felix Meiner. Wenz, Gunther (1984). Geschichte der Versöhnungslehre in der evangelischen Theologie der Neuzeit, vol. 1 (Münchener Monographien zur historischen und systematischen Theologie, vol. 9), Munich: Christian Kaiser. Wenz, Gunther (2000), Tillich im Kontext. Theologiegeschichtliche Perspektiven (Tillich-Studien 2), Münster: LIT. Wenz, Gunther (2005), Offenbarung. Problemhorizonte moderner evangelischer Theologie (Studium Systematische Theologie, vol. 2), Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Winter, Aloysius (2000), Der andere Kant. Zur philosophischen Theologie Immanuel Kants (Europaea Memoria, series 1, Studien, vol. 11), Hildesheim et al.: Georg Olms.

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CHAPTER SIX

Fichte on Optimism and Pessimism1 RORY LAWRENCE PHILLIPS (University College London)

The debate over the worth of life and living, or the so-called Pessimismusstreit, in mid- to late nineteenth-century German philosophy, has been recently highlighted by Frederick Beiser to be centrally important to the development of philosophy in Germany postHegel (Beiser 2014a; Beiser 2016).2 Of course, in this debate, the figure of Schopenhauer looms large. In this paper, I will examine the way that Fichte might have responded to this debate. There are at least three reasons for looking at Fichte here. Firstly, optimism and pessimism are often at issue on the periphery of what Fichte is discussing, in, for example, Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben (The Way Toward the Blessed Life) and the System der Sitten (System of Ethics), and so there is reason to think that optimism would have been a live issue for Fichte. Secondly, Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), author of many philosophical works, most importantly for my purposes Die Philosophie des Unbewusstsen (The Philosophy of the Unconscious) (1884; 2nd edn. 1893), and possibly the most important proponent of pessimism after Schopenhauer, claims Fichte to be a pessimist, and this claim of continuity between Fichte and Schopenhauer should be resisted. There may be ways in which Fichte influenced Schopenhauer—after all, Fichte taught Schopenhauer for a while—but this is not an area in which the elder philosopher would agree with the younger.3 Thirdly, Fichte’s stance represents an independently interesting position in the debate, according to which we are to cultivate an attitude of hope for the future, which partly plays a motivational role in our moral lives and how we tackle the real evils of current existence. Three preliminary points should be made. Firstly, it bears repeating that whilst etymology might reveal that “optimism” and “pessimism” are roughly “best-ism” and “worst-ism,” there are a variety of positions and grades that one can take, and one can, for example, take Hartmann’s line of thinking that this is the best of all possible worlds, but that non-existence is better than existence. Secondly, it also is worth stressing that none of these positions involve being an optimist in the everyday sense of thinking of the proverbial glass half full. In Margaret Boden’s excellent phrase, to be an optimist as a rule of mental hygiene does not imply philosophical optimism (Boden 1966, 292; see also Eagleton 2015, 1–2). Thirdly, there is an ongoing debate in Fichte scholarship around the continuity of his Jena thought (roughly from 1793/1794–1799/1800) and his later thought, from 1800 until his death. I do not have the space to deal with this here, other than to say that Fichte’s views on systematic issues and metaphilosophical issues (such as the correct starting point of philosophy or the aims of philosophical reasoning and the 109

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boundaries of reason) may well change, but it seems to me that a coherent line of thought can be drawn out which connects his early and later work.4 I shall begin section 1 below by arguing that we should reject Hartmann’s labelling of Fichte as a pessimist, and go on to discuss why hope is important for Fichte. I then try to show in more detail the character of this hope. I shall then, in section 2, discuss why from Fichte’s perspective Schopenhauerian pessimism is unwarranted. Then in section 3 I will discuss Fichte’s brand of hopeful optimism and how it fits into the larger picture of our nature as fundamentally morally oriented.

1 FICHTE’S STANCE ON THE ISSUES In Hartmann’s major work The Philosophy of the Unconscious, he characterizes Fichte as a kind of pessimist. Hartmann says: “Fichte declares the natural world to be the very worst that can be, and is himself only consoled by the belief in the possibility of a preferment to the blessedness of a supersensible world through the medium of pure thought” (Hartmann 1893, 2).5 There then follows a lengthy quotation from Fichte’s mature work The Way Toward the Blessed Life. In the passage, Fichte articulates two different ways that we might think about happiness in finite existence. In the first case we have an agent who chases after happiness “eagerly appropriating, and devoting themselves to, the first best object that pleases them and promises to satisfy their desires” (Fichte [1806] 1889b, 304).6 They then realize that this is not really a fault of the object per se, but rather a condition of finitude—no finite object can give lasting happiness. Fichte then suggests that the agent determine[s] perhaps to renounce all faith in happiness and peace; blunting or deadening, as far as possible, their still inextinguishable aspirations; and then they call this insensibility the only true wisdom, this despair of all salvation the only true salvation, and their pretended knowledge that man is not destined to happiness, but only to this vain striving with nothing and for nothing, the true understanding. In other words, the agent, on giving up on the idea of finding satisfaction in transient objects, renounces the very idea of worldly happiness, seeing it as illusion. They then might find themselves comforted by the idea that blessedness and happiness lie beyond death. But this, as Fichte puts it, is a “mournful delusion”—not because there is no life beyond death, but because in Fichte’s view “there lies a blessedness beyond the grave for those who have already entered upon it here” and “by mere burial man cannot arrive at blessedness.” That is to say that whatever blessedness and happiness are, there is a continuity between the kind of happiness we can achieve in this life and in the next. From this passage we can see that Fichte accepts the traditional religious view that finite things cannot give us lasting happiness and that this means we should turn our attention elsewhere (to morality and religion, primarily). Hartmann, however, seems to miss the point of the passage. Fichte does indeed say that many people will chase after happiness and objects of desire, and will then reflect and say “Am I now happy[?]” and then will be “loudly answered from the very depths of [their] own soul, ‘O no, thou art as empty and needful as before’ ” (Fichte [1806] 1889b, 304). But it is a mistake to read this as Hartmann does, as suggesting that Fichte thinks this world is “the worst it could be,” and therefore seek comfort in the idea of a future world. On the contrary—Fichte explicitly denies this. Fichte is not saying that our lot is to be thrown from one desire to the next before realizing each time that it only ever leads

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us to more desire, so that our lives are to be seen as permanent dissatisfaction. In fact, from the context it is clear that Fichte is contrasting what he calls the true and the apparent life. The true life is one in which our “aspiration towards the eternal” is pre-eminent, and we know that what is truly real is the moral, the true, the good, the beautiful (ibid., 303).7 The apparent life is mistaken because it takes the objects of the sensible world to be the ultimate constituents of reality. Whilst Fichte thinks it is indeed true that many people are stuck in the apparent life, he also thinks it true that we can and should move to the true life, to become convinced that our destiny or vocation lies elsewhere. In short, Fichte definitely agrees with the pessimist that finite objects could never satisfy fully. But that is because the truth of that position is independent of the question of pessimism. Many figures in the history of philosophy and theology have felt that desire for finite objects will only ever lead to dissatisfaction and ultimately could not give happiness. But surely that is insufficient to be a pessimist. Importantly, Fichte says that “there lies a blessedness beyond the grave for those who have already entered upon it here, and in no other form or way than that by which they can already enter upon it here, in the present moment” (Fichte [1806] 1889b, 305). His point is not that the delusion is that there is a next life. The “mournful delusion” is thinking that the next life will be a place in which happiness that is currently lacking is made up for. In Fichte’s view, if one holds this view, one is liable to bemoan the next life in just the same manner—and so put off the hopeful fulfillment once more. Instead of thinking of the next life as a place in which happiness is really found, Fichte attempts to re-orient his hearers into seeing that the supersensible values of the next life are also present in the here and now.8 The inference that Hartmann drew is more-or-less the opposite of what Fichte really wants. If the true life and blessedness are possible in this world, then Fichte can surely not also think that this is the worst possible world. Indeed, as we see later, Fichte’s view of the moral-religious person is that they do not contend with thoughts of what may have been, or thoughts of why God created the world the way he did, and they do not pretend to be able to judge the works of God. Rather, they acquiesce in the faith that, as Austin Farrer would say: “Might the Creator have thought to glorify himself by constructing a cosmic gramophone, streamlined for the production of symphonic Alleluias? But that is not how, it seems, he thought to glorify himself; and he is wise” (Farrer 1962, 58). Fichte should not then be thought of as a proto-pessimist, at least not on the grounds that Hartman adduces, which are faulty. I will now turn to a discussion of Fichte’s views, in order to bring out what I see as his cautious optimism and hopefulness. Fichte, in my view, thinks that we should affirm existence and be hopeful about the future. There is evidence to suggest that he would reject the question as to whether we can have an opinion about the world itself being good or bad. Certainly it seems sometimes that he would reject evaluations of it as being the best possible or worst possible, as he in a sense thinks it is the only possible. He asks, for example, “May this eternal being exist otherwise than in this precise form? How were that possible, since this form is nothing else than existence itself; and consequently the assertion, that being could also exist in another form, would be equivalent to saying, that being could exist, and yet not exist[?]” (Fichte [1806] 1889b, 428). But then other times, for example when outlining the moralreligious person as one who has renounced themselves “and then he is wholly absorbed in God” (ibid., 438), he says that the moral-religious person “cannot wish that anything in these events should be otherwise than what it is, without wishing that the inward life, which can only thus manifest itself, should be otherwise,—and without thereby separating

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his will from the Will of God, and setting it in opposition thereto” (ibid., 442). More pertinently, he says that the religious person “cannot any longer reserve to himself a choice in these things, for he must accept everything just as it happens; for everything that comes to pass is the will of God with him, and therefore the best that can possibly come to pass. To those who love God, all things must work together for good, absolutely and immediately” (ibid., 442–443; emphasis in original). So it seems that from the standpoint of the religious person, this world is the only one really possible, and because this world is the will of God, it is the best. Indeed, part of what it means to be the one really possible world (as opposed to logically possible) is that it is the Will of God.9 This does not mean that the religious person thinks of everything as good—Fichte describes that view as “absolute shallowness” (Fichte [1806] 1889b, 472). Similarly, the religious person is “far removed from the well-known and much-commended effort of this same superficiality to put such a construction upon surrounding events as may enable it to maintain itself in this comfortable frame of mind:—to explain them away, and to interpret them into the good and the beautiful” (ibid., 473). So we have a view according to which the world is the best possible but that not everything in the world should be thought of as good. There are two ways (which are not mutually exclusive) that we can take this. The first is that Fichte is drawing a distinction between thinking that the world is good and thinking that existence itself is good. One could think that the current state of the world is good even though existence is itself not good, and vice versa. I would suggest that here Fichte might adopt the view that existence is good (because it is a manifestation of God or God’s will) but that the world is not (because of evil or sin). Secondly, we could also interpret the remarks about being the best possible world as an account of the phenomenology of the moral-religious person. That attitude, that the divine will is done, is part of what it is to have faith. That faith is not contradicted by seeing things as they are—i.e., evil. This interpretation draws support from what Fichte later says in respect of this passage. He says that the moral-religious person “regards his whole personal existence, and all outward occurrences that affect it, but as means for the fulfillment of the divine work in him” (Fichte [1806] 1889b, 446). Fichte also says that “To those who do not love God, all things must work together immediately for pain and torment, until, indirectly by means of this very torment, they are at last led to salvation” (ibid., 443). Clearly, we must be talking about something like a perspective on the world rather than a feature of the world itself, otherwise Fichte would be saying that the world is simultaneously working for good and working for bad. The moral-religious phenomenology is to appreciate the world aright, paying attention to the badness of the world, but always contextualizing this within the firm faith that all things work together for good. In my view, we should conclude that Fichte thinks this world to be the best possible not because of what it is, but because of what it can and should be. Fichte claims that the world is not currently good, but that we can hope that it will be. Our grounds for this hope are not, however, merely speculation about the future, but involve faith in the rationality of the present and past. This is one task of Fichte’s philosophy of history—to give grounds for thinking that there is a rational ordering in history and that God is at work even when He seems absent. For Fichte, the philosophy of history is salvation history. To return to other aspects of the pessimism debate, Fichte would agree with Schopenhauer that existence is not necessarily or even usually conducive to happiness and would disagree with Leibniz that it is so conducive.10 Schopenhauer, however, infers from this observation his conclusion about the badness of existence, or at least sees it as

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empirical confirmation of the a priori reasoning regarding the world as will. Fichte, on the other hand, insists that happiness is not and should not be the measure of the goodness of existence. Therefore, insofar as pessimists tend to measure the value of existence by virtue of the happiness of its inhabitants, Fichte would reject this.11 Therefore if the question as to whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic is a question of whether there is a preponderance of pain over pleasure, Fichte would say that the argument is a non sequitur. This is a plausible attitude to take. Quite apart from Schopenhauerian pessimism, it seems prima facie implausible that if the inhabitants of the world were, as Robert Nozick frames it, in an experience machine, all living very pleasurable but illusory lives, to conclude that the world was good (Nozick 1974, 42). To take a different example: J. J. C. Smart claims that if we imagine a world in which there is only one sentient being, a sadist, and that all other “sentient” creatures are not actually alive or capable of feeling but merely simulate it, then this world is preferable to one in which the person who is sentient feels grief and pain at the thought of the non-sentient creatures suffering (Smart 1973, 25). But on a Fichtean view (or any similar account), the goodness or badness of the world can only make sense as a question of the appropriateness of certain things in the world and whether moral purposes are fulfilled. Fichte would reject the inference from preponderance of pain over pleasure to pessimism, but it is perfectly consistent with his position that there actually is a preponderance of pain over pleasure. Similarly, it is plausible to think that Fichte believes that, morally evaluated, this world is bad as it is. The moral-religious person who knows that everything is in God’s world and thus is the best is the person who has the love of God, which for Fichte is the love of the moral and love of the good. This love, as Fichte says “sharpens [the moral-religious person’s] sight” so that they can and do view the evils of the world in their fullness (Fichte [1806] 1889b, 473).12 What this shows is that Fichtean optimism is not concerned with the state of the world as it is now, but rather the state of the world that we should bring about. In this spirit, whilst Beiser is surely right that Kantians need to be worried about pessimism because of the quietist attitude it implies (Beiser 2014a, 167), Fichte would reply by pointing out that optimism, at least certain strains of it, are equally implicative of a quietist attitude—the view that the situation cannot be improved is just as much a hallmark of bad forms of optimism as it is of pessimism (see Boden 1966, 294). Beiser thinks that the problem that Kantians will have with pessimism is that it leads us to think that ultimately moral or political efforts (for example, those in Kant’s essay Zur ewige Friede [Perpetual Peace])13 are pointless because either life is itself not worth living under any conditions or it could never be made significantly better. Fichte’s response to this would be the emphasis on hope. To see this in more detail, we should turn to Fichte’s philosophy of history. Fichte has a fivefold division of human history into stages. These are the “state of innocence of the human race,” followed by “the state of progressive sin,” then “the state of completed sinfulness” and “the state of progressive justification,” and finally “the state of completed justification and sanctification” (Fichte [1805] 1889a, 9–10).14 It is not quite correct to see this as a straightforward progression. It is in some way, as Fichte points out, a retrogression—the fifth stage is somewhat like a mature version of the first. The ways in which Fichte characterizes the present age are numerous. He begins by saying that it is “an age which has thrown off reason as instinct, without accepting reason in any other form in its stead, [and] has absolutely nothing remaining except the life of the individual” (Fichte [1805] 1889a, 22). The “greatest error” of the age is that each individual thinks

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“he himself is the thinking principle of his thoughts; whereas in truth he is but a single ray of the one universal and necessary thought” (ibid., 23). I take it that at least part of what Fichte thinks is so bad about the state of completed sinfulness is its individualism which is bound up with what he later calls the one single vice—to make self the object of our thoughts, or egoism (ibid., 36). Given that egoism is ultimately concerned only with one’s own personal existence, and egoism is a characteristic of the present age for Fichte, then it is clear that the present age is a bad one. It is opposed to the life of reason, which is characterized as the individual forgetting themselves, forgetting their own personality (ibid., 36). That opposition is why the present age is the age of “completed sinfulness.” Fichte wants us to conceive that we are by nature somewhat drawn to evil, but this is made much worse by the current social situation, though of course we always retain full moral responsibility for our choices.15 But Fichte also wants us to consider that the “end of the life of mankind on Earth” is “that in this life they may order all their relations with freedom according to reason” (ibid., 5). Moreover, Fichte thinks that this life “does not depend on blind chance; nor is it . . . everywhere alike . . . but it proceeds and moves onward according to a settled plan which must necessarily be fulfilled, and therefore shall certainly be fulfilled” (ibid., 16). Here we see Fichte invoke a traditional idea of providence. There is a moral plan for the world and rational beings, which will be fulfilled at some point. But Fichte always stresses the continuity of this plan with our acting in the concrete sphere. It is not something that can go on independently of us (e.g., ibid., 42–43).16 This is part of the hope at the heart of The Characteristics of the Present Age. This is a hint at why the hope might be warranted. It is to this issue that I now turn.

2 THE CHARACTER OF HOPE So we can see that Fichte’s optimism is grounded primarily in hope. Fichte can agree with Schopenhauer that there is a preponderance of pain over pleasure in the world, though he does not need to. More importantly, however, for Fichte this question is irrelevant to the question of the value of existence or the world. The value of existence and the world is derived from the moral value of things. Fichte goes so far as to say that humanity in itself has no value; it only has value relative to the moral end of reason.17 In order to see the character of Fichtean hope, we should turn to the late Jena essay “Ueber den Grund unsers Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung” (On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World-order). This essay is famous for precipitating the “atheism controversy” which ended in Fichte leaving the University of Jena.18 In that essay, there is a discussion of principles of action. Fichte discusses the key principle of Kantian moral arguments for the existence of God—that ought implies can. Just before that, however, there is a discussion of a more foundational principle. This principle can be called ‘trying implies believing possible’ (Fichte [1798] 1994a, 148). Roughly, the idea that Fichte wants to put forward is that if one performs a certain action, one is trying to bring about a certain end. To try to bring about that end just is to believe that end to be possible. Fichte says: “Once one has resolved to obey the law within oneself, then the assumption that this goal can be accomplished is utterly necessary. It is immediately contained within this very resolve. It is identical to it” (ibid., 148).19 There are two ways of reading this, a weaker and a stronger way. The weaker way is to say that Fichte thinks that it is irrational to try to bring about a certain end unless you believe that end to be achievable. The stronger is that it is genuinely impossible to try without believing possible—it is somehow built into the character of trying that one believes the end to be

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possible. We should attribute the stronger view to Fichte—he claims that trying and believing possible are “one and the same indivisible act of mind” (ibid.).20 Fichte would say that if someone claims to not believe that an end is possible, but through their action shows that they seem to be trying to bring it about, then that agent is self-deceiving in some way. Either they really are not trying to bring the thing about or they really do believe it to be possible. I, as a rational agent, have then the end of reason as my end. I could only reject this if I were to “disown my own essence” (ibid.). The point of this discussion is to get to the following conclusion: I simply must propose for myself the goal of morality. The accomplishment of this goal is possible; it is possible through me. This means, as is revealed by simple analysis, that all of the actions that I ought to accomplish, as well as my own states, which are a condition for accomplishing such actions, are related to the goal I have set for myself as a means to the same. — ibid., 149 Fichte thinks that the moral law has a general end. All actions that express a commitment to the moral law also thereby express a commitment to the belief in the possibility of this end. The end itself is sometimes stated to be the goal of reason, sometimes the goal of morality, but these all mean the same thing in the end. It is the summation of a rational being’s vocation—to be moral. One expression that Fichte gives of the “higher law” that we can and should act in accordance with is that it has the consequence that “an ethical act infallibly succeeds and an unethical one infallibly fails” (ibid.). This is one reason why Fichte takes the hope to be warranted. It is part of what it is to be a moral agent that one tries to bring about the goal of morality. Given that I have to endorse this, I then have to endorse the hope that it will become actual. Further on, Fichte describes this as “the true faith” and says of the moral order that it is “what we take to be divine” (ibid., 150). The moral order, importantly, is partly something that we bring about by virtue of our moral action. We ought to believe that our moral actions are furthering the moral world order, even if it appears otherwise.21 Fichte then asks whether we would need some further ground of the world order—some substantial and personal being which would be the ultimate explanation. Fichte argues, in effect, that the extra postulation of an agent is unwarranted, and we could just as easily stop at the postulation of a moral world order. For Fichte this extra move to a personal agent is unwarranted by the argument—all it shows is that we have to, as long as we are to be true to our nature as practical beings, believe that the goal of morality is possible and that there is a moral world order in which that is true.22 Another feature of this faith that Fichte thinks we should have, which is structurally similar to an orthodox theistic conception of God, is the following. It is often said that the attitude “belief in God” can have more than one meaning—it can have the import of an existential statement, but it also means to trust God or to commit one’s life to Him. As Alvin Plantinga says, “To a believer, the entire world looks different” (1977, 2). This optimistic faith, or trust in the moral world order, is preserved in Fichte. We should also not infer from this faith in the moral world order that Fichte advocates a kind of fatalism—or what Kant calls “theological chiliasm”—roughly, that there is ultimately no reason to perform any moral actions because there is a moral world order that governs our lives inevitably. This is the same threat that surfaced above with the invocation of providence in The Characteristics of the Present Age. Fichte says, in explanation of this very point, that when he employs the expression “order” in “moral

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world order,” “by the term ‘order’ I understand nothing but an active ordering” (Fichte [1798] 1994b, 161);23 that is, the order is not fixed in advance of its actuality. It would be improper, then, to think of this moral world order as apart from the real lives of the agents within it and who contribute to it.24 By way of a conclusion to this section, then, we can see that Fichte would demur on the question of optimism or pessimism straightforwardly phrased. Fichte has no reason to believe one way or the other that the world contains more good than evil, or more pain than pleasure. That issue does not reach the heart of what it means to be an optimist or a pessimist, for Fichte. Similarly, if asked whether existence is preferable to non-existence, Fichte would think of the question as ill-formed. Whether Fichte would advocate affirmation or denial of the world is a somewhat more appropriate question. A pessimist might see Fichte as close to the apex of advocating denial—the world as it is currently is to be disowned in favor of another, better world. The moral code that Fichte advocates is also, as was known to many of the neo-Kantians, for example, very demanding (see Kosch 2015). It represents the moral agent being fully and ultimately free, and under strict obligations at every moment. But one of Fichte’s main points is that to think that strict obligations entail denial is to fall into a trap. Morality is not, on Fichte’s account, a system of imposition that we find constraining us at every turn. Whilst it is very strict insofar as it represents the fundamental feature of morality as duty, and one has many more duties than one ordinarily might think, it is not an extra project that we have to take on to the detriment of our other projects. It rather pervades all of our projects, and in doing so, it allows us to find out our true nature as practical beings. There is no choice between our authentic selfhood and the demands of morality. Morality just is our authentic selfhood.25 To that extent, and under that interpretation, Fichte advocates affirmation of the world, rather than ascetic denial. Then we come to the most important kernel of Fichte’s brand of optimism—the issue of hope. This is by far the most important aspect—Fichte’s faith is a moral hope that the world will be such that what ought to be will be.

3 THE EDIFYING POWER OF THE MORAL LAW One might have a couple of worries at this stage. One problem is the looming specter of quietism—are the monks right that we should retreat from the world and let God work things out? This not only seems to put us in the position that Fichte would want to avoid but also means that Fichte is guilty of Hartmann’s charge or the similar charges that he distances himself from in the first lecture of The Way Toward the Blessed Life. Secondly, one might be concerned that my reading of Fichte as hoping for the mysterious movements of providence to work things out means that he jeopardizes autonomy because the solution is merely thrown into the court of the unknowable and the divine. I will now show why Fichte’s solution does not compromise autonomy nor invite quietism. It will be useful in this context to examine Luther’s distinction between law and gospel, as I think Fichte’s view stands in a sense in a Lutheran tradition. Luther distinguishes between two different ways of receiving God’s word, both of which are necessary. The order, in Luther’s mind, is law followed by gospel (Lohse 1999, ch. 28). What this means is that we are confronted with the depths of our sinfulness, by our inability to even make any real progress into what is morally required of us, and then we find ourselves in need of rescue, and then the gospel is found, with its core message of justification by faith alone. So the progression of thought moves from uneducated reason

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(proud) to educated reason (humbled and humiliated, realizing its need for salvation) to faithful reason (humbled by the law with faith in the gospel).26 The law and the gospel are not to be identified with the Old and New Testaments, respectively, as both contain parts of law and parts of gospel, though there may be a preponderance of law in the Old and gospel in the New. I take Luther’s view to be an interesting predecessor to the pessimism controversy because Luther is neither as optimistic as Leibniz—that is, he does not seem to think that this is the best of all possible worlds—nor is he straightforwardly a pessimist. Rather, Luther’s view is that we must cleave to God in all things, put our faith and trust in Him, and then, once we really truly grasp justification by faith alone, our conscience is freed, and we can finally do the right thing for its own sake.27 To put it another way, once we divorce “doing good” from salvation—once we see that salvation isn’t the right kind of thing to be merited—we can get on with doing our duty as it confronts us in everyday situations, without obsessing or worrying over the long term state of our souls. The key is that it is the very same thing—God’s Word—which is the source of both law and gospel, the source of both our humiliation and our freedom. This is interestingly similar to Fichte because Fichte ascribes to the moral law a function not unlike that of law and gospel. That is, the moral law has both the function of revealing just how evil our lives often are—radically evil, in Kant’s terminology—but also of uplifting us and appealing to our sense of the good. Fichte says: It would be intolerable to have to feel contempt for ourselves [at our disharmony and moral failure] if we were not lifted up again by the law’s continuing demand upon us, if this demand, since it issues from ourselves, did not re-instil in us courage and respect, at least for our higher character, and if this annoyance were not mitigated by the sensation that we are still capable of meeting the demand in question. — Fichte [1798] 2005, 139 Fichte’s view is then that it would be intolerable for the moral law to function in such a way as to not also bring along with it the promise of the possibility of success. The fact that I fall short of the law in so many ways should not function as a deterrent to future moral striving but as both a humbling fact and an edifying one—humbling because I am continually reminded of my finitude and edifying because I am continually reminded of my vocation for infinity. Similarly, Fichte’s hope would not require that I know a great deal about the potential consequences of my actions and how they are to line up with the goal of morality. I should not be in the position of paralyzing myself with fear and worry—being so concerned with what I ought to do that I end up actually failing in all my duties. I should face up to those duties, and if I fail, I ought to be able to report that my conscience is clear—that is, that I failed for a reason other than that I didn’t try. This is Anne Jeffrey’s characterization of this aspect of hope, though in a non-Fichtean context: “hope removes anxiety about the need to complete the work of salvation in one’s own timing through [e.g.,] coercive political action. For hope is a mean between the extreme of anxious striving, on the one hand, and despairing paralysis, on the other” (Jeffrey 2017, 205). All hope requires, then, for it to be a virtue, is that it is based in some independently compelling narrative—for Fichte, this is the narrative provided by morality, cashed out in The Way Toward the Blessed Life as true life. So we needn’t worry that Fichte is jeopardizing the motivational power of the moral law or the moral subject with his story about hope. Instead, we can see that by invoking a kind of law/gospel distinction within the sphere of morality, Fichte

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holds a position according to which the moral law is at once humbling and edifying; showing us the seriousness of our task but assuring us that we are equal to it. In addition to the quietism problem, there was also the concern that Fichte may be surrendering the autonomy of the moral subject by moving all responsibility to providence or God, making us subject to heteronomy or an alien power. Firstly, the hope we have is not hope that God will make everything aright independently of us—Fichte is not in the business of saying that we should just trust that God will, at his pleasure, declare the endtimes and make a new heaven and new earth, and that this has absolutely nothing to do with our moral efforts here and now. As he puts it, the only true confession of faith is: “joyfully and innocently to accomplish what duty commands in every circumstance” (Fichte [1798] 1994a, 150). As discussed previously, God’s providence is an active ordering as well as a moral order—this is necessary in order to preserve freedom. Similarly, the march of history does not move without us—we are the subjects of history and the shapers thereof. To use the terminology of Fichte’s philosophy of history, we would not move from the Third to the Fourth Age (“completed sinfulness” to “increasing justification and sanctification”) unless we were really a motive force behind this, finding our place in the moral world order. Secondly, we should see Fichte as again similar to Luther on this issue. They both share the view that the faithful and moral person tends to do things for their own sake, without worrying about the distant consequences (whether earthly or salvific).28 Indeed, Fichte characterizes the atheist as someone who is obsessed with working out all the details of the consequences of their action before they can be sure that what they are doing is right (e.g., Fichte [1798] 1994a, 150). Instead, on Fichte’s view, we should listen to conscience, and know that if something is right, then we need not worry ourselves about how that is supposed to affect things down the line—that is up to God; we are concerned with the present. Similarly, in Luther’s view, the Christian convinced of the doctrine of sola fide will turn back to their earthly life, assured that their salvation does not depend on whether their actions succeed right now, and in doing so, is freed from the worry and fear that paralyzes the conscience. Then they can see what they ought to do, out of sheer thankfulness to God. In my view, then, Fichte, like Luther, does not recommend that we absolve ourselves of all moral responsibility and duty because there is a provident God. Instead, it is because there is a provident God that we can fully go into the world and do good, unassailed by doubts regarding our ultimate fate, though with a hopeful attitude that the providential order will work through us to direct history in the right way.

4 CONCLUSION: THE HOPEFUL MORAL AGENT In conclusion, we can see that the questions of pessimism and optimism can be viewed from at least three angles. The first is the question of the goodness or badness of the world or existence. These two can come apart—indeed one can think that existence is good but that the world is not. The second is the question of our attitude of affirmation or denial of the world. The third is the question of hope and whether it is warranted. These questions are independent insofar as an answer to one is compatible with most answers to others. My suggestion in this paper is that Fichte has a compelling picture that is centered around hope, and so sidesteps many of the problematic aspects of the debate. I have argued that the centrality of hope for Fichte means that he can remain neutral on the goodness or badness of existence or the world, though it also seems plausible that Fichte

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might agree that the world as currently existing is bad. On the question of affirmation, I have suggested that Fichte’s view is that we should take the attitude of an affirmer, rather than a Schopenhauerian ascetic. Our vocation is a social, moral, and political one, and asceticism cannot, as a rule, do justice to these aspects of it.29 However, Fichtean morality is very demanding. One lesson to draw here is that Fichte wants us to appreciate the moral aspects of all choices we make—even those that seem trivial. That is itself a means to deepening our appreciation for our own moral natures. Fichte’s main standpoint, which puts him firmly outside the camp of the pessimists, contrary to Hartmann’s appropriation of Fichte for that movement, is that the world can, and must, become better, more moral, and more rational. This kind of moral faith is firmly rooted in a conception of ourselves as fundamentally moral creatures, who have the task of fulfilling our vocations and overcoming our moral ills. One key aspect of the Fichtean story is that the moral law can be itself simultaneously humbling and edifying, akin to how Luther’s law/gospel distinction works. Our faith and hope in the moral world order is that the world becomes better, that we contribute in some way towards doing so by fulfilling our vocations, and that we can achieve justification and sanctification thereby. This hopeful attitude is the mid-point between being paralyzed by despair or worry regarding the success of the moral and the anxiousness that is a result of the same. Instead, we go out into the world, doing good, and ardently hoping for the best.

NOTES 1.

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Anna Ezekiel and Katerina Mihaylova for very helpful comments and encouragement with this paper. Ancestors of this paper were presented at the UCL-Leipzig Graduate conference in 2017, and the British Society for the History of Philosophy conference in 2019. I thank audiences at both conferences, especially Douglas Lavin, Bob Stern, Nick Currie. Thanks are also due to Sebastian Gardner, Tom Stern, and David W. Wood for looking at several versions of this paper.

2.

The Pessimism Controversy also gets attention in Beiser 2014b, though, of course, this is primarily in the context of the neo-Kantian responses to pessimism.

3.

Fichte’s lectures Den Tatsachen des Bewußtseins (On the Facts of Consciousness) from both the Autumn of 1811 and the Winter of 1811–12, are found, alongside Schopenhauer’s sometimes very critical notes, in Schopenhauer [1809–1818] 1988.

4.

Yolanda Estes, for example, says that the later work “reflects no profound departure from his early philosophy of religion” (Estes 2008, 99–100).

5.

Hartmann also discusses Fichte as a predecessor to his notion of the unconscious in volume 1 of this text (23–24 and 362), and in volume 2 shows a tendency to associate Fichte with “subjective idealism” the other proponents of which he identifies as Kant and Schopenhauer (e.g., at 240, 332, 340).

6.

For translations of Der Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (The Characteristics of the Present Age) and The Way Toward the Blessed Life I rely on William Smith’s translations in Fichte [1805] 1889a and [1806] 1889b but have modernized the capitalization.

7.

This thought is present also, for example, in Wilbur Marshall Urban, the little-read mid-twentieth century American philosopher, who mentions a few candidates—“Love, empire, fame, justice, God” as being things by which “he lives, for these he is found willing,

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not only to live, but in his great moments to suffer and die. In his great moments of experience these are, in fact, the things which man feels to be most really real” (Urban 1949, 40–41; emphasis in original). 8.

This makes Fichte close to the tradition of “realized eschatology”: the view that God’s Kingdom has come already.

9.

I agree with Estes (2008, 103) who says “Without love, the human subject cannot act morally, because the intelligible world does not exist for it.”

10. For Fichte, see Fichte [1806] 1889b, 442; Fichte [1798] 2005, 4:146; Fichte [1794] 1988, 4:299n. For Leibniz, see Leibniz [1710] 1985, 189, 192. For Schopenhauer, see Schopenhauer [1851] 1974, 291–305. 11. For a contemporary pessimist who seems to fit this description, David Benatar’s Better Never to Have Been (2006) is exemplary. 12. This has further similarities with Farrer’s view. Farrer says that the more we love “the more we feel the evils besetting or corrupting the object of our love. But the more we feel the force of the besetting harms, the more certain we are of the value residing in what they attack” (Farrer 1962, 188). 13. Fichte’s review of Perpetual Peace has him say, near the outset, that some may dismiss it as “a pious wish, a non-authoritative proposal, or a beautiful dream” but actually “the main Idea of this book may well be something more than this . . . that this is an Idea that pertains to the essence of reason, that reason simply demands the realisation of the same” (Fichte [1796] 2001, 313). 14. In theological terms, Justification is the process or event whereby we become saved and judged righteous. Sanctification is the step after justification where an agent becomes not only saved, but good, e.g., by having their ability to sin removed after the infusion of virtue by the Holy Spirit (which in traditional Christian thought, e.g., Augustine, amounts to more freedom, not less). See Augustine 1961, chap. CV, 123. On this and related points see Zaborowski 2008, esp. 173. 15. Here Fichte shows the influence of Rousseau, mediated by Kant. But Rousseau and Kant both want to say that humans are by nature good, or at least that there is a seed of goodness within. This is true even though, as Fichte says, we are “born and fashioned in egoism, and have all lived in it” (Fichte [1805] 1889a, 37). 16. This opens interesting questions of monergism and synergism—views in soteriology: the area of theology dealing with salvation and related concepts. The interesting point is that Fichte seems to incline towards synergism, which is frequently thought to lead to Pelagianism of some sort, which is heretical. It would indeed be amusing if Fichte, famous for supposedly being an atheist, turned out to be a heretic. 17. This is why Fichte refers to rational agents as “tools of the moral law” which, for him, is roughly equivalent to the Kantian notion of ourselves as ends in ourselves (Fichte [1798] 2005, 244, 281–282, 288). 18. The relevant texts in the controversy are translated by Curtis Bowman and collected in Estes 2010. 19. This principle is closely related to “ought implies can,” which Fichte also seems to believe (see Fichte [1798] 2005, 76). 20. Strictly speaking they cannot be the same, because then any time I believe something to be possible it would follow that I try to do it. Fichte’s view strictly speaking is that the

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practical activity of trying carries with it the commitment of believing possible (and in that sense is indivisible) but that the reverse is false. 21. This is one sense in which faith “in spite of evidence” might genuinely be said to be a virtue. The moral person who continues to try to do their duty even though they have good evidence that not doing their duty may bring about more material benefits and that others have success in doing so is plausibly virtuous; they have faith that doing the moral thing is the best thing to do even though it does not seem so. 22. Thus Benjamin D. Crowe says that Fichte is content with ascribing “at most some morally relevant attributes to the divinity” and that the idea of God in Fichte is “the idea of an activity, the activity of coordinating nature and moral agency” (2010, 77–78). 23. It could be argued that Fichte changed his mind on this issue. However, it seems possible that the moral world order is both genuinely open—that it allows for free self-determining action—and that it will infallibly succeed because it is the order of reason. It also may be that this faith is what gives the hope its appropriate setting. On this theme, see Jeffrey 2017. 24. I will deal with this more fully in the next section. 25. This is brought out nicely by Allen Wood (2016, 104–105, 194). 26. A good account of the ways in which this ties together with Luther’s “theology of the cross”—that we should seek to account for the centrality of the Passion and Cross in theology—is Jorgenson 2009. 27. This is best seen in his De Libertate Christiana, also known as Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen or The Freedom of a Christian (Luther [1520] 1957, 333–377), and A Commentary on St. Paul’s Galatians (Luther [1535] 1953, 138). See also Lohse 1999, 213, on the idea of God as working through “masks.” 28. Luther’s insistence on this point is best captured in The Freedom of a Christian (Luther [1520] 1957, esp. 349–351 and 361–362). 29. Fichte’s writing on asceticism is not about asceticism as Schopenhauer advocates it; rather, it is about moral discipline in the exercise of our ordinary duty. The only extant English translation, by A. E. Kroeger, should be approached with caution (Fichte [1798] 1907).

REFERENCES Augustine (1961), Enchiridion, transl. J. B. Shaw, Washington, DC: Regency Press. Beiser, Frederick (2014a), After Hegel, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Beiser, Frederick (2014b), The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beiser, Frederick (2016), Weltschmerz, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benatar, David (2006), Better Never to Have Been, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boden, Margaret (1966), “Optimism,” Philosophy, 41 (158): 291–303. Crowe, Benjamin D. (2010), “Fichte’s Transcendental Theology,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 92 (1): 68–88. Eagleton, Terry (2015), Hope Without Optimism, London: Yale University Press. Estes, Yolanda (2008), “After Jena: Fichte’s Religionslehre,” in Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore, (eds.), After Jena: New Essays on Fichte’s Later Philosophy, 99–114, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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Estes, Yolanda (ed.) (2010), J. G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute (1798–1800), transl. Curtis Bowman, Farnham: Ashgate. Farrer, Austin (1962), Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited, London: Collins. Fichte, J. G. ([1805] 1889a), The Characteristics of the Present Age, transl. William Smith, in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, vol. 2, 1–288, London: Trubner & Co. Fichte, J. G. ([1806] 1889b), The Way Toward the Blessed Life, or The Doctrine of Religion, transl. William Smith, in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, vol. 2, 289–496, London: Trubner & Co. Fichte, J. G. ([1798] 1907), “Asceticism, or Practical Moral Culture,” transl. A. E. Kroeger, appended to W. T. Harris, (ed.), The Science of Ethics, 379–399, London: Kegan Paul. Fichte, J. G. ([1794] 1988), “Lectures on the Vocation of the Scholar,” transl. Daniel Breazeale in Daniel Breazeale, (ed.), Early Philosophical Writings, 137–184, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Fichte, J. G. ([1798] 1994a), “On the Basis of our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World-Order,” transl. Daniel Breazeale, in Daniel Breazeale, (ed.), Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and other Writings: 1798–1800, 141–154, Indianapolis: Hackett. Fichte, J. G. ([1800] 1994b), “From a Private Letter,” transl. Daniel Breazeale, in Daniel Breazeale, (ed.), Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and other Writings: 1798–1800, 155–176, Indianapolis: Hackett. Fichte, J. G. ([1796] 2001), “Review of Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” transl. Daniel Breazeale, The Philosophical Forum, 32 (4): 311–321. Fichte, J. G. ([1798] 2005), System of Ethics, transl. Günter Zöller and Daniel Breazeale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hartmann, Eduard von ([1870] 1893), The Philosophy of the Unconscious, vol. 3, transl. William Chatterton Coupland, 2nd edn., London: Kegan Paul & Co. Jeffrey, Anne (2017), “Does Hope Morally Vindicate Faith?” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 81 (1): 193–211. Jorgenson, Allen (2009), “Crux et Vocatio,” Scottish Journal of Theology, 62 (3): 282–298. Kosch, Michelle (2015), “Fichtean Kantianism in Nineteenth-Century Ethics,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 53 (1): 111–132. Leibniz, G. W. ([1710] 1985), Theodicy, ed. Austin Farrer, transl. E. M. Huggard, LaSelle, IL: Open Court, 1985. Lohse, Bernard (1999), Martin Luther’s Theology, ed. and transl. Roy A. Harrisville, Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Luther, Martin ([1535] 1953), A Commentary on St. Paul’s Galatians, ed. Philip S. Watson, transl. Erasmus Middleton, London: James Clarke & Co. Luther, Martin ([1520] 1957), The Freedom of a Christian, transl. W. A. Lambert and Harold J. Grimm, in Harold J. Grimm, (ed.), Luther’s Works, vol. 31, 333–377, Philadelphia: Concordia. Nozick, Robert (1974), Anarchy, State, and Utopia: Oxford, Blackwell. Plantinga, Alvin (1977), God, Freedom, and Evil, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Schopenhauer, Arthur ([1851] 1974), “Additional Remarks on the Doctrine of the Suffering of the World,” in Parerga and Paralipomena, 262–275, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur ([1809–1818] 1988), Manuscript Remains, vol. II, Critical Debates (1809–1818), ed. Arthur Hübscher, transl. E. J. F. Payne, Oxford: Berg. Smart, J. J. C. (1973), “An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics,” in J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, (eds.), Utilitarianism: For and Against, 1–74, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Urban, Wilbur Marshall (1949), Beyond Realism and Idealism, London: George Allen & Unwin. Wood, Allen (2016), Fichte’s Ethical Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zaborowski, Holger (2008), “Fall and Freedom: A Comparison of Fichte’s and Saint Paul’s Understandings of Original Sin,” in Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore, (eds.), After Jena: New Essays on Fichte’s Later Philosophy, 162–182, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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The Autonomy of the Heart Forberg on Action Without Belief KEVIN J. HARRELSON (Ball State University)

Friedrich Karl Forberg has a very narrow legacy to date. Among specialists on the Kantianism of the 1790s, especially among Fichte scholars, he is known principally as the instigator of the Atheismusstreit. That controversy led to Fichte’s dismissal from Jena and so the end of the glorious first era of German idealism. Forberg’s position in history is thus an unenviable one: he is known for indirectly getting his mentor fired. Furthermore, the whole episode had to do mainly with the public perception of atheism by the disputants, rather than with questions of genuine philosophical depth. To the extent that there is a philosophical issue thought to underlie the controversy, it concerns whether an atheist can be moral. In this essay, I endeavor to shift the conversation somewhat by arguing that there is a much more interesting issue to be found in Forberg’s ill-fated essay: does moral action require optimism about morality? My intent is to show that Forberg’s positions on variations of this question distinguish him positively from Kant and Fichte. It is well known that Kant and Fichte proposed arguments to the effect that we cannot act morally without confidence that the good ultimately prevails in the universe. They each wavered over many of the details, however, and my purpose in this essay is not to decide which versions of their theories are authoritative. I will try to show only that the various arguments they give on this score fit two general themes as I define them. The first theme is completionism about moral intention, and they defend a thesis in what we would call the philosophy of action. The idea appears most clearly in Kant’s Preface to Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, though it is present also in a number of texts by Fichte: action is end-oriented, such that any action lends itself to a potential regress of questions concerning its ends. On Kant’s formulation, we may block the regress only by presuming a highest good. While there is occasion for dispute over whether and how Kant settled the matter, he was reasonably firm in his conclusion that the ultimate, completed end of moral action is a just world in which happiness is distributed in accordance with virtue. The second principle common to Kant and Fichte is an integrationist account of moral agency. Integrationism requires that agents integrate their various beliefs, desires, and actions so that these are both consistent with one another and in accord with our deepest commitments. The demands of morality, integrationists reason, require a unified and thoroughly integral self. Not only must we aim at a world in which morality becomes actualized; for Kant and Fichte we must do so with some version of (what Harry Frankfurt [2005] has called) wholeheartedness. In Kant’s philosophy this idea runs through his 125

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theories of autonomy and moral agency, which are to be found as much in his historical writings as in his ethical ones (see Kleingeld 1999; 2001). In the case of Fichte this is the dominant theme running through his philosophical writings. It is worthwhile, then, to examine his interactions with Forberg from the latter’s perspective: in one fell swoop, Forberg’s argument undercuts the entire edifice of the Kantian and Fichtean moral theory, all while maintaining the terminology and style of those philosophers. Forberg, namely, rejected integrationism by divorcing action from belief, and so allowed that moral action may proceed in the face of skepticism about the action’s effects. Moreover, he did this without rejecting the Kantian notion of duty. For Forberg, the moral self is a fundamentally divided one in which the good heart overrules a skeptical intellect. These questions are practical, and we now are familiar with specific contexts that encourage the kind of moral pessimism that Forberg saw as consistent with the best of deontological moral theory. Does anti-racism, as a program of action, require confidence that there will be a post-racial era? Does environmental activism require a belief that the earth will be habitable for our distant descendants? Kant and Fichte would be unusual sources of moral consolation for those interested in such questions, given that their philosophies require broad confidence in the ultimate efficacy of moral action. Forberg, by contrast, defends the lonely heart who chooses the good in the face of an unresponsive world. He has more to recommend us, on this score, than do Kant and Fichte. The autonomy that he salvaged for moral action belongs not to the whole self, as in Kant and Fichte, but only to the heart.

1 BEYOND THE ATHEISM CONTROVERSY Forberg was a student of Platner in Leipzig and Reinhold in Jena. He completed a Latin dissertation on the Transcendental Aesthetic in 1792 (Harrelson 2010). In the mid-1790s he wrote on a variety of related topics, devoting himself most completely to the idea of free action (Forberg 1795). He also earned a reputation as a commenter on transcendental philosophy for his “Briefe an die neueste Philosophie” (Letters on the Most Recent Philosophy) which appeared in the 1797 volume of Fichte and Niethammer’s Philosophisches Journal (Forberg 1797). His extensive notebooks, published in 1796 as Fragmente aus meiner Papieren (Fragments from My Notebooks), do not suggest that he shared the theoretical ambitions of the other transcendental philosophers (Forberg 1796). That aphoristic work includes rather a long series of informal observations about virtue and character, and there is little evidence that he cared for the kind of system-building exemplified by Fichte. In 1797 he left Jena to teach in a Latin school at Saalfeld, where he remained relatively unaffected by the controversy that his modest essay inspired. He was instead promoted to principal of the school, and he later worked as a librarian while he compiled his magnum opus on classical eroticism (Forberg [1824] 2003). Forberg spent only a half-decade as a university lecturer, though he had the good fortune that this was at Jena from 1792–1797, where Fichte’s early Wissenschaftslehre was in production and Schelling was slowly coming into his own. Considering the brevity of his academic career, his theoretical and literary output is reasonably impressive. Nonetheless, “Entwicklung des Begriffs der Religion” (Development of the Concept of Religion) is probably his most notable piece, and the task here will be to separate that text and its argument from the common narratives surrounding the atheism controversy. Forberg’s treatise appeared in the Journal in autumn 1798, next to a contribution by Fichte on the same topic. Fichte’s text, to be sure, should not have been read as expressing

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a kind of atheism. But in Forberg’s case the issue is less clear: the ostensible thesis of “Development” is that morality in the Kantian style is fully compatible with a robust denial of the existence of God. The first point to consider about Forberg then is that it was indeed reasonable, we should allow, to construe this as a kind of atheism. Scholars of the atheism controversy sometimes write as if the public reaction to Forberg and Fichte was or should have been surprising (see Estes and Bowman 2010, 6). But it is important to remember that all philosophical writings on religion or morality in Saxony and Prussia were then under intense scrutiny. The fact is perhaps anathema to the tendencies of Kant scholarship, but the whole of that philosopher’s theory of religion was composed under the pressure of a pair of 1788 edicts by Wöllner and Frederick II (Wiggerman 2010). There should thus be no question as to whether these circumstances affected Kant’s career, but only over precisely how they did so (see Hunter 2005). The same is true of Fichte (whose very first publication underwent potentially censorious review) and Forberg, although there were substantial differences in censorship between Prussia (where Kant worked) and Saxony (where Fichte and Forberg worked) at this time. The interpretation of all such texts on religion or morality from this period, then, requires some sensitivity to issues of censorship. My aim in this section is to circumvent the issue as much as possible by separating the philosophical content of the relevant texts from the largely misleading religious overtones. The ostensible theses of Forberg’s and Fichte’s texts concern religion. But in both cases, “religion” is lent a very specific contextual definition, so that we can reformulate most of the substantive assertions from the controversy without reference to atheism. Forberg’s ostensive thesis, to put it in a proposition, is that morality may be practiced without religion. But his substantive thesis, on my account, will rather read: “moral action derives solely from the heart, independently of all judgment about the world beyond the agent.” This idea may be examined philosophically without further reference to the atheism controversy, and to do so is the purpose of this essay. Not only has the scholarship on these texts lent undue emphasis to the public controversy, but it has also neglected to treat Forberg as an equal party to the philosophical discussion. Forberg is typically treated as a controversial foil whose argument need not be considered on its own merits. In her excellent collection of texts from the atheism controversy, Yolanda Estes judges that there is little merit in Forberg’s proposal. Her concern, however, lies mainly with whether Fichte’s early positions on religion are consistent with his later positions. Where they have acknowledged Forberg’s principled departures from Kant and Fichte, scholars have written as if this fact alone presented an objection. Di Giovanni, for instance, claims that Forberg is unserious to whatever degree he departs from Kantianism: Forberg is trying to establish the concept of a faith which is totally independent of theoretical considerations. In this, in spite of appearances, he breaks away from Kant completely and also, as I suspect, from good sense, for I doubt that a supposedly purely subjective interest, one for which no theoretical justification can be given or need be given, would be sufficient basis for any effective morality. — Di Giovanni 1989, 88 I wish to refocus the issue by formulating the terms of debate in a terminology somewhat removed from the immediate context. We should not speak of “faith” or even “belief ” in this context, but rather of action and moral intention. This will allow us to separate the deeper questions about moral agency from the controversies surrounding religious

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orthodoxy and academic freedom. But it will also enable us to distinguish within Kantian moral theories between the metaphysics of morals and the theory of moral action. What we will find is two philosophers (Kant and Fichte) who argue that moral intention requires religion and one (Forberg) who heavily qualifies that claim. In any case, “religion” here receives an idiosyncratic definition, namely as “a practical belief in a moral worldgovernance” (Estes and Bowman 2010, 37; Lindau 1913, 37). My argument will be that on Forberg’s reading “practical belief ” does not name a cognitive component of intentional action, whereas for Kant and Fichte it does denote such a component.

2 KANT’S DOCTRINES OF PRACTICAL BELIEF AND THE HIGHEST GOOD In this section I wish to review Kant’s doctrines of the highest good and practical belief in order to argue that Kant is committed to some version of completionism about moral intention. In other words, while the specifics of Kant’s formulations of these concepts varied between 1781 and 1793, he never contradicted the sole thesis I am concerned to attribute to him: it is incoherent to choose to do right if we believe that the world does not, in the very long run, comply with our intentions. Moreover, we may take “believe” in a sense in which the notion of a highest good is consciously entertained by the moral actor. Establishing the last point is the main aim of this section. The theoretical background of this problem begins near the end of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (A804–819). In that text, Kant formulated the notion of a summum bonum or highest good, which he described as an ideal condition in which happiness is distributed according to moral worth. Kant was concerned, like many Enlightenment figures, with the apparent disharmony between morality and happiness. His broad context thus included pessimism and optimism as we find those worries expressed by writers like Leibniz, Voltaire, and Pope. But his solutions to these issues aimed rather at classical sources of moral theory: Stoics and Epicureans had treated happiness as analytically related to virtue. Virtue is, to cite a platitude, its own reward. The Stoic sage cannot but be happy, no matter what his worldly condition. Against this, Kant rightly asserted that happiness could have only a synthetic relationship to virtue. Despite his complex terminology, then, Kant was dealing with the same sort of plain observation that earlier Enlightenment figures had formulated: there are good people who are unhappy, and evil people who meet with great fortunes. This circumstance would suggest that the world is unjust to the extent that the virtuous deserve happiness whereas the vicious do not. Kant’s concern in this section is not only with metaphysics needed for an understanding of this problem (viz., the Leibnizian problem of a theodicy, see A812/ B840) but also with the simpler problem of moral motivation: why would anyone choose the good if this is unrelated, at least analytically, to happiness? If our motivation is happiness, he argues, it would not follow that we should be moral unless we presume that there is a highest good. To cite his decorative language: “the majestic ideas of morality are, to be sure, objects of approbation and admiration but not incentives for resolve and realization, because they would not fulfill the whole end that is necessary for every rational being” (A813/B841).1 Kant left these sections unaltered in the second edition of the Critique, but not because his views had not changed. His Critique of Practical Reason, published nearly simultaneously with the second edition of the earlier Critique, shifts the terms of discussion substantially. The standard reading of this issue is that, after the first Critique, Kant

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developed both a more nuanced theory of moral agency and also a stricter set of arguments about duty (see Pasternack 2011; 2017; Bacin and Sensen 2018). This reading has much to recommend it, since Kant frequently argued that duty should have no extrinsic motivations. The standard story has it that the summum bonum then acquired for Kant a purely theoretical function: if it were not the case, Kant reasons, that a highest good is at least possible, then the moral law would have no objectivity. But this point is not about the motivation of individual persons to act, nor does it concern the merely psychological requirements for free actions. It concerns rather the metaphysical or metaethical basis of Kant’s theory, and so lies beyond Forberg’s target in “Development.” Even if the standard reading—viz., that the “highest good” assumes more of a metaphysical and less of a psychological role for Kant—is correct, however, that does not imply that Kant ceased to worry about motivation or intention. Those problems, to be sure, are less central to his canonical works in ethics, but they do appear importantly in both the Critique of Judgment and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Near the end of the former work, Kant speculates about the possibility of what he called the moral atheist: We might thus consider a righteous man (such as Spinoza) who actively reveres the moral law [but] who remains firmly persuaded that there is no God and . . . that there is also no future life: How will he judge his own inner destination to a purpose, [imposed] by the moral law? He does not require that complying with that law should bring him an advantage, either in this world or in another; rather, he is unselfish and wants only to bring about the good to which that sacred law directs all his forces. — KU, AA 05:452 Here Kant licenses the possibility of moral atheists, which is to say skeptics about morality who live and act morally. Later we will examine Kant’s rejection of the rationality of such a life. I wish only to note that, for Kant, the “practical belief ” that he requires in regard to the summum bonum is not only a matter of pure practical reason but also a requirement of moral intentions. To this extent we must attribute even to Kant at least two meanings of “practical belief,” and the failure to distinguish between these may lead us to misread the Fichte-Forberg debate. One sense of practical belief concerns the postulates of the second Critique, which are propositions of transcendental philosophy. The second sense of practical belief concerns what a given individual must think in order to coherently and rationally engage in free action. Kant’s thinking on these subjects receives a clearer formulation in the Preface to the first edition of Religion. In that text, he distinguishes more sharply between the psychological and metaphysical domains of morality, and on the basis of that text alone that we could ascribe to Kant a full theory of moral intention. The opening passages of Religion pay homage to the domain of high moral theory, in which duty requires no end outside itself: “morality needs . . . no end, either to recognize what duty is or to impel its performance” (Rel, AA 06:4). But Kant abruptly interjects to claim that intentional action is nevertheless end-oriented, since “in the absence of all reference to an end no determination of the will can take place in human beings at all” (ibid.). When we particular humans act, Kant continues, the representation of the consequence of our action “must nonetheless be admissible” (ibid.). No doubt we can do things without knowing what we are doing, but intentional action consists partly in our representing an end of our actions. To use Fichte’s example: if I intentionally grow tomatoes I must, among other requirements, represent to myself grown tomatoes.

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An individual who pursues an action freely must, then, think of the end or result of that action. The point of Kant’s opening argument had been only that the end or result of our action is not the reason why we choose it. If the action is free, in other words, we choose it only because it is right. Kant insists, however, that one condition of the rightness of our action is that we are also aware of the action’s consequences. In the remainder of the Preface, Kant introduces a second argumentative step, inferring from “moral action requires us to represent its end” to “morality thus leads inevitably to religion.” By itself, this would be a fairly modest version of the completionist argument, since “religion” could entail all sorts of things. Nonetheless, he moves rather immediately to the conclusion that the only object that could serve as the end of right action is a “highest good in the world” (Rel, AA 06:5). Why, for Kant, must I, qua particular human, conceive of a highest good? Why does the need to think of the longer-term ends of our actions require us to think of a summum bonum? Why does the resolve to tell the truth lead us to represent a world in which truth-tellers are rewarded? We should not let the difficulties of reconstructing the Kantian architectonic—Kant’s entire exegesis proceeds from a worry we will mistake a consequence of morality for its ground—distract us from the mysteriousness of this inference in regard to its validity. For Kant, again, it should follow fairly plainly from “I endeavor to develop my talents” that “I endeavor that there be a just world.” It is this sort of mysterious inference that Fichte seeks to justify in his writings from the atheism controversy.

3 FICHTE’S PARADOX In the same issue of the Journal in which Forberg’s “Development” appeared, Fichte published his own essay called “Ueber den Grund unsers Glaubens an einer göttliche Weltregierung” (On the Basis of the Belief in a Divine Governance of the World). He meant this as a mild corrective to Forberg’s more aggressive treatise, and he hoped thereby to distinguish his own position from that of a younger colleague who appeared to borrow his terminology and style of argument. In this intervention he was correct, though the ensuing controversy was fatal to his early career. His position on moral action was, namely, more consonant with the religious orthodoxy than was Forberg’s. Fichte did argue in “Basis” that practical faith in divine governance is a basic fact of the human condition. He opened his essay by declaring, rightly, that Forberg “does not so much oppose [my] convictions as fail to arrive at them” (Estes and Bowman 2010, 21; GA I/5, 347). His convictions included the claim that, as Kant had also argued, morality serves as the basis of a belief of divine governance (and, as in Kant, not vice versa). As in many other texts by Fichte, the argument turns on his claim that there is a species of contradiction (a “performative contradiction,” we now call it) involved in denying our own freedom. Next, he supposes (as Kant does in Religion) that freedom has an object, or a result that it seeks to bring about: “I am free” entails “I intend a certain x” or “I intend to Φ.” Free will always has, for Fichte, a specific aim—in his terminology it is always “determinate.” But to intend a certain course of action or a certain result, for Fichte, requires also that we believe that the intended result will come about. “I intend to tell the truth” implies (analytically) that “I believe I will tell the truth”: By taking hold of that goal posited by my own being and turning it into the goal of my real action, I simultaneously posit as possible the accomplishing of that very goal

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through real action. Both propositions are identical, for “I intend something as a goal for myself ” means “I posit it as real at some future time.” — Estes and Bowman 2010, 24; GA I/5, 352 This first step of the argument (viz., that moral intention requires representation of the result, and so a belief that the result is possible) is valid in a certain, first-personal sense. We act freely only if we think of our own action as at least potentially successful. We might think of this as Fichte’s Paradox, which presents a parallel to Moore’s Paradox. G. E. Moore later famously claimed that it is absurd to assert “I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don’t believe that I did” (Moore 1942, 543). His point was that belief has specific first-personal properties that do not reduce to third-personal ones. Fichte’s Paradox focuses on intention rather than belief, but otherwise makes the same point: Fichte’s Paradox: we may not, on pain of contradiction, assert both “I intend to tell the truth” and “I don’t believe I will tell the truth.” We cannot, in other words, sincerely intend what we believe to be impossible, or even what we expect will not occur. In intending we rather presume the world to be orderly enough for there to be an effective relationship between my intention and its fulfillment. There is a deep truth here about intentional action, and our task in the remainder will be to locate the proper boundaries of the point. The remainder of “Basis” falls short of Fichte’s theoretical goals, however, in that he fails to justify the second part of the argument, namely the completionist step. From the fact that I think of my action as potentially successful it does not follow that the world has a specifically moral order, nor that this order satisfies the majestic ideas of Kantian theories. Fichte, however, presumes what we might view as a strange and mainly unjustified (in these texts) equivalence between the level of order required by a simple moral intention and the kind of Weltregierung that he aspired to equate with Kant’s end of history, kingdom of ends, etc. To see how Fichte later tried to supplement the argument in order to justify the assumption of a moral order, we should examine briefly one of the later texts of the atheism controversy. In the January 1800 issue of the Philosophisches Journal Fichte published a text labeled “Aus einem Privatschreiben” (From a Private Letter) in which he rephrased much of the argument of “Basis” in the form of a parable2: Now ask my opponent . . . “You go out, say, to sow seeds. For the time being this may count as your action. But without a doubt you are not sowing merely in order to be sowing, but rather so that your seeds will sprout and bear fruit. The latter, the future harvest, is no longer your action but rather the goal of your action; and you will doubtless see that this is not one thing but rather two . . . . This fructifying power, not your sowing, is the final sufficient reason for the harvest.” — Estes and Bowman 2010, 258; GA I/6, 378 The parable makes the point that the result of every intention is independent of the intention itself: “I intend to grow tomatoes” includes the proposition that “tomatoes grow.” My intention to grow tomatoes, moreover, is not identical to growing tomatoes. Tomatoes, rather, grow quite independently of me, as a result of certain facts about sunlight, soil, and some botanical facts of which we may know little, etc. The key point is that two sides of my intention (the intention-to-grow and the actual growing) must hang together in a lawlike fashion in order for any intentions to be effective. Moreover,

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in order for me to intend to grow tomatoes, I must also have the belief that tomatoes grow. I cannot intend to grow tomatoes if I believe the growth to be impossible or perhaps even unlikely. Fichte’s simple point, then, is that in acting morally I likewise presume the reality of a moral order that complies with my intention to so act. Differently put, it would be irrational of me to proclaim “I intend to grow tomatoes” if I did not at a deep level accept a certain account of the principles of botanical nature, as well as my ability to affect that botanical nature at least in this instance. Likewise, whoever utters “I endeavor to tell the truth” presumes something about the moral nature of the universe, as well as about our ability to help bring morality to actualization. But it is hardly required by the argument thus far to gloss my expression “something about the moral nature of the universe” by inserting “that the righteous meet with rewards in the very long run.” This is the completionist step that both Kant and Fichte need to justify.

4 FORBERG’S ARGUMENT IN “DEVELOPMENT” Forberg’s “Development” repeats many of the themes discussed above about moral intentions, but it undercuts other aspects of the argument. Forberg employs the language of Kant and Fichte throughout, and he clearly means to adhere to a certain minimalist reading of Kantianism. But he carefully imposes limits on how we should interpret “moral world-governance” and “practical belief ”: the world-governance required by Fichte’s argument need not be so majestic, and it certainly need not rest in a summum bonum. Moreover, Forberg’s notion of “practical belief ” is not even a minimally cognitive requirement in the sense that it is for Kant and Fichte. The purpose of this section is to divest his argument from the Kantian terminology and so to reveal Forberg’s more defensible notion of action. The opening few sentences recite the whole matter in Kantian/Fichtean language. Following his definition of “religion” as “nothing other than a practical faith in a moral world-governance,” he continues: “It is clear from the words themselves what a moral world-governance is. If things happen in the world so that the ultimate success of the good is to be expected, then there is a moral world-governance. If, on the contrary, fate is unconcerned about virtue and vice, then there is no moral world-governance” (Estes and Bowman 2010, 37; Lindau 1913, 37). Despite this apparent Kantianism, Forberg introduces three important points of disagreement that determine his conclusions. The first is that even the minimal sense of “moral world-governance” is compatible with all kinds of religious ideas. Kant had, for at least a dozen years, tried to argue that moral action requires that we revive some specifically scholastic notions of God; Fichte had likewise argued that moral intention requires that we assume a deep level of moral worldorder, although he had not given further theological specifications of this idea prior to the atheism controversy. It seems plausible enough on Forberg’s part, however, that moral action should be indifferent to the precise manner in which we conceive of the moral order. In fact, he took this indifference to be a consequence of Kant’s division of practical from theoretical reason. A polytheistic pantheon, he concludes, would be just as appropriate as a highest good: “Religion can co-exist just as well with polytheism as with monotheism, just as well with anthropomorphism as with spiritualism. If only morality remains the rule of the world-governance, then it is otherwise all the same whether one believes in a monarchical or aristocratic world-constitution” (Estes and Bowman 2010, 37; Lindau 1913, 37).

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The second point of conflict between Forberg and his predecessors concerns Forberg’s higher tolerance of Enlightenment pessimism. He claims, in a series of passages that echo Hume or Voltaire, that “it has been the ancient complaint of all righteous people from time immemorial that evil so often triumphs over good” (Estes and Bowman 2010, 37; Lindau 1913, 39). Kant had of course acknowledged this tradition, but he had also authored many works (such as “Ideas toward a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent”) in which he stressed the importance of conceiving of human history as proceeding according to a principle of progress. Consider, among many such texts, the eighth thesis from “Universal History,” in which Kant claims that “[o]ne can regard the history of the human species, in the large, as the realization of a hidden plan of nature” (IaG, AA 08:27). Much to the contrary of Kant, then, Forberg accepts a morally pessimistic account of human history: “Human beings have not become better. Injustice is no less in vogue. . . . The language of justice, honesty, and fidelity still sounds like foolishness to the ears of the world. The appearance of selflessness, integrity, and generosity is still a rare, admirable occurrence. The irresponsible barbarism of warfare still continues” (Estes and Bowman 2010, 42; Lindau 1913, 48). Forberg’s third objection, however, contains the key to the entire dispute. He rejects the entire notion of practical belief as Kant and Fichte understand it, and he substitutes for it a minimal sense of “practical belief ” that is as valid thirdpersonally as it is first-personally. He anticipates this point by substituting the term “wish” in several instances for the more obscure Kantian terminology. To the question of how morality arises in the heart, Forberg writes: “Religion arises solely from the wish of a good heart that the good in the world may maintain the upper hand over the evil in the world. No wish of this kind is present in an evil heart” (Estes and Bowman 2010, 39; Lindau 1913, 42). To be sure, Forberg continues to use the expression “practical belief ” just as frequently as Kant and Fichte do, but it is clear that he means for this to be compatible with a thoroughgoing skepticism about the effects of moral action. In a later portion of the text, he glosses the whole argument again in a terminologically inconsistent way. He repeats that we have a duty to believe (equivocating on “believe”) in a Weltregierung, but he also declares that we have a duty merely to act as if we so believed: Only this faith is by no means a duty insofar as it is theoretical, that is, idle speculation, but rather only insofar as it is practical, that is, insofar as it is the maxim of real actions. In other words, it is not a duty to believe that a moral world-governance or God as the moral world-sovereign exists; instead, it is merely a duty to act as if one believed it. — Estes and Bowman 2010, 44; Lindau 1913, 51 As I indicated above, there are several notions of practical belief that need to be parsed here. But the upshot of my review of Kant and Fichte is that in both cases a practical belief is a kind of first-personal knowledge. This element of Kant’s argument was present already in the Critique of Pure Reason, when he wrote that we cannot conclude that “it is certain,” but we can conclude that “I am certain” (A829/B857). For Forberg, we would rather say not that I am certain but rather only “I wish.” A moral intention, and its action, need not be accompanied by belief in its result, as Kant and Fichte had taken so much trouble to argue. Forberg’s notion of practical faith, then, does not contain the same first-personal element isolated in Fichte’s Paradox: we may indeed say, without contradiction, “I hope that it happens although it seems unlikely” or “I will try but likely fail.” In Forberg’s

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defense, we could appeal to other kinds of action, such as ironic or defiant actions. In such cases, it would seem that belief in the efficacy of our action would no longer be a necessary component of our intention. These types of action fit rather neatly in the conceptual space opened by Forberg’s claim that “it is merely a duty to act as if one believed.” What we believe, in this sense of “practical belief,” is therefore no more than what an external observer may reasonably describe as the maxim of our action. In other words, Forberg’s notion of practical belief is now closer to “wish” or “hope.” It does not require the special form of first-personal knowledge presumed throughout the Kantian/ Fichtean theories. This should suffice to make a prima facie case for Forberg’s notion of action without belief. To further make the case we will need to examine the second principle of the Kantian and Fichtean arguments, namely the integrationist principle. Both Kant and Fichte argue that we humans cannot sustain a moral life while acting under such conflicted intentions. They instead place certain restrictions on the rationality, and hence (for them) morality, of intentional action. Once we have these arguments in place, we may return to Forberg’s dramatic depiction of a heart that rebels against the head. The head knows, after all, that the world will likely not reward just action, and that perpetual peace on earth is a highly improbable (though not logically impossible) conjecture by the Kantian. The good heart, nevertheless, pursues its duty. This presents a romantic conflict between the head and the heart that, for Forberg, is the basic human moral situation.

5 KANT AND FICHTE ON THE DIVIDED SELF Above, I cited a passage from the Critique of Judgment in which Kant licensed the logical possibility of denying moral optimism while also adhering to the moral law. Here I wish to examine the rest of Kant’s judgment of Spinoza. The remainder of the passage reads: “Yet his effort encounters contingently with the purpose of his that he feels so obligated and impelled to achieve, he can never expect nature to harmonize with it in a way governed by laws and permanent rules (such as his inner maxims are and must be)” (KU, AA 05:452). We can imagine Forberg assenting to this passage, which is to say that he will agree with Kant that the moral atheist, like any other moral person, will meet with injustice on all sides and likely become discouraged. In fact, much of “Development” reads as a further dramatization of just this case. But Forberg did not, as Kant did, take this as sufficient reason for the moral saint to reject the dilemma. On Kant’s account, the efforts of a Spinoza lead rather to a life that is (as Hare [2005] aptly describes it) rationally unstable. A full examination of the details of this point would require Kant’s discussion of the inclination to evil in Religion, but the Critique of Judgment supplies the essentials: [S]uppose that, regarding this purpose too, he wants to continue to adhere to the call of his inner moral vocation. . . . In that case he must—from a practical point of view, i.e., so that he can at least form a concept of the possibility of [achieving] the final purpose that is morally prescribed to him—assume the existence of a moral author of the world. — KU, AA 05:452 On Hare’s analysis, which he bases on several additional passages from Kant’s lectures, Kant sees the moral atheist as rationally unstable, such that the skeptic must assume the existence of a moral Weltregierung if he wishes to continue to pursue a moral life. This claim from the third Critique underlies Kant’s decision in Religion that the development

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of the moral principle in our hearts requires cultivation through religious communities. Kant understood, then, that moral action is minimally possible for the moral skeptic or atheist, but he saw religion as a buffer against an inevitable breakdown of will. Belief in a highest good would, he concludes, make it possible to sustain the moral course over the long haul. One problem with this argument is that we could grant it and still reject the summum bonum. The latter could be, after all, a useful untruth. But that is not Forberg’s position (it is rather Vaihinger’s; see his [1911] 1986). Forberg rather embraced the instability of moral action, and he took this to be the actual situation of humans who have good hearts. In Fichte’s case, on the other hand, there is both a more thoroughgoing acceptance of the basic fact of divided selves and a more thoroughgoing repudiation of this fact in relation to morality. To illustrate this point briefly from Fichte’s corpus I will lean on an interpretation offered of him by Daniel Breazeale. Breazeale explains that Fichte “understood his scientific project as a response to a deeper and fundamentally practical need—a demand not for theoretical certainty or even for practical conviction, but rather, for personal unity and wholeness” (Breazeale 2013, 131). The idea that the purpose of philosophy (as opposed to religion, on Kant’s view) is to supply a sense of wholeness is an overriding theme in Fichte’s philosophy, and I wish here only to indicate a few passages in which this point illuminates his dispute with Forberg. Fichte had even preceded Forberg in locating the basic divide as that between the head and the heart. In a letter to Reinhold from 1795, for instance, Fichte claimed that “[m]an’s highest drive is directed at the attainment of absolute agreement with himself— agreement between the theoretical and practical faculties, the head and the heart. If I do not accept in practice what I must accept in theory, I place myself in clear contradiction with myself” (Breazeale 2013, 133). In the big picture, Fichte reasoned that free, moral action must lead to the conclusion that the world is organized in accordance with such action. But to demonstrate this he recognized (unlike Kant) that it could only be so if my freedom in fact determines that order of the world. The world as such, for Fichte, became a product of the activity of the I. The first-personal reasoning that we find in Fichte’s Paradox is thus the principle of his vast philosophical system. To put the whole matter for Fichte in a nutshell: in order to reason from “I intend to tell the truth” to “the world has a moral order,” we need to assume that the desired Weltordnung has the first-personal structure of Fichte’s Paradox. Of course, this is not the place to examine the validity of the many argumentative steps along Fichte’s path, but rather only to indicate that the completionist argument holds only if we defend it with a vast theoretical edifice of the sort that Fichte devoted his life to constructing. Forberg, on the other hand, wished to defend the defiant lonely heart. He thus rejected both the task of systematic philosophy, as Fichte saw it, and also the hope to integrate all aspects of subjectivity. To make this point he ended “Development” with a clear shot at Fichte: “But one must answer these questions in the same style in which they are raised, and not in the style of a system of which it is already very doubtful whether it has given more assistance to science or to ignorance” (Estes and Bowman 2010, 45; Lindau 1913, 54).

6 FORBERG’S LONELY HEART The integrationist arguments have a certain appeal to them, to the extent that they portray moral agents as we are compelled to think of ourselves, namely as free and integral. It

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would be edifying also to think that my intentional actions reveal something about the deep structure of the world. Personal unity is likewise an attractive ideal, but one that, as even Fichte admitted, runs contrary to the facts of the human situation. In that regard we should consider, rather, how moral action occurs in the life of a human being who is not a transcendental philosopher, and this is what Forberg examines. We should follow him in thinking of those humans around us who have hearts inclined towards certain ends but also heads that doubt whether those ends will ever be achieved. We should think, in other words, of the hopeful yet conflicted persons who nevertheless pursue what they take to be right. Forberg defends the activity of these people in two respects. The first point is that he acknowledges something that for Kant was a merely theoretical point, namely that the heart may overcome the head. I may act rightly, in other words, despite all skepticism and even pessimism about the place of morality in the world. This is indeed what activists do when their causes, as in the examples of anti-racism and environmentalism, are improbable ones. The moral agent is one who struggles against circumstance, since we do not, pace Kant, know the world to be good. Moral action thus reveals itself most clearly precisely when our projects have unlikely outcomes. For Forberg, the opposition between the heart and the head is so central to morality that he sees freedom better demonstrated precisely when we are intellectually disposed to doubt the efficacy of our actions: “The power of the moral will, on the contrary, appears nowhere more splendidly and more sublimely than in the maxim of the religious person: I will that things may get better, even though nature does not will this!” (Estes and Bowman 2010, 45; Lindau 1913, 53). One might object that Forberg’s division between the heart and the head would leave the heart—the seat of all good will—and its moral instinct without any content. Without some level of interaction with the head, how does the heart know what to do at all? Otherwise put, the heart needs to get its direction from somewhere. How does anyone know (in their heart) which actions are the right ones? The heart, after all, is always in conflict with other hearts as well as the head. How do we find, to appeal to my own examples, the anti-racist and environmentalist imperatives in the first place? There are, we must allow, racist hearts as well. Forberg addresses this worry when he discusses the possibility of agreement required among moral actors. He sees the agreement of all hearts in the moral law as the primary object of our hopes: “Just as the idea of a future possible agreement of all people in all judgments hovers incessantly before the eyes of all thinking people, there also hovers before the eyes of all morally good people the idea of a universal agreement about the good, the idea of a universal dissemination of justice and goodwill” (Estes and Bowman 2010, 40; Lindau 1913, 45). The idea here borders on an acceptance of the relativism implied by his subjectivist position, but the relativism is only epistemic. A consequence, namely, of divorcing the heart or will from its belief-component is that we do not know that our heart (as opposed to that of other people) is in the right. Certainty about the moral law, by contrast, could only be intellectual. It follows from this picture of free action, then, that we can also only hope that our heart is in the right place. Rather than a form of relativism, this view requires only humility. It implies only that the good, moral actor will not know by introspection that she is a good, moral actor. In acting rightly, then, Forberg’s lonely heart hopes for universal, moral agreement without (as in Kant and Fichte) demanding it. In that respect Forberg’s argument is rather a defense of moral humility as well as hope.

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7 CONCLUDING REVIEW The arguments of the foregoing lend themselves to review in a series of straightforward propositions. Kant, Fichte, and Forberg accept some common premises about free, intentional action: 1. In order to act morally we must think of ourselves as free. 2. In order to think of ourselves as free we must think of ourselves as acting towards a particular end. 3. In order to freely act towards that particular end, we must represent it to ourselves as possible. 4. The end towards which we act freely, however, is not entirely in our control. 5. So in order to think of our action as efficacious, or to think of the end as brought about by our action, we must think of our free action as part and parcel of an orderly universe. What Kant and Fichte wish to add to this otherwise very reasonable argument, however, is a pair of implausible additions that their arguments do not obviously justify: 6. We can only intend to (freely) act in the right if we think of the universe as, in the very long run, just and good. 7. We can only think of the universe as just and good to the extent that we lend ourselves a sense of personal unity. Forberg, on the other hand, holds open the possibility that there is moral (and hence free) action without the requirement that we think of ourselves so completely as oriented to a final end, and without our having to discover personal unity as a prerequisite for thinking of such majestic ends. He rather substituted the more reasonable conclusions: 6a. We can only pursue the good in the hope that it prevails in the very long run, and 7a. We only do so when we hope that all hearts will, in the very long run, pursue this along with us. Forberg reached these conclusions, however, only as a result of his courage to think of humans as fundamentally divided. We may, he insisted, acknowledge the sense of duty in our hearts without thinking of our hearts as deeply related to the ordering principle of the universe. That, for him, was too immodest a thought, although he allowed that we should hope (in our hearts!) that we act rightly. In Forberg’s case alone among our three philosophers, then, did the human hope for a good world coexist with the humility appropriate to its situation. In Forberg’s case alone, just the same, could the activist also be a patient and tolerant pluralist, hopeful but unconvinced that the instincts of their heart correspond to the highest goods.

NOTES 1.

Translations from the Critique of Pure Reason are by Guyer and Wood in Kant [1781/1787] 1998. Other passages by Kant are from extant translations as follows: Critique of Judgment

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by Werner Pluhar (Kant [1790] 1987); Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason by George di Giovanni and Allen Wood (Kant [1793] 1998); and “Ideas toward a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent” by Ted Humphrey (Kant 1983). 2.

Much of the content of “Privatschreiben” concerns accusations of atheism, and the (what I have argued) burdensome equivalence between “God” and “moral world-order.” This problem causes Fichte to have to also explain other instances of his peculiar philosophical terminology, as well as the differences between the common meanings of terms and his stipulative distinctions. As I have suggested, we may avoid such problems as misfortunes of context.

REFERENCES Bacin, Stefano and Oliver Sensen (eds.) (2018), The Emergence of Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowman, Curtis and Yolanda Estes (2010), J. G. Fichte and the Atheism Dispute (1798–1800), Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Breazeale, Daniel (2013), Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre: Themes from Fichte’s Early Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Di Giovanni, George (1989), “From Jacobi’s Philosophical Novel to Fichte’s Idealism: Some Comments on the 1798–99 ‘Atheism Dispute,’ ” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 27 (1): 75–100. Fichte, J. G. (1964), Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften [GA], Reinhard Lauth, Hans Jacob and Hans Gliwitsky, (eds.), Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann. Forberg, F. K. (1795), Ueber die Gründe und Gesetze freyer Handlungen, Jena. Forberg, F. K. (1796), Fragmente aus meiner Papieren, Jena. Forberg, F. K. (1797), “Briefe über die neueste Philosophie,” Philosophisches Journal einer Gesellschaft Teutscher Gelehrten, 6: 48–88 and 7: 259–272. Forberg, F. K. ([1824] 2003), The Manual of Classical Erotology (De figura veneris), Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific. Frankfurt, H. G. (2005), “Identification and Wholeheartedness,” in Free Will: Free Agency, Moral Responsibility, and Skepticism, 37–53, London and New York: Routledge. Hare, John (2005), “Kant on the Rational Instability of Atheism,” in Andrew Dole and Andrew Chignell, (eds.), God and the Ethics of Belief: New Essays in Philosophy of Religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrelson, Kevin (2010), “Friedrich Karl Forberg,” in Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers, 338–339, New York: Continuum. Hunter, Ian (2005), “Kant’s Religion and Prussian Religious Policy,” Modern Intellectual History, 2 (1): 1–27. Kant, Immanuel ([1781/1787] 1998), Critique of Pure Reason, transl. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1790] 1987), Critique of Judgment, transl. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett. Kant, Immanuel ([1793] 1998), Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, transl. George Di Giovanni and Allen Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel (1983), Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, transl. Ted Humphrey, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett.

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Kleingeld, Pauline (1999), “Kant, History, and the Idea of Moral Development,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 16 (1): 59–80. Kleingeld, Pauline (2001), “Nature or Providence? On the Theoretical and Moral Importance of Kant’s Philosophy of History,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 75 (2): 201–219. Lindau, Hans (ed.) (1913), Die Schriften zu J. G. Fichte’s Atheismus-Streit, 1798–1800. Munich: Georg Müller. Moore, G. E. (1942), “A Reply to My Critics,” in P. Schilpp, (ed.), The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, 535–677, La Salle, IL: Open Court. Pasternack, Lawrence (2011), “The Development and Scope of Kantian Belief: The Highest Good, The Practical Postulates and The Fact of Reason,” Kant-Studien, 102 (3): 290–315. Pasternack, Lawrence (2017), “Restoring Kant’s Conception of the Highest Good,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 55 (3): 435–468. Vaihinger, Hans ([1911] 1986), Die Philosophie des Als Ob, Aalen: Scientia. Wiggermann, U. (2010), Woellner und das Religionsedikt. Kirchenpolitik und kirchliche Wirklichkeit im Preußen des späten 18. Jahrhunderts (Beiträge zur historischen Theologie, 150), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

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Mind Subverted to Madness The Psychological Force of Hope as Affect in Kant and J. C. Hoffbauer KATERINA MIHAYLOVA (Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg)

Johann Christoph Hoffbauer (1766–1827) was a professor of philosophy working and teaching at the University of Halle. Like most of his colleagues in Halle at that time,1 Hoffbauer’s philosophical work follows and develops Kantian ideas (see Meyer and Schenk 2011, 158–179; Ersch and Gruber 1832, 246–249). However, while Hoffbauer’s work on logic, moral philosophy, and natural law mostly aims to clarify and explain Kantian ideas, Hoffbauer develops his work in psychology far beyond Kant. This work was already very influential at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For example, in his 1808 treatise on the Geschichte der Psychologie (History of Psychology), German philosopher and psychologist Friedrich August Carus praises Hoffbauer for his contributions to psychological research, emphasizing in particular his achievements in empirical psychology (Carus 1808, 713–714). In this chapter I compare the concept of hope as affect in the psychology of Kant and Hoffbauer, pointing out continuities and discontinuities between their discussions of this concept. I sketch the negative aspects of hope in Kant’s work, and his responses to questions of how hope can impair the objectivity of judgments about the future and what the negative effects of this impairment are. Although Kant does not consider hope as essentially an affect, he maintains that, in some kind of (pre-rational) natural state of human existence, it does function as an affect, and, as a result, impairs our cognitive faculties. In order to prevent such an impairment, he claims, we need to use reason to govern all our faculties. Hoffbauer takes up this idea in the newly developed context of clinical psychology. The first part of the chapter presents a short sketch of Kant’s psychological concept of hope as affect, focusing on the possible negative effects of hope on the function of human understanding. The second part examines the reception of this Kantian theory in Hoffbauer’s psychology. The analysis in this section focuses on Hoffbauer’s analysis of how the affective impact of hope may cause the inappropriate use of our cognitive faculties, even potentially leading to a serious impairment of our sanity. This psychological perspective sheds new light on Kant’s claim that reason has an essential interest in hope.

1 KANT ON HOPE AS AFFECT The discussion of hope in Kant’s critical philosophy, including the claim of reason’s interest in hope,2 presupposes knowledge about Kant’s psychology of hope. This includes 141

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the relationship between hope and happiness as the object of hope. In the following, I sketch the psychological aspects of hope and focus on the question of the affective character of hope, which Kant understands as a threat to reason and which helps explain the claim of reason’s essential interest in hope. In his Metaphysics of Morals, Kant states that the search for happiness is an unavoidable aspect of human nature (MS, AA 06:387). He defines happiness here as satisfaction with one’s own state, insofar as the permanence of this state is certain. According to Kant, this definition relates only to the perfection of our physical state. This, he claims, is because we only become interested in the perfection of our moral state once we have already achieved this moral state; consequently, moral perfection addresses us as a duty and not through an instinct of nature (ibid.). Nevertheless, Kant claims that it is impossible for us to achieve perfect satisfaction with either our physical or our moral state, since we need to stay active in order to be alive, and the only way for us to stay active is by the incentive (Stachel) of inconvenience and pain (Anth, AA 07:234–235). Perfect satisfaction would necessarily lead to idle peace, the standstill of our motivation, and blunt sensation, which unavoidably leads to death (ibid.). However, what we can achieve is comparative satisfaction, i.e., our satisfaction in one moment can be compared to our satisfaction in another moment or to the satisfaction of our fellows, allowing us to achieve improvement comparatively (ibid.). It is our feelings (of pleasure and reluctance) which lead us to search for a state of more satisfaction than we have in our present state. Kant defines such feelings as effects of the sensations of our state (Empfindung unseres Zustandes) on our soul (Anth, AA 07:230–231). A pleasant feeling motivates us to stay in this state while a feeling of reluctance and pain motivates us to leave the state (ibid., 231). In addition to cases where feelings are caused immediately by sensations, they could also be effects of certain representations of our imagination (MS, AA 06:211). In such cases there is a connection between our feelings of pleasure and displeasure (Gefühl von Lust und Unlust) and our desires (Begehren) (ibid., 212). This connection is caused by reason and is therefore called interest (Interesse) while the pleasure involved is called practical pleasure (praktische Lust) (ibid.). This could occur in one of two ways: (1) we imagine an object which we are determined by reason to desire and this representation of our imagination affects our feeling of pleasure (i.e., the feeling is an effect of our imagination and this is a moral feeling); or (2) we imagine an object which affects our feeling of pleasure and for that reason we desire this object (ibid., 212–213). Kant calls the interest in (1) the interest of reason (Vernunftinteresse) and in (2) the interest of inclination (Interesse der Neigung) (ibid.). As we have seen, a feeling which is an effect of a representation of our imagination is connected to desire by reason, and a feeling which is caused immediately by our sensations is not connected to desire by reason. The latter even suppresses our understanding. Kant calls this kind of feeling “affect” (Affekt), while he uses the term “passion” (Leidenschaft) not for a feeling but for a desire which suppresses reason and understanding (Anth, AA 07:251). Kant points out that the essential characteristic of affects is not the higher degree of the feeling but (as in the case of the passions) the suppression of the understanding (ibid., 254). For this reason, he claims that affects and passions are diseases of the soul (ibid.). The conceptual difference Kant makes between a feeling of pleasure which is not affect and a feeling of pleasure which is at the same time affect is to call the latter joy (Freude) (ibid.). Kant speaks of hope in relation to both kinds of feeling of pleasure: insofar as a feeling of pleasure is caused by our imagination of the future (and is not thought to be an affect)

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and insofar as such a feeling is caused by sensations (and is thought to be an affect). But at first glance it is unclear whether hope is always meant to be an affect or whether it is an affect in only some cases. Kant seems to define hope as an affect: “Hope and fear are actually those affects which are directed towards the future” (Kant 1924, 256; see also Anth, AA 07:254–255).3 But the affective aspect is obviously not essential to hope, since Kant claims that not every hope is an affect: “Is all fear and hope affect? Hope could become affect, if it brings us to lose our self-control” (Kant 1924, 256). In the Vorarbeiten zu Die Metaphysik der Sitten (Preparatory Works for the Metaphysics of Morals), Kant makes a specification concerning the affective aspect of hope in regard to happiness. He claims that it is a duty to ourselves to avoid the dependence of our (future) satisfaction on fortune, coincidence, or anything that is not within our power to achieve. According to Kant, this implies avoiding hope (and fear) as affects (AA 23:400). Kant illustrates this by quoting an epigram expressing the active attitude of defeating hope as affect: spes et Fortuna valete (hope and fortune farewell) (ibid.). In the Vorarbeiten to his lectures on anthropology, Kant also describes hope, as affect, as part of our natural state, which we have a duty to ourselves to overcome. In this natural state, we have the strongest desire for things that are not in our power, and we depend on the favor of luck (AA 15:843). By contrast, according to Kant morality is a state in which our feelings and desires are within our power, such that we desire not because we must, due to our affects, but because of our free will,4 and we feel good not through affect but because of our morality (moral feeling) (ibid.). In Metaphysics of Morals, Kant draws on the concept of inner freedom in describing this free state of our feelings and desires as an essential part of our virtue.5 Accordingly, reason should control our feelings (seine Affecten zu zähmen) and rule over our desires (seine Leidenschaften zu beherrschen) (MS, AA 06:407). This includes the prohibition (Verbot) expressed by the moral duty of apathy (not to let affect and passions suppress understanding) and the requirement (Gebot) of the duty of self-control (to subordinate the faculties of the soul under the rule of reason) (ibid., 408). Here Kant describes the opposite of the moral state—the state of vice (Laster)—not by hope as affect (i.e., the abovementioned natural state which we have to overcome). The affect itself is not a vice, since the affect (claimed to be just a “weakness in the use of understanding” connected with strong emotion) is a lack of virtue but not incompatible with good will (ibid.). Nevertheless, the tendency (Hang) to such an affect could support vice, which is not due to weakness of the will but to deliberately choosing in favor of those affects which are in conflict with our rational (i.e., moral) conduct (ibid.). In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant also points out the necessity of the moral principle of apathy for regulating our soul with regard to the affects. Moral apathy should avoid suppressing understanding (Anth, AA 07:253– 254). Here we also find reference to the difference between affect and passion, which Kant characterizes in terms of the impairment of our free will: While the affect leads to a temporary impairment comparable with ecstasy (Rausch), passion leads to an extensive impairment comparable with madness (Wahnsinn) (ibid., 253). We see that, according to Kant, hope without the condition of internal freedom due to virtue (i.e., hope as affect) is a permanent threat to our maturity (and, combined with passion, a genuine threat to our sanity). Thus it is not surprising that, in the Canon of Pure Reason from the first Critique, Kant asserts reason’s interest in overcoming this threat through the regulative idea of the highest good (see Kang 2015, 170–171). The latter connects the object of hope (i.e., happiness) to the condition of virtue as the moral state we should try to achieve.

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2 HOFFBAUER ON HOPE AND THE ABILITY TO ACHIEVE OUR OWN ENDS In Hoffbauer’s work on psychology, we find the Kantian conception of the highest good as a regulative idea in its function of overcoming the threat to our reason and ability to achieve our ends. Indeed, the idea of the highest good (and the state of moral and physical perfection), especially with regard to the question of this ability to achieve our ends, is crucial for Hoffbauer’s understanding of mental disease. One of the most important assumptions in the psychology of Hoffbauer is the idea of adequate relations between human faculties. According to Hoffbauer, the faculties of the soul and the body are given by nature, but in order to be able to use them to achieve our ends we have to develop them to their perfect state. For this purpose, we have to answer the question about the way they should relate to each other. In his Psychologische Untersuchungen über den Wahnsinn, die übrigen Arten der Verrückung und die Behandlung derselben (Psychological Inquiry Concerning Madness, the Other Kinds of Insanity, and Their Treatment) (1807), Hoffbauer complains that in the psychological work of his contemporaries6 there is still a lack of effort in examining this question, even though it is of great importance for many disciplines (Hoffbauer 1807b, 8). As an example, he claims that the importance of this question for a teacher follows from the requirement to achieve the standards for a proper education in the application of the faculties, which includes the interactions between the faculties. In a second example, he points out that for a moral philosopher who claims a duty to perfection it is important to be able to give a definition of the perfect state of all faculties (and their relation to each other), in order to be able to determine the particular duties leading to such perfection. Although Hoffbauer is a moral philosopher, his own interest in this psychological question also originates in his research on psychiatry.7 He worked on this topic together with his colleague, the famous professor of medicine at the University of Halle, Johann Christian Reil (1759–1813).8 In his dedication to Reil, Hoffbauer claims that in cases of mental disease where the symptoms are caused psychologically by the activity of the inner sense and not by physiological deficiencies it is a mistake to try to treat them physiologically (Hoffbauer 1807b, Dedication). In such cases, a physician should use a treatment that takes into account the laws of psychology, i.e., the laws according to which single mental states can be engendered. Physicians should also consider the different degrees of impairment of mental states, such as the state of disproportion between the imagination and the senses, which in small doses could correspond to the creative fantasy of a poet but in greater degrees becomes pathological and turns into madness (ibid.).9 According to Hoffbauer, by taking this into account it becomes obvious that the exploration of the laws regulating the connection between different mental states is of interest for both philosophers and physicians (ibid., iv). The development of Hoffbauer’s research on this topic is based on the connection between these different perspectives. The starting point for Hoffbauer’s enquiry is the analysis of the perfect state of the human being, i.e., the ability to achieve one’s own ends by the proper use of all the faculties of the body and the soul (Hoffbauer 1807b, 9). This state includes both physical and moral perfection and is based on the rational conduct of all faculties. According to Hoffbauer, in this state our reason (1) determines us to adopt only ends which accord with moral standards, and (2) enables us to achieve such ends. Without referring to Kant, Hoffbauer seems to address here the Kantian idea of the highest good as a synthesis of (1) virtue and (2) happiness.10 For the psychological exploration of the laws regulating the

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connection between different mental states, Hoffbauer focuses on (2) and asks about the faculties involved and their proper relation to each other. The answer includes a composition of relations between different faculties: That a certain perfection of the faculty of cognition is required here is self-evident. For this must display to the acting human being the ends he has set himself and the difficulties that stand in the way of achieving them, and instruct him about the relationship between the various ends he considers. . . .—But this perfection of the faculty of imagination alone would not enable the human being to achieve the ends he considers, even assuming he does not lack the external means these call for. Weakness, an aversion to effort, or on the other hand too great a sensitivity to certain feelings, could distract him in his actions. For these reasons, he might even perhaps fail to accomplish anything, because the inviting aspects of other undertakings distract him from the undertakings that he has already begun and almost completed. Therefore it is clear that for the most perfect human being the faculty of imagination and the faculty of feeling must . . . stand in a certain relationship. And the faculty of desire . . . [must stand in a certain relationship] to the faculty of cognition . . . . Least of all should the faculty of desire itself seem to reflect reality and truth to the human being. — ibid., 9–10 The perfect state which Hoffbauer describes here requires, first, a composition involving the proper relation between the parts of the faculty of understanding in relation to the senses. Second, it requires the proper relations between the three main faculties of understanding, feeling, and desire. This second item includes a relation between the understanding (including the imagination) and the feelings, where the former dominates the latter. It also includes a relation between the understanding and desire, where the former determines the decisions of the latter and prevents the latter from defining what is real and what is true (Hoffbauer 1807b, 10). On the relation between the feelings and desire, Hoffbauer claims only that the feelings usually dominate desire but that they should do this only under the condition that this domination does not impair the guiding function of the understanding (ibid., 11). First, Hoffbauer is relying here on the Kantian concept of virtue and the idea of the two conditions of inner freedom required by virtue, i.e., that reason should control the feelings and rule the desires (MS, AA 06:407). Second, Hoffbauer is relying on results from Kant’s first Critique, specifically on the relationship between aesthetic and logical components as the two sources of experience. The relevance of this condition for the ability to achieve one’s own ends mainly concerns the reliability of experience. In cases of inappropriate relationships between the imagination and the senses, like in madness,11 Hoffbauer claims that, even if mad persons could act rationally, since they live in their own “thoughts in an entirely different world than the real world,” it is unavoidable that they fail in achieving their own ends (Hoffbauer 1807b, 11). Hoffbauer presents a complex account of the possibilities impacting the reliability of experience due to inappropriate relationships between the parts of the cognitive faculty of the soul. Here he follows Kant’s first Critique and the analysis of the possibility of experience12 constituted by the three functions of representation: sensible representations of intuition (apprehension), representations of imagination (reproduction), and representations by concepts (recognition) (A95–110). Accordingly, Hoffbauer distinguishes between the senses (Sinne), the faculty of reproduction (Reproduktionsvermögen),13 and the understanding (Verstand), and explains their function regarding the capacity to

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achieve one’s ends (Hoffbauer 1807b, 13). While the understanding is able to identify proper means for our ends from conclusions based on our experience, the senses guarantee the reliability of experience (as a source of access to reality) and, finally, memory (as a function of the faculty of reproduction) provides access to our past experience in order to enable the understanding to find out the proper means for achieving our ends. But a disproportional relation between these cognitive faculties could, according to Hoffbauer, impact their functions. One possible impact follows from a disproportional relation between the senses and memory. In a proper relationship, the representations of the senses have a higher degree of vividness than the representations of the imagination (and especially memory). But in cases where the imagination produces images with the same (or a higher) degree of vividness (because of numb senses or wild imagination), there is the danger of memory providing representations of experience which do not have their origin in the senses, and in this way providing an experience of a world which is not real (Hoffbauer 1807b, 14–15). This disproportional relationship due to too strong an imagination is, according to Hoffbauer, madness (Wahnsinn) (ibid., 21).14 Another possible impact concerns the relations between the senses and the understanding or memory and the understanding. In cases where the activity of the senses or memory is too high, it is possible that the activity of the understanding could be suppressed. In such cases we either stay within sensual perception without being able to think about the past or future at all (which is a state of perpetual immaturity), or we have some power over the senses but we are still not capable of moving our attention15 or drawing conclusions about matters of experience (which is also state of immaturity) (Hoffbauer 1807b, 15–18). Such a disproportionate relationship, where the understanding is too weak, is, according to Hoffbauer, a confusion (Verwirrtheit) (ibid., 21), in opposition to composure (Fassung), where the understanding is focused on finding means for its own ends (ibid., 22). The opposite relation—of suppressed senses and an understanding that is too strong—is Hoffbauer’s definition for the madness of a brooding person (Verrückung des Grüblers) (ibid., 21). These considerations lead to both implicit and explicit consequences regarding the question of hope. Recall that the important guideline for the analysis of hope in Hoffbauer was the question of one’s ability to achieve the objects of hope. In this regard, we stated, Hoffbauer is drawing on the Kantian legacy in adopting the distinction between moral and physical perfection as well as the necessity of the subordination of happiness as the object of hope under the condition of morality. With the discussion of the perfect state, we saw how, according to Hoffbauer, the question of one’s own ability (given the achieved moral perfection) could be addressed from a psychological perspective. The essential issue here is focused on the psychological conditions for such an ability: the perfect state of our faculties in their relation to each other, which enables us to achieve our ends. In Inquiry Concerning Madness, this question of the perfect state provides the foundation for Hoffbauer’s analysis of the possible impairment of this state, in order to be able to give appropriate suggestions for psychological treatment. It should be clear that knowledge of the perfect state offers the answer to how hope participates in our life in a productive way: we should use our faculties in an appropriate way so that we can choose proper objects for our hope (proper ends) and be able to achieve them. But it is worth seeing how Hoffbauer discusses the opposite case, namely when we hope without using our faculties in an appropriate way and when hope, associated with the emotions, leads to undesirable results, reducing our ability to achieve our ends.

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In Inquiry Concerning Madness, Hoffbauer presents two cases of hope subverting the mind to madness as a result of the inappropriate use of our cognitive faculties. The first case concerns chimerical madness (chimärischer Wahnsinn), which is distinct from feigned madness (vorspiegelnder Wahnsinn). Hoffbauer introduces this distinction in chapter 10, concerning four kinds of distinctions due to different aspects of madness (Hoffbauer 1807b, 92–93). We already saw that, according to Hoffbauer, madness is due to a disproportion between the senses and the imagination, where the latter is too strong, and we lose orientation in regard to the difference between what is real and what is merely a product of our imagination. The issue in the case of the distinction between feigned and chimerical madness is the quality of the representation the imagination produces which we believe to be real. Madness is feigned when we believe we have a real perception although there is no object present for our senses, while chimerical madness is when we hold something to be real which could not be an object for our senses (ibid., 94). It is possible that both occur simultaneously. If a person with chimerical madness believes they are the King of Spain or the Duke of Bavaria, there is no possible object of the senses which could convince them that they are wrong, and the person will keep giving possible explanations supporting this belief. According to Hoffbauer, in such cases the person tends to feigned madness, which supports chimerical beliefs. This tendency results from the interest of the person in confirming the latter. In chapter 11, we find Hoffbauer’s discussion of how hope could be involved in the disproportion between the senses and the imagination that results in chimerical madness. Here Hoffbauer analyzes cases where the imagination of a person tending to vanity, pride, or self-love focuses on objects which are able to please this tendency (Hoffbauer 1807b, 102–103). The imagination represents such objects more and more vividly in order to keep the vanity, pride, or self-love pleased with the consequences so that with the increase in the vividness of the representation, these merely imagined objects turn from objects of hope into objects of (chimerical) past experience. The function of hope is initially to answer a need of a person. It could be the need for esteem or the need to overcome terrible suffering. As Hoffbauer describes in detail, this initially has the function of dispelling and diverting attention from the deficit by using the imagination (ibid., 105). But beside this positive function, hope can be the origin of impairment and even madness when hope starts to boost our imagination, representing options for acting which lack reality and with such vividness that a person wrongly holds them to be real (ibid.). Hope is here forcing the imagination to exceed the limits of real experience, which impairs the relationship between the imagination and the senses and results in losing the sense of reality. In this way, a suffering person could become feigning and chimerically mad, believing they are the King of Spain or the Duke of Bavaria and confirming such beliefs through self-deception. With regard to feigned madness, Hoffbauer points out that in such cases there is a remarkable exertion of the imagination to produce self-deception which is comparable to the exertion of the understanding of a mathematician trying to solve a mathematical question (ibid., 106). We find the other case of hope subverting the mind to madness as a result of an inappropriate use of our cognitive faculties in chapter 14. This chapter deals with cases where the imagination becomes overstrained (Überspannung der Einbildungskraft) and the result is madness. One possible cause for the imagination becoming overstrained is the emotional state of desire (Leidenschaft) aiming at the satisfaction of a need (i.e., aiming at happiness). For this purpose we seek to perceive the object of desire through our senses.

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But in cases where this object is not present to our senses, our imagination has to offer a representation of this object in order to satisfy the desire (Hoffbauer 1807b, 131). The more strongly the imagination answers to the desire, the stronger the desire becomes. In such mutual stimulation and increase between desire and imagination, the representation of the desired object becomes more and more vivid. In this way a person could believe they perceive the object instead of just imagining it (ibid., 132), which compromises the relationship between the senses and the understanding (ibid., 134), which is the crux of madness. According to Hoffbauer, the function of hope here is related to the expectation we have regarding the desired object. Such expectations can vary with regard to different kinds of objects. There is a difference between (1) concrete objects of desire (e.g., a specific job we wish to attain, or a specific person we love, etc.) in which we have a very specific expectation that the imagination can represent most precisely; and (2) abstract ideas of what we desire (e.g., to be rich, to have influence, etc.) in which we have only an unclear expectation. In both cases, the object of the desire—insofar as it is not present to us and our senses—becomes the object of our hope (Hoffbauer 1807b, 136) so that hope forces the imagination to represent the object of hope in the most vivid way.16 But there is a difference between the two cases due to a change in circumstances (Wechsel der Glücksumstände), which can lead in different ways to a surge in the power of the imagination and to madness (ibid., 134). Hoffbauer describes the two possibilities of such a change in circumstances either as fulfilled hope or as disappointed hope and claims a difference between the results of fulfilled and disappointed hope in (1) and (2). In case (1), a fulfilled hope has the consequence that our desire has been satisfied and we have achieved the happiness we expected. The highest delight (entzückendste Freude) we can feel in such cases is not enough to impair our sanity (Hoffbauer 1807b, 136). But the misfortune of disappointed hope in case (1) could shatter our calm mindset, leading to our imagination becoming overstrained and to madness. This is because we do not have a substitute for our object of hope and our last chance of not losing it is representing it in our imagination. In Hoffbauer’s example, a betrayed lover would feel like they are losing everything so that the danger of becoming insane is very likely. It is quite the opposite situation in case (2), where we do not have a concrete object of desire we could expect. Given a fulfilled hope which exceeds our expectation (like winning an inconceivably huge prize) there is a great danger for us of becoming insane. This is because we feel released from the burden of being cautious and using our senses and understanding carefully, which allows our reason to lose a firm grip on our emotional states (ibid., 134). But with a disappointed hope (if we avoid losing our self-control) we enter a state which is, according to Hoffbauer, the opposite of the state of madness: cold and calm thought (ibid., 135). We see that Hoffbauer’s discussion of hope in Inquiry Concerning Madness follows Kant’s idea that when we adopt the ends of our affects and passions without subordinating them to morality there is a threat to our reason and our ability to achieve our ends. Hope always answers to the affects and desires that follow from our needs as a physical being, but we may hope to achieve happiness as the state of satisfaction with our state only under the condition of being virtuous and ruled by reason. Without this condition, hope can distract the considerations of the understanding,17 with the consequence that we blindly follow our affects and desires, willingly accepting the danger of losing our sanity.

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3 CONCLUSION Appraising the relevance of the affective character of hope in Kant’s psychology enables us to rethink the claim of reason’s interest in hope formulated in Kant’s third question of interested reason (“What may I hope?”). This highlights an important aspect of this interest, concerning nothing less than our maturity in conducting our life. We find this interpretation of Kant’s work on hope in the psychological writings of Hoffbauer, who appropriates this interpretation in a productive way. Hoffbauer develops an important claim in this regard, pointing out the proper connection between the faculties of the soul and their correct use for understanding the psychological laws according to which single mental states can be engendered. The latter is crucial to treating different degrees of impairment of mental states. Hoffbauer has been known merely as a close reader and important supporter of Kantian philosophy in the early nineteenth century, without his own original philosophical contributions. But with his deep understanding and application of his knowledge of Kant in fields such as medicine or jurisprudence—as in his analysis of the psychological relevance of hope to understanding mental disease—Hoffbauer continues and further develops Kant’s legacy.

NOTES 1.

e.g., Ludwig Heinrich Jakob (1759–1827), Jakob Sigismund Beck (1761–1840), or Johann Heinrich Tieftrunk (1760–1837).

2.

Famously formulated in the third question of interested reason, “What may I hope?” which Kant introduces in the Canon of Pure Reason in his first Critique (A804/B833).

3.

All translations are the author’s own.

4.

The moral state does not deny the necessity of our feelings of pleasure or their function in our life, since these feelings instruct us about the content of our concept of happiness. The moral state, rather, guarantees our rational conduct (i.e., prevents the suppression of rational conduct) and enables us to compare and deliberate about the content of our feelings and inclinations. Thomas Höwing suggests something similar when he interprets the function of the feeling of pleasure in Kant as a part of an “evaluative experience” which provides us with possible ends for our actions (Höwing 2013).

5.

Kant used different concepts of freedom. For this reason, we should differentiate the inner freedom (innere Freiheit) which we introduce here as a part of his concept of virtue from other concepts of freedom such as the transcendental freedom of the will (in the meaning of autonomy of the will) or freedom of choice (Freiheit der Willkür).

6.

There is still a need for investigation of psychology and anthropology from this period (see for example Wübben 2007, 67).

7.

For an overview of Hoffbauer’s contributions to psychiatry see Hall 1958. In the nineteenth century, Hoffbauer’s research was viewed as a continuation of Kant’s contributions on this topic (see Anonymous 1851, 60; Hartmann and Jahr 1855, 16). In contemporary publications, there is also reference to differences between Kant and Hoffbauer, for example the reduction of moral imputation in cases of mental disease in Hoffbauer and the resulting replacement of the concept of vice with insanity (John 2005, 103). For Kant’s attitude on the relationship between philosophy and medicine see Zammito 2018.

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8.

Reil was one of the most influential physicians of this time in many areas of medicine. He is best known for establishing and developing modern neurology and psychiatry. Together with Hoffbauer, he examined the psychological methodology for treatments of mental diseases. Both also edited a journal on this topic (see Hoffbauer and Reil 1808; Hoffbauer and Reil 1812). Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century their work was classified as separate attempts (Hartmann and Jahr 1855, 16).

9.

Hoffbauer analyzes this idea of different degrees of mental states in some of his writings. A prominent example is his profound studies on the different degrees of the state of drunkenness (in human beings and in animals), which in human beings varies from a low degree supportive of the free conduct of our behavior to the pathological degree of an addiction (Hoffbauer 1821). On Hoffbauer’s own consumption of wine see Varnhagen von Ense 1837, 103–104.

10. Hoffbauer discusses his understanding of the interdependence between virtue and happiness in chapter 14 of his Untersuchungen über die wichtigsten Gegenstände der Moralphilosophie insbesondere der Sittenlehre und Moraltheologie (Inquiry Concerning the Most Important Objects of Moral Philosophy, Especially the Doctrine of Morals and Moral Theology) (Hoffbauer 1799, 159–166). Here, he claims both virtue and happiness as necessary ends for our will (ibid., 159, 163–164). According to Hoffbauer, if we do not place happiness under the condition of morality, only our feeling of pleasure will guide us in identifying what our happiness is, and we will be unable to avoid the possibility of contradiction between different feelings of pleasure. We may use our reason prudentially (to find out the proper means for the different ends) but since there are different ends which potentially contradict each other the result is that the search for happiness could fail to attain happiness (ibid., 161). With the subordination of happiness under the condition of morality, it is not our feeling but our reason which gives us happiness as an end for our will. And, since reason provides not only concordance between happiness and morality but also between the different contents of happiness, the result is that we are enabled to pursue happiness (ibid., 165). 11. The definition of madness which Hoffbauer offers is “a disproportion between the senses and the imagination which makes a human being constantly mistake the representations of the imagination for representations of real experience of objects” (Hoffbauer 1807b, 21). But, he claims, four kinds of further differentiation of this disproportion are also possible (ibid., 91–93). 12. Hoffbauer seems to adopt the Kantian analysis of the possibility of experience. Nevertheless, as a professor at the University of Halle who was intensively engaged with the history of the university (see Hoffbauer 1805), he was well acquainted with the concepts of experience of his predecessors (for the latter see Cataldi Madonna 2019; De Boer and Prunea-Bretonnet 2021; Rydberg 2017). 13. The ability of reproduction is, according to Hoffbauer, the general notion, while memory is a specific part of this. But in all parts of the ability of reproduction the imagination is at work. 14. There is a similar disproportion between the senses and the imagination in cases of strong emotions like rage (Zorn) or infatuation (Verliebtheit) but such cases are, according to Hoffbauer, not madness because the state there is accidental and temporary, which is not the case in madness (Hoffbauer 1807b, 38–39). However, in other works Hoffbauer claims that strong emotions can cause madness when they are unexpected (Hoffbauer 1807a, 138).

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15. Hoffbauer defines attention as the ability to represent something clearly and claims it is possible for attention to move willingly or unwillingly. With this definition he rejects a concept of attention as the ability to follow something willingly (Hoffbauer 1802, 5–6). 16. Where the object of our desire is present to us and our senses, Hoffbauer describes the caution and attention of the person in relation to this object and claims that here hope (and fear) are effects of the probability of attaining the object (Hoffbauer 1796, 431–432). 17. See Hoffbauer’s discussion of hope in the chapter on habitual absent-mindedness (habituelle Zerstreuung) in volume 1 of Untersuchungen über die Krankheiten der Seele (Inquiries Concerning the Diseases of the Soul) (1802, 80).

REFERENCES Anonymous (1851), Deutschlands Denker seit Kant. Die Lehren und Geistesthaten der bedeutendsten deutschen Denker in neuerer Zeit, Dessau: Moritz Katz. Cataldi Madonna, Luigi (2019), Erfahrung und Wissenschaftstheorie bei Christian Wolff. Quellen und Probleme, Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Carus, Friedrich August (1808), Nachgelassene Werke. Dritter Theil. Geschichte der Psychologie, Leipzig: Barth and Kummer. De Boer, Karin and Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet (2021), The Experiential Turn in EighteenthCentury German Philosophy, London: Routledge. Ersch, Johann Samuel and Johann Gottfried Gruber (eds.) (1832), Allgemeine Encyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste, Zweite Section H–N, Neunter Theil, Leipzig: Brockhaus. Hall, Götz (1958), Der Beitrag des Philosophen J. Chr. Hoffbauer zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Psychiatrie, Munich: Schubert. Hartmann, Franz and Gottlieb Heinrich Georg Jahr (1855), Specielle Therapie acuter und chronischer Krankheiten. Dritter Band. Die Geisteskrankheiten, Leipzig: Weigel. Hoffbauer, Johann Christoph (1796), Naturlehre der Seele in Briefen, Halle: Rengersch. Hoffbauer, Johann Christoph (1799), Untersuchungen über die wichtigsten Gegenstände der Moralphilosophie insbesondere der Sittenlehre und Moraltheologie. Erster Theil, nebst beyläufigen Bemerkungen über die verdienstlichsten Bemühungen um die Sittenlehre, vorzüglich in den neuern Zeiten, Dortmund and Essen: Blothe. Hoffbauer, Johann Christoph (1802), Untersuchungen über die Krankheiten der Seele und die verwandten Zustände. Erster Theil, welcher allgemeine Betrachtungen über die Seelenkrankheiten und eine Klassifikation derselben enthält, Halle: Trampen. Hoffbauer, Johann Christoph (1803), Untersuchungen über die Krankheiten der Seele und die verwandten Zustände. Zweiter Theil, vorzüglich über die Krankheiten in den einzelnen Geistesvermögen, nebst Ideen über die psychische Heilung derselben, Halle: Trampen. Hoffbauer, Johann Christoph (1805), Geschichte der Universität zu Halle bis zum Jahre 1805, Halle: Schimmelpfennig. Hoffbauer, Johann Christoph (1807a), Untersuchungen über die Krankheiten der Seele und die verwandten Zustände. Dritter Theil, über den Wahnsinn und die übrigen Arten der Verrückung, nebst Ideen über die psychische Heilung derselben, Halle: Hemmerde and Schwetschke. Hoffbauer, Johann Christoph (1807b), Psychologische Untersuchungen über den Wahnsinn, die übrigen Arten der Verrückung und die Behandlung derselben, Halle: Schwetschke.

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Hoffbauer, Johann Christoph (1808), Die Psychologie in ihren Hauptanwendungen auf die Rechtspflege nach den allgemeinen Gesichtspunkten der Gesetzgebung oder die sogenannte gerichtliche Arzneywissenschaft nach ihrem psychologischen Theile, Halle: Schimmelpfennig. Hoffbauer, Johann Christoph and Johann Christian Reil (eds.) (1808), Beyträge zur Beförderung einer Kurmethode auf psychischem Wege, vol. 1, Halle: Curt. Hoffbauer, Johann Christoph (1810), Grundriß der Erfahrungs=Seelenlehre, Halle: Hemmerde and Schwetschke. Hoffbauer, Johann Christoph and Johann Christian Reil (eds.) (1812), Beyträge zur Beförderung einer Kurmethode auf psychischem Wege, vol. 2, Halle: Curt. Hoffbauer, Johann Christoph (1821), “Psychologische Bemerkungen,” in Thomas Trotter, (ed.), Über die Trunkenheit und deren Einfluß auf den menschlichen Körper. Eine philosophische, medicinische und chemische Abhandlung. Mit psychologischen Bemerkungen verwandten Inhalts begleitet von J.C. Hoffbauer, 183–276, Lemgo: Meyer. Höwing, Thomas (2013), Praktische Lust. Kant über das Verhältnis von Fühlen, Begehren und praktischer Vernunft, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. John, Matthias (2005), “Hoffbauer: ‘Gerichtliche Arzneywissenschaft nach ihrem psychologischen Theile,’ ” in Katja Regenpurger and Temilo van Zantwijk, (eds.), Wissenschaftliche Anthropologie um 1800?, 94–103, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner. Kang, Ji Young (2015), Die allgemeine Glückseligkeit. Zur systematischen Stellung und Funktionen der Glückseligkeit bei Kant, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Kant, Immanuel ([1781/1787] 1996), Critique of Pure Reason, transl. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett. Kant, Immanuel (1924), Die philosophischen Hauptvorlesungen Immanuel Kants. Nach den neu aufgefundenen Kollegheften des Grafen Heinrich zu Dohna-Wundlacken, ed. Arnold Kowalewski, Munich and Leipzig: Rösl & Cie. Meyer, Regina and Günter Schenk (2011), Die Philosophische Fakultät der Fridericiana von ihrer Gründung 1694 bis zur Schließung 1806 – Ein Überblick, Halle: Schenk. Rydberg, Andreas (2017), Inner Experience: An Analysis of Scientific Experience in Early Modern Germany, Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August (1837), Denkwürdigkeiten und vermischte Schriften, vol. 2, Mannheim: Heinrich Poff. Wübben, Yvonne (2007), “Limitierte Anthropologie. Grenzen des medizinisch-philosophischen Wissenstransfers am Beispiel von Johann August Unzer,” in Heinz Thoma, Jörn Garber and Manfred Beetz, (eds.), Physis und Norm. Neue Perspektiven der Anthropologie im 18. Jahrhundert, Göttingen: Wallstein. Zammito, John H. (2018), “Kant and the Medical Faculty: One ‘Conflict of the Faculties,’ ” Epoché, 22: 429–451.

CHAPTER NINE

“What May I Hope?” Schleiermacher’s Answer to Kant’s Third Question J Ö RG NOLLER (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich)

1 INTRODUCTION In current philosophical debates, the role of emotions has increasingly become a focus of interest.1 Emotions can be distinguished in terms of their evaluative, phenomenological and mental dimensions (see Scarantino and de Sousa 2018). The complexity of emotions is particularly evident in the feeling of hope, which is still underexplored in philosophy.2 What is the philosophical nature of hope? Hope is characterized by a complex intentionality, since it is directed towards something that is not entirely in the power of the hoping subject, so that in hoping the subject depends on something external. As such, hope seems to imply a certain kind of heteronomy. However, as I will show in what follows, Schleiermacher interprets the phenomenon of hope as the unity of freedom and dependence, which he calls the feeling of ultimate dependence (schlechthinnige Abhängigkeit). Thus, the relationship between hope and rationality is of special interest (see Bloeser and Stahl 2017). This relationship is prominently discussed in Kant’s work, which serves as a background for Schleiermacher’s discussion of hope and related phenomena. According to Kant, the feeling of hope and the feeling of respect are related. He argues that these feelings are not empirical, like the feeling of hunger, but rather articulations of practical reason—respect being the incentive of morality, hope the consequence and purpose of morality as such. Like Kant, Schleiermacher conceives of some emotions in a non-empirical way, however from a decidedly religious perspective.3 In what follows, I will examine how Kant and Schleiermacher understand the relationship between feeling, reason and religion in order to better understand what hope is. In doing so, I will take a closer look at their different conceptions of religion, and raise the question of how religion is related to human sensibility and human freedom. I will argue that although Schleiermacher does not often use the term “hope,” his theory of the feeling of ultimate dependence can be reconstructed as an answer to Kant’s question “What may I hope?” posed in his Critique of Pure Reason (A803/B833; cf. LJ, AA 09:25).4 Schleiermacher’s implicit notion of hope not only expresses the relationship between religion, ethics and metaphysics; it also situates the finite human being in society and the universe and determines its relationship in terms of freedom and dependence. 153

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According to Kant, hope is the human articulation and expression of religion. However, religion is a rational and practical consequence of morality. Schleiermacher criticizes this view. He argues that religion is independent of morality. Even more: The religious feeling or intuition of dependence, which grounds the feeling of hope, plays a transcendental role—it is the condition of possibility of consciousness, and grounds both metaphysics and ethics because it concerns the very relationship between human finiteness and the universe. Kant and Schleiermacher have in common that they conceive of religion from the perspective of human beings. More precisely, they understand religion from the structure of the human mind and its capacities. While Kant associates religion with pure practical reason and the concept of the highest good, Schleiermacher relates religion to a very specific feeling: the feeling of absolute or ultimate dependence. Whereas Kant places reason and morality at the center of his theory of feelings, Schleiermacher declares religion to be a realm of its own, an autonomous reality, and therefore claims a special form of emotionality for religious facts. In what follows, I will first outline Kant’s conception of the moral feeling of respect and the highest good, which serve as a kind of background for Schleiermacher’s theory. In a second step, I will show how the young Schleiermacher worked his way through Kant’s moral philosophy and criticized his theory of the moral feeling of respect and of the highest good. Finally, I argue that Schleiermacher’s own theory of religious feelings and his implicit conception of hope grew out of this criticism. For this purpose, I will show how Schleiermacher, through his critique of Kant’s moral philosophy, formed and developed his own theory of the feeling of ultimate dependence, and how this feeling can be understood in terms of hope.

2 KANT ON RESPECT AND HOPE 2.1 Feeling of Reason Kant ascribes six characteristics to respect, each of which constitutes an interpretative problem for research5: 1. it has a purely rational origin,6 and it is therefore distinguished from empirical feelings7; 2. it is considered to be “the sole and also the undoubted moral incentive”8; 3. it is both negative and positive with regard to its emotional content9; 4. in feeling respect, the human self is at the same time bound and free10; 5. it is “morality itself subjectively considered as an incentive”11; 6. it primarily refers to a non-empirical object, an abstract “law,” and not to individual human persons.12 Kant’s theory of respect seems to have nothing to do with the everyday phenomenon of respect, since common respect refers to individuals and not to a human faculty. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant attempted to address possible objections: “It could be objected that I only seek refuge, behind the word respect, in an obscure feeling, instead of distinctly resolving the question by means of a concept of reason.” Kant continues: “though respect is a feeling, it is not one received by means of influence; it is, instead, a feeling self-wrought by means of a rational concept and therefore specifically

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different from all feelings of the first kind, which can be reduced to inclination or fear” (GMS, AA 04:401n).13 However, the status of Kant’s concept of respect as a rational feeling is far from clear, not only in terms of our common sense but also in terms of Kant’s philosophy itself. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defined the relationship between feeling and reason as follows: Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. It is thus just as necessary to make the mind’s concepts sensible (i.e., to add an object to them in intuition) as it is to make its intuitions understandable (i.e., to bring them under concepts). Further, these two faculties or capacities cannot exchange their functions. The understanding is not capable of intuiting anything, and the senses are not capable of thinking anything. Only from their unification can Cognition arise. But on this account one must not mix up their roles, rather one has great cause to separate them carefully from each other and distinguish them. Hence we distinguish the science of the rules of sensibility in general, i.e., aesthetic, from the science of the rules of understanding in general, i.e., logic. — A51–52/B75–76 In his Critique of Practical Reason, however, Kant asserts with regard to the moral sense of respect: “here we have the first and perhaps the only case in which we can determine a priori from concepts the relation of a Cognition (here the Cognition of a pure practical reason) to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure” (KpV, AA 05:73).14 Given the problematic conceptual status of respect between reason and feeling in Kant’s ethics, Richard McCarty coined the terms “intellectualism” and “affectivism”: Intellectualists hold that respect for the moral law is, or arises from, a purely intellectual recognition of the supreme authority of the moral law, and that this intellectual recognition is sufficient to generate moral action independently of any special motivating feelings or affections. Opposed to the intellectualist interpretation is what I shall call the affectivist view. Affectivists need not deny that Kantian moral motivation initially arises from an intellectual recognition of the moral law. Contrary to intellectualists, however, they maintain that it also depends on a peculiar moral feeling of respect for law, one consequent to the initial recognition or moral judgment the intellectualists emphasize exclusively. — McCarty 1993, 423 At first glance it seems that intellectualism and affectivism about Kant’s concept of respect are difficult to reconcile, for Kant himself argued in many places in his work that the separation of sensual intuition and rational concepts is constitutive for his transcendental and moral philosophy. But why is such a rational feeling for autonomous action necessary at all? The need for such a moral incentive arises from the finite nature of the human being as a both rational and empirical being. Kant understands an “incentive (elater animi)” as “the subjective determining ground of the will of a being whose reason does not by its nature necessarily conform with the objective law” (KpV, AA 05:72). The “nature” of the human being is: so constituted that the matter of the faculty of desire (objects of inclination, whether of hope or fear) first forces itself upon us, and we find our pathologically determinable

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self, even though it is quite unfit to give universal law through its maxims, nevertheless striving antecedently to make its claims primary and originally valid, just as if it constituted our entire self. — ibid., 74 What makes the moral incentive necessary is the division of the human will between the upper and lower appetitive faculty of a being whose choice does not of itself accord with the moral law of a practical reason, “because an internal obstacle is opposed to it” (ibid., 79).

2.2 Religion of Reason In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defines the theoretical and practical interest of reason in three ways: 1. What can I know? 2. What should I do? 3. What may I hope? (A803/B833) Kant articulates the third question as follows: “If I do what I should, what may I then hope?” This question is “simultaneously practical and theoretical,” and thus does not concern an additional, third realm besides theoretical and practical reason, but only continues to determine our practical interest. Hope has the status of an attitude that is voluntarily directed towards happiness and at the same time implies the inference “that something is (which determines the ultimate final end) because something ought to happen” (A803–804/B833–834). In this context Kant distinguishes happiness from the worthiness to be happy. Happiness as motive is only a component of empirically dependent reason, i.e., of instrumental or even “pragmatic” reason, and is “grounded on empirical principles” such as inclination. It “advises us what to do if we want to partake of happiness” (B834). Worthiness to be happy, as the determining factor of will, on the other hand, is not empirically determined, since here it “considers only the freedom of a rational being in general and the necessary conditions under which alone it is in agreement with the distribution of happiness in accordance with principles” (B834). The highest good, therefore, consists “in exact proportion with the morality of rational beings, through which they are worthy of it,” which in turn determines happiness (cf. B842). According to Kant, practical reason is not only decisive for the establishment of morality but also for the determination of religion. Admittedly, Kant emphasizes in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason that pure practical reason, as it manifests itself in the moral feeling of respect, is not dependent on religion in determining the will. Morality consists solely of purely formal rational considerations, as it has its ground in the categorical imperative, and does not need any material determining grounds apart from itself. The moral reason for maxims and the determination of will lies solely in the formality of pure practical reason, as determined by the categorical imperative and the moral feeling of respect. However, the concept of morality is not sufficiently determined by preceding motives. It is always also about the purpose, that is, the larger context in which the determination of will is situated. Reason determines the will only “as to how to operate but not as to the whither” (Rel, AA 06:4). In this respect, reason itself has an interest in “[w]hat is then the result of this right conduct of ours” (ibid., 5). It is concerned

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with the “ultimate end” that consists in the “consequence” of the duties, that is, their concrete realization. Such an “idea” of the highest good, as Kant emphasizes, “rises out of morality and is not its foundation” (ibid., 5–6). Thus, Kant argues for a consequentialist account of morality; however, in an account that is a priori and not a posteriori. Regarding Kant’s theory of the moral good, we can distinguish between a narrower and a broader sense. In the narrower sense, according to Kant, the good is solely the good will, i.e., the subjective moral motivation and decision that grounds an action. In the relationship between will and action, the will thus plays the decisive role. It is, metaphorically speaking, the “jewel,” and its consequences of the action are only its “setting,” which in comparison is insignificant. In a broader sense, according to Kant, the good is the “highest good” as an a priori unity of morality and happiness, corresponding to the twofold meaning of “good” in the sense of “moral” and “pleasant.” As such, it is “the object of the faculty of desire of rational finite beings” (KpV, AA 05:110). “[I]n the judgment of an impartial reason,” according to Kant, morality must be most closely connected with happiness. Reason, which by the categorical imperative absolutely demands morality, must at least contain in itself the promise that moral action is rewarded. A reason that demands the moral but does not promise happiness would be extremely problematic according to Kant. This does not mean, however, that the prospect of happiness should be the condition or the reason for moral action. According to Kant, this would be equivalent to a merely legal act, which uses morality only as a means to an end. Rather, reason demands the unity of morality and happiness in such a way that the morally acting person should become happy as a consequence of her morality, but not that happiness be the motive of morality. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant had written “that an impartial rational spectator can take no delight in seeing the uninterrupted prosperity of a being graced with no feature of a pure and good will, so that a good will seems to constitute the indispensable condition even of worthiness to be happy” (GMS, AA 04:393). Reason thus demands, according to Kant, both that morality leads to happiness and that happiness cannot be attained without morality. Kant determines the highest good inasmuch as happiness is “distributed in exact proportion to morality (as the worth of a person and his worthiness to be happy)” (KpV, AA 05:110). For Kant, happiness is first of all an object of hope, not of knowledge or will. Also, hope must not serve as an incentive for an action, for otherwise the action would not be done out of duty (cf. KpV, AA 05:129). Therefore, the realm of hope is religion, and “morals is not properly the doctrine of how we are to make ourselves happy but of how we are to become worthy of happiness. Only if religion is added to it does there also enter the hope of some day participating in happiness to the degree that we have been intent upon not being unworthy of it” (ibid., 130).

3 FEELING OF RELIGION 3.1 Critique of the Highest Good Schleiermacher’s interpretation of Kant’s conception of the highest good lets us better understand his implicit conception of hope. The young Schleiermacher criticizes Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason for not being able to coherently integrate the concept of happiness—and thus also that of the highest good—into his system of reason.15 Schleiermacher speaks of the “infiltration [Einschleichung] of the concept” (Rel, AA

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06:97) of happiness into Kant’s philosophy, which, as he argues, is solely due to the systematic structure of Kant’s work, but not to the actual adequacy of the concept. According to Schleiermacher, the concept of happiness is only an “addition” to Kant’s moral philosophy, since the sensibility contained in happiness is not compatible with the a priori structure of pure practical reason. In his Groundwork and his second Critique, Kant brings reason and will into such a close, almost identical relationship that happiness itself must be considered a requirement of reason. Schleiermacher criticizes that Kant, by integrating happiness into the concept of practical reason, must think happiness timeless, which, however, contradicts the emotional and sensual character of happiness (cf. KpV, AA 05:105). Furthermore, according to Schleiermacher, Kant’s theory of practical reason does not do justice to the dynamics and actual reality of happiness. As Schleiermacher argues, “Kant has unduly approximated reason to the faculty of desire,” and considered “what is merely a need of the faculty of desire, namely happiness, as an indispensable requirement of reason itself ” (KGA 1.1, 104–105). The phenomenon of happiness has, therefore, a utopian place in the Kantian system. Here Schleiermacher’s later criticism already becomes apparent, which consists in clearly distinguishing religion from moral philosophy (as well as metaphysics) and assigning it its own capacity and domain—namely intuition and feeling.

3.2 Critique of Respect Schleiermacher’s implicit conception of hope becomes obvious in contrast to Kant’s conception of the moral feeling of respect. Especially in his Notizen zu Kant: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Notes on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason) and his Über die Freiheit (Discourse on Freedom), which were written shortly after the publication of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, the young Schleiermacher devoted himself to Kant’s theory of the moral feeling of respect. It is striking how subtly Schleiermacher criticizes Kant’s theory of respect here.16 Most importantly, his critique concerns the problem of the cognitive dimension of respect. Kant had asserted that the moral feeling of respect “is not pathological, as would be a feeling produced by an object of the senses, but practical only, that is, possible through a preceding (objective) determination of the will and causality of reason” (KpV, AA 05:80). It is, according to Kant, “specifically different from all feelings of the first kind, which can be reduced to inclination or fear” (GMS, AA 04:401n). Schleiermacher denies that the feeling of respect can directly determine the will and constantly work against competing feelings. It is therefore “not a particular feeling of its own” (KGA 1.1, 133). Kant’s thesis that “this feeling is different from all others” is, according to Schleiermacher, unfounded.17 In his Discourse on Freedom, Schleiermacher further problematizes Kant’s theory of respect. Specifically, he questions the effectiveness of respect. An a priori determination of respect as a feeling that competes with other inclinations is not possible. Even more: “It [i.e., the moral feeling of respect] only appears on single occasions and no single action can be thought of that does not promote some natural inclination” (KGA 1.1, 163). Schleiermacher criticizes that the feeling of respect is not to be assumed equally by all people. From this, he concludes that it is not brought about by practical reason alone, as Kant had asserted, but depends “on the receptivity of sensibility on different circumstances each time” (ibid., 164). The feeling of respect is, in this regard, “as pathologically determined as any other and not at all of a different kind than all the others” (ibid.).

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Schleiermacher, therefore, denies that “the moral feeling is entirely a priori determined by pure reason,” for “sensibility constantly presents reason with the problem of achieving the greatest possible constant satisfaction of (all) entire inclinations in a subject, which reason will never be able to solve” (ibid.). In his critique of Kant’s conception of respect, Schleiermacher’s religious focus on the role of feelings is already apparent. He denies that practical reason and moral philosophy can do justice to the finite nature of emotions. It therefore remains to be determined more precisely to what extent religion does justice to these feelings, insofar as religion is its actual domain.

3.3 Intuition of Religion In his Reden über die Religion (Speeches On Religion) from 1799, Schleiermacher establishes religion as a discipline in its own right, thereby distancing himself from Kant, who had regarded religion as a merely rational and necessary consequence of morality.18 It is true that religion, metaphysics and “morality,” as Schleiermacher calls ethics, have in the last analysis “the same object . . ., namely the universe and man’s relationship to it” (Schleiermacher [1799] 2001, 75). Metaphysics asks about the first and last principles of being,19 whereas ethics deals with the first and last principles of action.20 Nevertheless, religion is specifically different from metaphysics and ethics, including in terms of its emotional dimension.21 Schleiermacher thus undertakes, as it were, a ‘critique of pure religion’ to distinguish it from metaphysics and the ethics of pure practical reason. He is concerned with the “decisive opposition . . ., in which religion finds itself against morality and metaphysics” (Schleiermacher [1799] 2001, 75). Religion differs not so much in matter, but rather in form, that is, in the specific relationship of human beings to the universe. According to Schleiermacher, religion “receives a special nature and a peculiar existence.” Schleiermacher speaks here somewhat imprecisely, because only methodologically, from a “different kind of procedure” (ibid., 76) of religion compared with metaphysics and moral philosophy. Religion’s different and specific form goes along with a specific kind of emotionality, which lets us better reconstruct Schleiermacher’s implicit notion of hope: “Its essence is neither thought nor action, but rather intuition and feeling” (Schleiermacher [1799] 2001, 79). As in Kant, where reason had its own feeling in terms of respect, religion has its own feeling according to Schleiermacher. This feeling can be interpreted in terms of the feeling of hope. Schleiermacher does not locate religion in theoretical and practical reason, but in the realm of aesthetics, i.e., according to Kant, in the realm of judgment.22 The capacity of religion is not so much that of spontaneity, but that of receptivity: “It wants to look at the universe, in its own representations and actions it wants to listen to it devoutly, from its direct influences it wants to let itself be seized and fulfilled in childlike passivity” (Schleiermacher [1799] 2001, 79). While metaphysics and ethics consider “in the whole universe only man as the center of all relationships” (Schleiermacher [1799] 2001, 80), religion seeks to discover and seek the infinite not only in human beings but in all finite things. Its scope is therefore broader than that of metaphysics and ethics. Religion conceives of the finite not as something limited and for itself, but in its holistic context with the whole, the first and the last. Religion does not separate human beings from the infinite or the “universe,” but understands them “as a part of the same” (ibid., 80f.). Religion is thus “sense and taste for the infinite” (ibid., 80), as Schleiermacher puts it. It has as its object the “basic feeling

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of the infinite and living nature” (ibid., 81), the “feeling of the infinite” (ibid.), which metaphysics and ethics lack, and which can be interpreted in terms of hope. Thus religion leads to the completion of human nature, in that it leaves “speculation as well as practice completely” and is “the necessary and indispensable third to those two,” that is, “their natural counterpart” (ibid., 80). By having the intuition of the infinite as its object, religion represents the foundation of metaphysics and ethics, which—at least according to Kant— cannot epistemically cognize it in the sense of an “intellectual intuition.”23 Instead, Schleiermacher argues that the “intuition of the universe” is “the most general and highest formula of religion” (ibid., 81). Schleiermacher conceives of intuition in the sense of being affected by what is intuited, i.e., the universe. The universe as object of religious intuition and contemplation is of such a kind that it “reveals” itself, i.e., it is understood as actively acting. However, the person who lets herself be affected by the universe is not only objectively opposed to it. For she is also part of this universe, which she intuits from her finiteness; she is both subject and object of the universe. Schleiermacher thereby argues against a theoretical objectification of the universe in intuiting. Religion consists in the individual and direct intuition of the universe and its manifestations, but not in its conceptual/ systematic theory and reflection (cf. Schleiermacher [1799] 2001, 83). Every single manifestation of the universe as such guarantees its entire religious content and truth. It does not require any further justification or causal reference to other manifestations or principles. Although Schleiermacher essentially determines religion through a subjective act and a human capacity, this does not mean that he holds a kind of religious solipsism. His definition of religion in terms of human faculties and feelings rather implies an intersubjective dimension, for he emphasizes that religion must “necessarily also be sociable.” The religious person does not keep her religious intuition as a kind of private experience but communicates it to other people. Religion is therefore about the human being “propagating the vibrations of his mind on them [other people] where possible.” According to Schleiermacher, in religious communication “speaking and listening is indispensable to everyone equally” (Schleiermacher [1799] 2001, 267). Schleiermacher places religious communication, which he also calls the “heavenly bond,” above social communication, which he characterizes as a mere “political bond” (ibid., 270). The religious effect is not only subjective through the influence of the universe on the subject, but also the communication of this intuition. Schleiermacher distinguishes the direct intuition of religion by its dimension of freedom before metaphysics and moral philosophy. By intuiting religion, the mind is endowed with “unlimited freedom” (Schleiermacher [1799] 2001, 86). Schleiermacher also calls the intuition of the universe the attitude of “love” (ibid., 92). But how exactly is this freedom to be understood?

3.4 Dependence as Freedom In the second edition of the Christian Faith (1830–1831), Schleiermacher further determines the feeling of religion in terms of hope. According to Schleiermacher, feeling is not something dark or confused, as in the Leibniz-rationalist tradition, but has a rational and motivational structure, which is closely related to self-consciousness (cf. Schleiermacher [1830–1831] 2003, 23, 31). In his Glaubenslehre (Doctrine of Faith), Schleiermacher defines the feeling of intuiting the universe more precisely as “piety.” It consists in “being

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aware of ourselves as dependent on ourselves as such, or, to say the same thing, as in relation to God” (Schleiermacher [1830–1831] 2003, 32). We can interpret the feeling of piety as hope, as a direct reference to Kant’s third question, although Schleiermacher never uses this term explicitly in his main works. Self-consciousness can be distinguished into two “elements,” namely “positing-oneself ” (Sichselbstsetzen) or “being” (Sein), and “not-having-posited-oneself-as-such” (Sichselbstnichtsogesetzthaben) or “havingsomehow-become” (Irgendwiegewordensein) (ibid., 33). The former means the freedom and self-activity of the subject; the latter its dependence, but also its receptivity, which is the dimension and realm of religion. However, this dependence is not to be understood in the sense of heteronomy. Rather, according to Schleiermacher, religious freedom and dependence stand in a dialectical relationship with each other. For the subject’s being posited is the very condition for its self-consciousness.24 The feeling of freedom of selfactivity presupposes an object to which it is related, but which does not originate from the subject itself. In modern terminology, one could call this relation a kind of intentionality, i.e., the being-directed of consciousness, which is always consciousness of something. Therefore, every feeling of freedom is also accompanied by a feeling of dependence, which makes it “limited” and only possible. This is the structure of hope: the unity of dependence and freedom. At the same time, however, according to Schleiermacher, “[without] all feeling of freedom . . . an absolute feeling of dependence would not be possible” (Schleiermacher [1830–1831] 2003, 37f.). With respect to this dialectical relationship between freedom and dependence, Schleiermacher speaks of a “total selfconsciousness” (Gesamtselbstbewußtsein), which consists in the “interaction of the subject with the co-posited [mitgesetzt] other” (ibid., 35).

4 CONCLUSION The importance of Schleiermacher’s concept of religion and its own epistemic capacity and feeling becomes obvious against the background of his critique of Kant’s theory of the highest good and the moral feeling of respect. Whereas Kant determines and motivates religion out of the demands of morality and pure practical reason, Schleiermacher reserves a relatively autonomous status for religion, also with respect to its emotional capacity. The very status of religion is expressed in the feeling of ultimate dependence, which, as I have tried to show, can be interpreted in terms of the feeling of hope. However, Schleiermacher is not only concerned with delimiting and defining religion—both in terms of its discipline and content. For religion refers to metaphysics and morality and only in combination gives them their true destiny, which consists in the holistic, vivid and lived universal relation of human finiteness and finiteness in general. By emphasizing the irreducible feeling of ultimate dependence, which is expressed in the feeling of hope, Schleiermacher does not isolate the religious subject. Rather, this genuine religious feeling motivates the subject to share its religious experiences with other subjects and to communicate them. Finally, Schleiermacher’s notion of ultimate dependence is not to be understood in the sense of heteronomy and lack of freedom. Both dependence and self-activity are deeply related in what Schleiermacher calls “total self-awareness,” as freedom intentionally presupposes an object that must always already be given to the subject so that it can have consciousness of something at all. The feeling of ultimate dependence, understood in terms of hope, is therefore the original transcendental condition of the possibility of experience, and an answer to Kant’s third question “What may I hope?”

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NOTES 1.

See, e.g., Scarantino and de Sousa 2018: “No aspect of our mental life is more important to the quality and meaning of our existence than the emotions. They are what make life worth living and sometimes worth ending. . . . But it is surprising that throughout much of the twentieth-century, scientists and philosophers of mind tended to neglect the emotions— in part because of behaviorism’s allergy to inner mental states and in part because the variety of phenomena covered by the word ‘emotion’ discourages tidy theorizing. In recent decades, however, emotions have once again become the focus of vigorous interest in philosophy and affective science.”

2.

See Bloeser and Stahl 2017: “[P]hilosophy has traditionally not paid the same attention to hope as it has to attitudes like belief and desire.”

3.

I will use the terms “feeling” and “emotion” interchangeably.

4.

Translations from Critique of Pure Reason are by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood in Kant [1781/1787] 1998.

5.

For a systematic reconstruction of Kant’s theory of the moral feeling of respect, see Noller 2019.

6.

“[T]hough respect is a feeling, it is not one received by means of influence; it is, instead, a feeling self-wrought by means of a rational concept” (GMS, AA 04:401n); “respect for the moral law is a feeling that is produced by an intellectual ground, and this feeling is the only one that we can cognize completely a priori and the necessity of which we can have insight into” (KpV, AA 05:73); “this feeling, on account of its origin, cannot be called pathologically effected but must be called practically effected” (ibid., 75); “The feeling [of respect] . . . is not pathological, as would be a feeling produced by an object of the senses, but practical only, that is, possible through a preceding (objective) determination of the will and causality of reason” (ibid., 80).

7.

It is “specifically different from all feelings of the first kind, which can be reduced to inclination or fear” (GMS, AA 04:401n). Respect is caused by the “influence of a mere intellectual idea on feeling” (KpV, AA 05:80). Respect is a “special kind of feeling, which, however, does not precede the lawgiving of practical reason but is instead produced only by it” (ibid., 92).

8.

“Respect for the moral law is . . . the sole and also the undoubted moral incentive” (KpV, AA 05:78).

9.

“[O]n the one side [it] is merely negative but on the other side, and indeed with respect to the restricting ground of pure practical reason, it is positive” (KpV, AA 05:74); “it . . . contains in it no pleasure but instead, so far, displeasure. . . . On the other hand . . . it also contains something elevating” (ibid., 80); “the moral law unavoidably humiliates every human being when he compares with it the sensible propensity of his nature” (ibid., 74); “however, since this constraint is exercised only by the lawgiving of his own reason, it also contains something elevating” (ibid., 80).

10. “The consciousness of a free submission of the will to the law, yet as combined with an unavoidable constraint put on all inclinations though only by one’s own reason, is respect for the law” (KpV, AA 05:80). 11. “[R]espect for the law is not the incentive to morality; instead it is morality itself subjectively considered as an incentive” (KpV, AA 05:76).

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12. “Any respect for a person is properly only respect for the law (of integrity and so forth) of which he gives us an example” (GMS, AA 04:401n). 13. Translations from Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals are by Mary Gregor in Kant [1785] 1998. 14. Translations from Critique of Practical Reason are by Mary Gregor in Kant [1788] 1997. 15. All translations of Schleiermacher’s works are my own. 16. On Schleiermacher’s critique of respect see Moxter 1992, 31–36 and Gutekunst 2019, 48f. 17. Kant, however, had asserted that respect is “the sole and also the undoubted moral incentive” (KpV, AA 05:78). 18. “Morality thus inevitably leads to religion” (Rel, AA 06:6). 19. Cf. for instance Aristotle’s definition of the prima philosophia as the science that deals with the principles (archai) of being. 20. Cf. for example Kant’s talk of a “metaphysics of morals” and a practical reason that establishes an absolute moral law. 21. Schleiermacher is not always terminologically precise in his determination of metaphysics and ethics. Sometimes he speaks in this respect of the object (such as morality or practice), sometimes of the discipline of that object. 22. Rudolf Otto ([1917] 1936, 152) has pointed this out. 23. Cf. B308: “If . . . we wanted to apply the categories to objects that are not considered as appearances, then we would have to ground them on an intuition other than the sensible one, and then the object would be a noumenon in a positive sense. Now since such an intuition, namely intellectual intuition, lies absolutely outside our faculty of Cognition, the use of the categories can by no means reach beyond the boundaries of the objects of experience.” 24. In this, Schleiermacher’s theory of self-consciousness is similar to that of Kierkegaard, as he developed it in Sygdommen til Døden (The Sickness unto Death): “The human self is such a derived, established relation, a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another” (transl. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong in Kierkegaard 1849 [1980], 13f.).

REFERENCES Bloeser, Claudia and Titus Stahl (2017), “Hope,” in Edward N. Zalta, (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/ hope/. Gutekunst, Katharina (2019), Die Freiheit des Subjekts bei Schleiermacher. Eine Analyse im Horizont der Debatte um die Willensfreiheit in der analytischen Philosophie, Theologische Bibliothek, vol. 185, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Kant, Immanuel ([1781/1787] 1998), Critique of Pure Reason, transl. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1785] 1998), Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, transl. Mary Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1788] 1997), Critique of Practical Reason, transl. Mary Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Kant, Immanuel ([1793] 1998), Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, transl. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren ([1849] 1980), The Sickness unto Death. A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, ed. and transl. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press. McCarty, Richard (1993), “Moral Motivation and the Feeling of Respect,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 31 (3): 421–435. Moxter, Michael (1992), Güterbegriff und Handlungstheorie. Eine Studie zur Ethik F. Schleiermachers, Morality and the Meaning of Life, vol. 1, Kampen: Kok Pharos. Noller, Jörg (2019), “Reason’s Feeling. A Systematic Reconstruction of Kant’s Theory of Moral Respect,” in SATS. Northern European Journal of Philosophy, 20 (1): 1–18. 10.12857/10.1515/sats-2019-0012. Otto, Rudolf ([1917] 1936), The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, transl. W. Harvey, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scarantino, Andrea and Ronald de Sousa (2018), “Emotion,” in Edward N. Zalta, (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/ entries/emotion/. Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst ([1789] 1983), Notizen zu Kant: Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, in Günter Meckenstock, (ed.), Kritische Gesamtausgabe, I. Sect. vol. 1, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter: 129–134. Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst ([1789] 1983), Über das höchste Gut, in Günter Meckenstock, (ed.), Kritische Gesamtausgabe, I. Sect. vol. 1, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter: 83–125. Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst ([1799] 2001), On Religion. Speeches to the Educated Among their Despisers, in Günter Meckenstock, (ed.), Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst ([1830–1831] 2003), The Christian Faith According to the Principles of the Protestant Church Presented in Context, 2nd edn. Partial volume, Rolf Schäfer, (ed.), Kritische Gesamtausgabe, I. Sect., vol. 13,1, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.

CHAPTER TEN

C. A. Eschenmayer History as the Realm of Freedom and Moral Development CRISTIANA SENIGAGLIA (University of Trieste)

1 INTRODUCTION The philosopher whose work is considered in this paper, Carl August Eschenmayer, did not elaborate an articulated concept of hope nor make precise categorical distinctions on that topic; in fact, he used the word “hope” only occasionally. However, this was not due to a lack of interest in the question; rather, it was consistent with Eschenmayer’s theoretical standpoint that the sphere of spirituality cannot be investigated by reason and knowledge but belongs to the realm of faith. Accordingly, that which concerns human destiny cannot be known but only felt and vaguely perceived as a presentiment or a premonition. In this context, the question of hope nonetheless emerges as an important component of Eschenmayer’s approach to spirituality, since hope forms part of the tension between human agency and divine intervention. This paper traces the role of hope in Eschenmayer’s system, in the process revealing a significant shift in perspective in Eschenmayer’s work compared to that of Kant, as well as his tense relation to the work of Hegel. With respect to hope, Eschenmayer’s modification of perspective can be made clear by reference to Kantian philosophy and by comparing the fundamental questions which are formulated by the two authors. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant affirms that philosophy ultimately aims at answering three questions: “What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?” (A805/B833). Eschenmayer, by contrast, focuses on the following three interrogatives: “Human being, where do you come from? What is your vocation [Bestimmung] in this world [literally ‘here’]? What will become of you?” (Eschenmayer 1824, 1). First of all, it becomes evident that the subject concerned is not conceived of by Eschenmayer in the first person but embraces the general human condition. Secondly, Eschenmayer’s questions relate to origin and destination, i.e., they introduce a temporal dimension respectively entailing past, present, and future, which chiefly define the human as a historical being. Thirdly, through the idea of vocation they stress the importance of human agency, by simultaneously placing it between an origin that is not self-determined and an uncertain ultimate end which has to be realized. This shifts the question of hope towards the dimension of the philosophy of history, on the one hand stressing the role and relevance of human agency, and, on the other, interrogating the essence and meaning of providence and divine intervention. In this complex and tension-filled constellation, freedom plays a central role, since it would not make sense to speak of human agency and its contribution to history if humans 165

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were destined to act under the logic of mechanism. More radically, this would exclude the possibility of the existence of history itself, since it would imply subjection to constant natural laws, ensuring immutability and repetition. On the other hand, freedom relates to hope, since, by being removed from the necessity typical of natural laws, it shows a supernatural origin, which, in Eschenmayer’s understanding, reveals the divine concern for human beings. At the same time, this enhances the possibility of a good use of freedom as well as of the realization of the good in the world. From this standpoint, history becomes the central realm in which freedom and human agency have a fundamental function concerning the realization of the good in the worldly dimension. At the same time, it raises cardinal questions such as the existence of a logical development in the world, the role of evil, and the possibility and effectiveness of providence, which are all related to the question of hope. After a short introduction to Eschenmayer’s basic ideas, the analysis in this paper focuses on showing how history acquires a central role in human life and how Eschenmayer connects it to human agency and freedom. On the other hand, it must be taken into account that Eschenmayer encases the development of history in an a priori dynamic structure, which aims at reconciliation and follows a world plan. The aim is to ascertain which results can be attained through history, how many of them can be entrusted to human beings, which elements can instead be corrected and completed by providence, and what role can be played by hope.

2 SOME SIGNIFICANT TRAITS OF ESCHENMAYER’S PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTION Carl August Eschenmayer (1768–1852), philosopher and medical doctor, was at first inspired by the Kantian conception of physics, as evinced by the title of his dissertation: Säze aus der Natur-Metaphysik auf chemische und medicinische Gegenstände angewandt (Propositions from the Metaphysics of Nature Applied to Chemical and Medical Objects) (1797), and by a work published one year later: Versuch die Geseze magnetischer Erscheinungen aus Säzen der Naturmetaphysik mithin a priori zu entwikeln (An Attempt to Develop the Laws of Magnetic Phenomena from the Principles of the Metaphysics of Nature) (1798). In these works, he presents a dynamic vision of nature, based on the two fundamental forces of attraction and repulsion, which are understood as two interactive poles mediated by a zero point of equilibrium. Therein he also begins to develop a theory of mathematical powers, considered as concepts able to analogically explain different degrees or constellations of objective phenomena and subjective mental faculties. The theory of the powers has the advantage, in his view, of avoiding the conception of a linear and continuous development, by explaining qualitative distinctions in the way of approaching and conceiving of reality. In the meantime, Eschenmayer develops a close connection with Schelling, which will last through time, although it will be characterized by some periods of particularly intensive intellectual and epistolary exchange, alternating with phases of distance and abeyance. A particular convergence is represented, beyond the theory of powers, by the idea of the worldsoul (Weltseele), which Eschenmayer explicitly derives from Schelling, and which is for both an imperceptible, unifying and enlivening principle animating the world. On the other hand, already in this common philosophical notion it is possible to ascertain the origin of their theoretical disagreement. While Schelling intends the worldsoul as an immanent principle, Eschenmayer attributes to it a transcendent origin,

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which also explains, in his view, the extraphysical provenance of freedom, which he deduces from Kant’s distinction between pure and practical reason. This theoretical divergence between the two authors continues to develop and include new aspects, until a difference in the relation they see between knowledge and faith, or philosophy and religion, emerges. While Schelling ascribes to philosophical knowledge the capacity to comprehend the Absolute and the divine, thanks to his notion of identity, Eschenmayer stresses the distinction between knowledge, which is a competence of reason, and faith, which has no epistemological function but is based on forms of feeling, prescience (Ahndung), and meditation (Andacht) which exceed rational comprehension. This distinction allows him, in his work Die Philosophie in ihrem Uebergange zur Nichtphilosophie (Philosophy in Its Transition to Non-philosophy) (1803), to conceive of an articulated system that demonstrates a parallel between ontological spheres and mental faculties. Also in this case, this conception is based on the theory of the powers and their different degrees, which allows him to maintain a basic code of unity while emphasizing the qualitative differences, clearly opposing a linear and continuous way of thinking. The system is articulated in the four powers of sensitivity, intellect, reason, and soul, and thematizes the Kantian notion of limit by providing a philosophy that disjoints and at the same time connects the rational (also entailing the different sciences and disciplines) and the extra-rational. Schelling, for his part, will dedicate an appendix (see Schelling 1801) to Eschenmayer’s Spontaneität = Weltseele oder das höchste Princip der Naturphilosophie (Spontaneity = The Worldsoul or the Highest Principle of the Philosophy of Nature) (1801), and then partially contest his theses in the final part of Philosophie und Religion (Philosophy and Religion) (Schelling 1804). Eschenmayer will elaborate his theoretical vision in the work Der Eremit und der Fremdling. Gespräche über das Heilige und die Geschichte (The Hermit and the Stranger: Conversations on the Holy and History) (1805), in which he points out the function of transcendence in human life through feeling and faith, which exceed knowledge and reason, and then in Einleitung in Natur und Geschichte (Introduction to Nature and History) (Eschenmayer [1806] 2016), the final part of which is dedicated to highlighting (in a friendly way) the most relevant theoretical divergences with Schelling. In the conception that he matures in these years, reason progressively develops from a mental faculty to the self-productive principle of reality. This explains its intrinsic tendency to self-objectivation, which unfolds in the two different and in some respects asymmetric fields of nature and history. Nevertheless, Eschenmayer equally maintains that reason has a limit in its competences and capacities which cannot be overthrown constitutively.

3 HISTORY AS A PART OF THE SYSTEM Eschenmayer’s system of powers is conceived of as a non-linear vision of mental faculties and corresponding dimensions of reality, which avoids uniformity as well as pure immanence (Berger and Whistler 2020, 95f.). In this sense, the diverse spheres maintain a relation of correspondence and analogy with one another, without the possibility of being completely traced back and reduced to a previous sphere. This guarantees an at least partial independence of the different spheres from each other, admitting at the same time forms of interweaving and correlation. Additionally, since the basis of the system of powers is constituted by a polarity of forces in unstable and changeable balance (i.e., the forces of attraction and repulsion), the internal dynamicism of the system is ensured and

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performed differently at the various levels. Yet a tension towards the next level is simultaneously expressed, which nevertheless is performed asymptotically, so that the previous level is not expected to fully reach the next one and, conversely, the superior level can be only tangential to the inferior one. These issues derive from a complex and accurate analysis based on the mathematical properties of the powers, whose unity is produced by the power with exponent zero, and whose sequences always indicate an empowerment that includes a qualitative enhancement. On the other hand, the difference is guaranteed through the archetypical presence of the separation and distinction between this world and the other world, which, much more than two different worlds, indicates for Eschenmayer the impossibility of a reduction to mere immanence and the necessity of maintaining different levels. This is particularly important in relation to history because it allows him to maintain a form of transcendence with respect to its end, still admitting a worldly perspective of development and progress. From this vantage point, history is chiefly considered the result of the process of selfobjectivation by reason. For Eschenmayer, reason operates in a dimension of tendency to immanence, which is nevertheless structured by the disjunction between subject and object. This disjunction, which is internal to and irresolvable by reason, determines the impossibility of exhaustive knowledge, as Eschenmayer argues. He asks: Where should the eye be situated in order to observe the totality of reason if reason is not to lose its subjective and enlivening function? As self-objectivation can never be completed, since this would mean the reduction of reason to a mere inanimate object, self-objectivation can only be partial, and it can proceed only in the two opposite directions of repulsion and attraction, expansion and concentration. The first case concerns the dimension of space, which means expansion as well as synchrony and translates into an infinite organization of external spheres producing an eternal order. The second case concerns the dimension of time, which is characterized by a succession of happenings developing themselves into a series of meaningful concatenations connected with each other through the displaying of an eternal plan. Nature and history represent, according to Eschenmayer, an opposition between two different poles, which are in a way asymmetric in their qualities: the pole of nature is dominated by necessity and law, the pole of history by freedom; the pole of nature is qualified by the prevalence of materiality and exteriority, the pole of history is instead qualified by the prevailing of spirit and intellectual faculties, and these entail the increasing intervention of human beings in shaping their world and life conditions. Nature and history, nevertheless, represent two forms of the self-projection of reason and offer at the same time the chance of self-knowledge. In history, this is performed by the community of rational beings and their succeeding generations, which ensure their material basis for spiritual and intellectual continuity. As reason can only be partially objectivated without losing its mediated unity between subject and object, this objectivation must happen in a way that maintains this unity at least partially. This can be made possible only by means of ideal products of reason which are able to partially objectivate themselves and simultaneously express unity in the immediate form of knowing subject and known object. For Eschenmayer, these immediate partial unities are constituted by the ideas, which are to be considered as regulative principles orienting reason itself in its process of objectivation and self-realization. He speaks in fact of three main ideas: truth (Wahrheit), beauty (Schönheit), and virtue (Tugend). These define three different fields pertaining to reason in their most speculative and ideal qualifications. Truth is qualified as “the most perfect idealization of necessity in

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the sensory world” (Eschenmayer [1803] 2007, [§87] 91) and specifically refers to the laws existing in nature. Truth is a quality concerning natural phenomena and scientific knowledge; therefore, as these are based on universal validity and applicability, truth implies necessity (Eschenmayer follows here the Kantian conception of natural phenomena as the sole appropriate realm of scientific knowledge). Beauty is instead considered as the indifference point between the intellectual and the sensory, which at the same time means “concretization of the intellectual and spiritualization of the sensory” (ibid.). Beauty is reached by means of the organization of material through form, which entails the ideal structuring of natural and sensory components. Its realm is the organism as well as the art product, both of which are also treated by Kant in the Critique of Judgment. Virtue, finally, is attached to the spiritual and human world, cultural expressions included, and represents “the most perfect realization of freedom in the intellectual world” (ibid.). Virtue includes all sectors of human activities in which the original impulse and characterization are originated by human thinking and agency. Therefore its fields concern right (or rights) and duties, and its key science is ethics. Virtue consists in realizing positive moral qualities and contents through agency, which rests on the fundamental presupposition of freedom. Nevertheless, Eschenmayer also extends the influence of virtue to history as the form of self-objectivation actuated by reason. The reason for this resides in the fact that he conceives of history as an expression of rationality, which nevertheless is shaped by the meaningful concatenation of human actions and not by an overarching power external to individuals. According to Eschenmayer, the series of actions that build history can be explained through an analysis compounding previous facts and the present condition, on the one hand, with free decision, on the other. By starting from the presupposition that these different aspects are taken into account through a reflective act, the chain of facts and events which delineates history appears to acquire a meaning which runs through the different occurrences and stages. Therefore, Eschenmayer opposes the idea that history is only an accidental sequence of disconnected facts by arguing that there are always some aspects ensuring a meaningful connection. This allows humans to integrate the influence of ethics in the chain of actions producing history, since agency can be subjected to moral criteria and chosen in accordance with them. By applying a systematically moralizing as well as ethically scrutinized judgment and acting consistently, the result to be expected is the pursuit of virtue in history as well as the asymptotic approximation to its realization. Thus, virtue becomes a regulative ideal as well as the approximate end, whereby it can also be implemented as a concrete social and political system and not only as the systematic actuation of the categorical imperative. On the other hand, history is not determined in its course because of the presence of agency, characterized by freedom, which includes the necessity of ethics as a science of morals and also has to reckon with the possibility of the lack of its application. Thus, liberty and necessity are shown to represent the two poles of the inner constitution of history, although freedom plays the paramount role.

4 ESCHENMAYER’S CONCEPT OF FREEDOM AND ITS RELATION TO HISTORY Partly following Kant, Eschenmayer affirms that freedom is a principle that does not concern thinking or feeling, but agency. Only in the sphere of the will can freedom express itself, because there it is not conditioned by external inputs and influences. Situating

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freedom in the will means understanding it as a practical principle intended to modify and organize reality and not a simple reaction to it. The quality of freedom is equated to spontaneity, which Eschenmayer, quoting Jakob Böhme,1 defines as causality from a nonground (Ungrund), i.e., an absence of ground. In other words, spontaneity indicates the possibility of beginning an action or a series of actions without it being directly provoked or implied by a previous reason: “Spontaneity is a creative causality, in every moment self-renewing, emerging [hervorquellende] not from a previous ground [Grund], but rather from a non-ground [Ungrund]. This genesis, since it is situated externally to the circle of all natural concepts and all equivalences, is indeed incomprehensible for us, but exactly here, in the incomprehensibility, there is an eternal truth” (Eschenmayer 1831a, 27 Aph. 59). Freedom then entails, as a consequence of spontaneity and self-originated causality, the possibility of choosing alternatives, sustained by the awareness that “you should and could have acted in another way” (ibid., 15 Aph. 12). Nevertheless, Eschenmayer distinguishes between a freedom influenced by senses or emotions and a freedom that represents the realization of reason (or, later, spirit). The first is a false freedom, i.e., arbitrariness (Willkür), and only the second is true freedom. True freedom can only be performed through a substantialization of an ideal element. Nonetheless, Eschenmayer opposes Hegel’s conception that substantialization concerns the totality of reason or of spirit. Rather, it substantiates the idea of virtue (which is already a partial component of reason) only in a partial way. Regarding this proposal, he notes: It is not the spirit that substantializes itself, but the ideas which derive from it. We see indeed that the idea of truth becomes substantial in the physical order and beauty becomes substantial in the organic order, although not in phenomena, but in the laws of movement and in the types of life, and so also the idea of virtue will substantialize itself in the history of the world [Weltgeschichte]. — Eschenmayer 1831a, 53 Aph. 134 However, the process of the substantialization of virtue is neither predetermined nor guaranteed. Since history concerns the practical sphere and follows from the concatenations of human actions, these are constitutively the results of a continuous expression of the different wills in play: “Every individual engages there [in history] with self-determination in the series of events” (Eschenmayer [1806] 2016, 48). The aspect of freedom characterizes human action, as well as virtue, as forms of contrasting reality and advancing “against” it. History is inseparably connected with the modification of present conditions, and this is performed already in the neutral sense that human beings intervene in and influence the course of nature, simultaneously reducing its sphere of presence through the development of culture and the social and political organization of life. The common tie between action and virtue is due to this kind of action “against reality” (see ibid., 55–57). However, this does not mean that virtue can be detected with the same frequency as human action. With respect to this, Eschenmayer is sometimes even pessimistic, since he admits that virtue is rare, especially in some epochs of history (such as that of his contemporary time), and anything but the general rule of human agency. Nonetheless, the fact that virtue is the criterion of true freedom and the fundament of ethics, at least in the social dimension (the religious dimension represents a higher level and is connected with an attitude forged by faith), speaks for the possibility of its extension and for a perspective of progressive affirmation with respect to the future, provided that virtue remains based on free will and that it can be requested, but not imposed.

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5 THE TRANSCENDENTAL STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE HISTORICAL PROCESS The interweaving of history with freedom does not signify that history is left to chance and disorder. On the contrary, in the same way that mental faculties have their own kind of structure and organization, history, too, is subjected to its own models of articulation and development. Thus, Eschenmayer attributes to history some fundamental structures and developmental processes, which shape their course by means of necessary stages and a teleological direction. Concerning the stages of the process, Eschenmayer establishes as the basic structure a trichotomy that implies a dialectical form of diremption, which utilizes religious terminology but also echoes Rousseau’s analysis about the original society in his Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind). The trichotomy consists of innocence (Unschuld), scission (Selbstentzweiung), and reconciliation (Versöhnung). According to Eschenmayer, these are the definitions of the three main phases in which history articulates itself, and they also provide an explication of the movement which characterizes their connection. Correspondingly, in history, we assist in the succession of the main phases articulating the course of events in conformity to this basic structure, and then minor processes internal to them reproducing the same movement on a small scale. The scheme based on innocence, scission, and reconciliation finds its ontological and epistemological foundation in the self-movement of reason, which implies a continuous process of selfobjectivation (although this can never be concluded and totalized, but concerns only a part of the process), completed by a process of reflection performed through a goingback-to-itself of reason (or, in a later phase of Eschenmayer’s thought, of spirit). This movement is then to be traced back to the essence of reason, which is not conceived of as a substance but as a force splitting in two directions that alternate their function and their predominance. The two fields, nature and history, are considered as, respectively, an organized and structured process of expansion in space, taking place simultaneously, which produces the eternal order of nature, and the diachronic succession instantiated in the dimension of time, which concerns the realm of history (which also entails culture, social and political life, institutions, etc.). The trichotomy of history can be ascertained, according to Eschenmayer, both at the level of the single person and at the level of universal history. By referring to the individual, this trichotomy reconstructs the process of children growing up to adulthood. The first phase is characterized by a stage of innocence, while youth brings a condition of division and conflict. On attaining adult age, the individual finds an internal unity and equilibrium, which is represented by a condition of reconciliation (Eschenmayer 1805, 19–20). In relation to history, Eschenmayer reconstructs the process with particular reference to the beginning. This probably has to do with the idea that ancient history, and especially biblical history, contains the archetypes of every following development. Additionally, this tendency takes on the method used by Rousseau in his description of the original state of nature and its transition to society, and later by Schelling, who in his work Die Weltalter (Ages of the World) dedicates his attention prevailingly to the past, and besides was always convinced that mythology provides, in a visual and metaphorical form, the fundamentals of philosophical truth. By underlining the relevance of the past, Eschenmayer constructs a philosophy of history which is articulated in three main periods:

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1. the condition of innocence and of the still inwardly untroubled harmony; 2. the condition of the Fall and of inward scission, and 3. the condition of acceptance and reconciliation. (Eschenmayer 1818b, 3) Consequently, he depicts the original human as a person in whom contrasts, distinctions, and polarities are still undeveloped, and in whom the moral conflict between good and evil is also not yet truly unfolded: Sensation and will, reason and desire, intellect and temper did not yet build the oppositions, which they present to us in all their full development. In return, nevertheless, the force of the feeling of self [Selbstgefühl] had a much more intensive power, and the life which opened itself in him [or her] showed itself in youthful pleasure and enjoyment full of grace, serenity, and guiltless purity. This life was simple in manners, customs, and habits, unacquainted with political forms, art and science, and still without unconditional pursuit of higher culture. — Eschenmayer 1818b, 4 In this condition of original simplicity, where virtue and malignity are not yet known, the first conflicts arise because of the scarcity of food, which compels people to change location. According to Eschenmayer, as long as people stay in a territory, they tend more to social relationships, which give rise to families and tribes, and are forged by sociable and peaceful tendencies. By contrast, the exhaustion of resources and the consequent emigrations originate conflicts, because they provoke encounters with the tribes living in the new territory, who perceive the newcomers as enemies endangering the basic conditions of their subsistence: The tribes migrate and encounter other tribes and now the first struggle for the fertile pastures begins, and for the first time the human being perceives in the [other] human being their enemy. Once hate, envy, and ill-will have taken root, it is all over with innocence and that harmless simplicity resorts to means which offer to them lie, ruse, and disguise. — Eschenmayer 1818b, 7 However, for Eschenmayer this new condition does not only have negative outcomes, since it allows the individual to confront the other and to reach the condition of selfconsciousness. In this turning-point, as surely as perniciousness [Verderben] appears in the nature of the human being, so this is nevertheless, on the other hand, also again the infallible means to develop the simple feeling of self into the full life of self-consciousness. Only by means of cohabitation, where every member affirms their own independence and finds their equal in the equal, which can never be the case in isolated families, does full self-consciousness develop. The act is refracted by resistance and drives, through reflection, the feeling of self out of itself, becoming the consciousness of one’s own power. — Eschenmayer 1818b, 7 Having been driven to this condition of instability and conflict, people prefer to renounce freedom and equality in exchange for security and the safeguarding of property. When people come together and accept living in society, there are in principle two alternatives: monarchy and despotism. At first, the union of the people is attained through a monarchy.

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However, if there is no stable tradition referring to laws (Eschenmayer gives here the example of the Mosaic tradition, which allows for the possibility of monarchies based on legality), the prevailing solution will be despotism, in which power and absolute subjection establish the political order, and this engenders the period of the Fall. Nevertheless, the process of self-consciousness, which is attained through the splitting and tension generated by the presence of the enemy and the relation of domination, is not useless. On the strength of reflection, indeed, it is possible to reach self-knowledge, which for its part originates self-legislation. And self-legislation shows itself to be the prevailing political order of the third period, which is the sociable period. In fact, when individuals show the ability to reflect about and know themselves, there is a continual exchange between existence and knowledge which develops the capacity to autonomously determine the laws which are necessary to a peaceful coexistence. In the sociable period, according to Eschenmayer, it is to be assumed that different peoples can also peacefully coexist together and that this is performed through reference to right and the law. Thanks to the concept of right, which is connected with a sentiment of freedom ensured by a political system based on legality, people unveil the misconduct and misgovernment of despotism and substitute for it a better form of rule: “Where a nation becomes clear about the truth of the concept of right, which has its realization only in a Constitution, and in spite of this still has to bow down to arbitrary domination, people will surely not consider real despotism as a necessary advocate of the idea” (Eschenmayer 1831a, 57 Aph. 142). The nations, and also their rulers (provided that they are sensible), when they have understood the fundamental value of rights, manage to transform the system into an organization where the free choice of the citizens is ensured. For Eschenmayer, the inner characteristic of freedom consists not in an accidental appearance that is passively accepted and develops in the course of time, but in an active principle, which, once it has rightly been understood, becomes essential in transforming and shaping life conditions. This becomes evident, especially in relation to political organization, which has to be consistent with its inspiring principles and ideals and therefore contribute to realizing freedom.

6 THE WORLD PLAN In relation to the schemes and structures concerning history, Eschenmayer also conceives of the idea of a universal world plan, which he chiefly understands in a religious sense, and which has as its end “the glorification of God and the bliss [Beseligung] of the free realm of the spirits [Geisterreich]” (Eschenmayer 1831b, 143f.). From the worldly perspective, this implies a moralization of life and its contents, intertwined, nevertheless, with happiness and wellbeing. In this sense, Eschenmayer takes on the question raised by Kant about the link between ethics and blissfulness, which Kant had considered as problematic, but nevertheless possible and related to hope, since the extended moral behavior implies the diminishing of hindrances and the improvement of interpersonal relationships. On his part, Eschenmayer sees this aim as an ultimate end, which also entails a religious dimension, and which therefore refers not only to universal history but also to the moral improvement of human beings in general. Nonetheless, universal history plays an important role in the world plan, and this is mirrored by the conceptual frame utilized by Eschenmayer, which includes the ideas of theodicy and providence, since especially the phases of scission (Selbstentzweiung) generate quarrels and conflicts which reduce the chances of moral compliance.

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In order to understand the role of universal history in the world plan, according to Eschenmayer, it is necessary to consider history as a whole with a beginning and an end, which he primarily focuses on as the project of moralization. Therefore, the standpoint of the world plan requires the annulment (Tilgung) of time, which is to be understood as the discovery of the eternal structure lying in the course of things. For Eschenmayer, the annulment of time does not necessarily mean the assumption of a messianic perspective or reference to the Last Judgment, but rather the capacity of distancing oneself from the concreteness of events and integrating them into a comprehensive understanding of the historical process. In this sense, the annulment of time chiefly means assuming the standpoint of the philosophy of history, which is able, in his view, to ascertain a direction of development and a final stage, although the trichotomic structure prevents a linear unfolding and a merely evolutionary improvement. Although at first sight the idea of a world plan indicates the shifting of attention towards momentous events and global tendencies, Eschenmayer insists on the fact that history is made by the single actions of individual people: “The human being, who intervenes as an active component in the plan of this totality, no matter how low his [or her] place may be, is nevertheless at least worth something” (Eschenmayer 1805, 13). In doing so, Eschenmayer stresses the possibility of individual contribution to the world plan not only through historical deeds or events but also through individual moral agency. For him, history is in principle produced by a chain of individual events and the realization of the world plan is a task that is conferred on each person in particular and on humankind in general: “History is in itself an eternal plan, and this is always as present as Providence, but it is carried forward by individuality, is developed in the course of time, and is a successive totality [sukzessives Ganzes]—just as nature is a simultaneous entity [Gleichzeitiges]” (Eschenmayer [1806] 2016, 57). The contribution of single individuals is completed, and not substituted, by the legacy of the single cultures and nations. In this sense, the different forms of association and community are seen as the necessary forms to promote development and multifariousness at the same time, which both contribute to the improvement of the moral order. In a late work, Eschenmayer affirms: “The moral world order nevertheless cannot be reached without people conglomerating into families, communities, tribes, nations, and states, in order to develop all the many-sided directions which are present in the body, the soul, and the spirit, and to store them in a history” (Eschenmayer 1852, 76). From this perspective, universal history is the collection of the different histories of the single nations, which in their turn constitute the basis for the life of single individuals. Nonetheless, these single individuals continue to play a significant role, and, what is even more important, they are endowed with freedom and the possibility of choice. This freedom is one of two features of Eschenmayer’s account that condition the kinds of hope that are possible within his system. The other one concerns Eschenmayer’s theory of divine compensation, whose implications for hope relate to both the effects of our own actions and the progress of world history as a whole.

7 FREEDOM AND THE PLAN OF HISTORY: THE THEORY OF COMPENSATION Dealing with a plan of history, the chief question is whether an ideal of free agency and decision by individuals can be maintained. The first question concerns the idea of a plan itself, which entails the conception of purposive finality, and the subjection of all single actions to a final end. The concept of a plan, conceived of on a universal level (Eschenmayer

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believes, as Kant does, that there are more inhabited planets and that each one contributes to developing this universal plan), seems to sharply contrast with the possibility of individual freedom and capacity of choice. Additionally, even in the restricted (so to speak) context of human history, individuals naturally tend to be encompassed by collective processes, and this furnishes a reasonable ground for imagining that the role of individuals becomes progressively reduced. In the uninterrupted flux of events and of people participating in it, it could be argued, the single individual is submerged in favor of collective actors such as nations or generations, and his or her agency is reduced to a minimal component of a huge and incessant interaction. How can it be believed that the individual continues to play a significant role and maintains a meaningful freedom? In effect, Eschenmayer reflects on this question. He maintains that the individual as a common person (and not only as an exceptional personality), in time contributing to establishing his or her personal destiny, has a relevant function in the co-shaping of history, since he or she plays a specific role within the eternal plan. The question is then: provided that individual freedom is seriously maintained, how can it be made certain that the world plan will come true? In order to maintain individual freedom within the eternal plan of history and to ascribe to it a significant function, Eschenmayer elaborates a theory of compensation. This theory asserts that, in consequence of the complex constellation of actions and interactions which produce a certain result in history, it is possible to think of a rebalancing, which provides for the maintaining of individual freedom of choice, on the one hand, and the attaining of certain results (and finally the end result) on the other. Concretely, this theory admits that the choices of one single person can be compensated for by other actions or by the concatenation of events, so that individual freedom is constitutively preserved and the plan nevertheless can be accomplished, at least in the long run: “Thus, the advancement of the world plan can also remain ensured through innumerable combinations, while every individual plays a role by free choice” (Eschenmayer 1818b, 131–132), or, conversely: “All series of deeds of human beings are free, but their interweaving towards the final success depends on divine compensation, which can intervene immediately as well as in a mediated way on the strength of laws” (Eschenmayer 1831a, 56 Aph. 140). This means, according to Eschenmayer, that individuals can freely decide what they want to do, and, once they have become acquainted with the contents of the world plan, they can freely support it (or not). On the other hand, their action is not indifferent to the possibility of reaching the expected result. For instance, the systematic effort to attain this plan by even a single individual can speed up the accomplishment of the whole process. Conversely, deviation from it can relevantly contribute to its slowing down. Additionally, there are some limits that one must not exceed, otherwise, external intervention in the form of a negative fate can take its course. Thus, there is for Eschenmayer not only the intervention of an “invisible hand” (such as that of Adam Smith, e.g., Smith 1761, 273) recalibrating the general process but also a stronger possibility of individual intervention through personal commitment as well as a significant chance of modifying the course of events by individual agency and decision.

8 THE FUNCTION OF ETHICS By recognizing the role of individual agency, Eschenmayer furnishes a further fundamental legitimization of the function of ethics. First of all, each individual can reach a high level

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of morality in every period of time, because possibilities of personal improvement and accomplishment are always available for every single individual and situation. Thus, even negative destiny cannot be taken as an excuse for immoral behavior. The study of ethics thereby increases its relevance, because it can have a weighty role also in relation to influencing history. In virtue of ethics, it is not possible to make humans better or worse in principle, because otherwise, this would instate a deterministic process, depriving them of free choice. In this sense, some troubles are the necessary price for the guarantee of freedom. By contrast, humans can be led to the knowledge of what is good and what is evil, and then make their conscientious choice. In this sense, ethics can be considered the science of relative freedom provided to the human will. On the other hand, this has major significance, because there is no point of arrival defined in advance, and people’s attitudes can relevantly influence moral development and the realization of the world plan. Thus, all individual contributions are relevant, and knowledge also represents a substantial contribution to development, since ethics as a science is interconnected with reflection and awareness. In the Introduction to Nature and History, Eschenmayer had already stated: “Every scientific effort is an anticipation of time and, the more it succeeds in speeding up in its knowledge the next step of the centuries, i.e., in establishing principles which can be recognized as true by the following generations, the deeper its spirit has seen the truth” (Eschenmayer [1806] 2016, 21). Consequently, the clarification of ethical norms can improve the course of development, which he understands as progress in morals and virtue related to fulfillment and happiness.

9 THE VIEW OF THE FUTURE In the work The Hermit and the Stranger, Eschenmayer exceeds this theoretical frame and sketches the tendencies of the future by depicting the time of reconciliation and its characteristic traits. In his understanding, his contemporary epoch is still a phase of scission, and it will take time to reach the beginning of reconciliation. For him, the present epoch is still qualified by an incongruity between ethics and happiness and is characterized on an international political level by the egoism of the nation states. Eschenmayer’s vision of the future and of the coming epoch of reconciliation features, by contrast, an increasing diffusion of the ideal of cosmopolitanism: “The people will care less and less about the single issues of customs, habits, and constitutions, and progressively learn to esteem the whole earth as the universal home country, and this is highly necessary, in order to widen the narrowness of [each specific] culture” (Eschenmayer 1805, 46–47). This will also modify the chief values of the nations, which will progressively focus on the general ideal of humanity and a universal ethical sentiment, which will propagate a more extended sense of friendship. Eschenmayer also imagines larger states with centralized institutions and particular local organs, which will all be subject to a sense of respect for the law. This will ensure a longer duration of peace, although it will not eliminate all conflicts. With respect to individuals, there will be a more intensive care of the body and health, but also more dedication to and development of arts and sciences. Business will continue to play an important role, but scientific thirst for knowledge will also increase and create the conditions for contact with the most distant people and the reciprocal exchange of ideas, habits, and artistic as well as technical results. In Eschenmayer’s view, religion will play a primary role in the formation of an invisible community of spirits by assuming a universalized dimension, and human beings will live and be happy by shaping the world in correspondence with the ideas of reason (i.e., truth, beauty, and virtue).

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If the future imagined for the epoch of reconciliation is characterized by a more cosmopolitan ideal and an ethical sense of humanity, for Eschenmayer this does not mean playing down the existence of differences and cultural specificities. Rather, every single component will be closely connected to the whole and mirror it in a peculiar and original way. Thus, everything will be the effigy of the universe, “but it will be expressed in each one in a different way, nevertheless so that the single one, as a whole in itself, is nonetheless adequate again, as a manifold, [in relation] to the general [das Allgemeine]” (Eschenmayer 1805, 66). From this perspective, he thinks of a polycentric development of culture, knowledge and science, which will also take place outside of Europe and create new centers. The idea of world history will also be understood from a more universal vantage point, since individuals are embedded in specific conditions, but they are also able to transcend them and gain a more universal perspective. Eschenmayer alludes in this sense to the notion of spirit (Geist), which is not confined by corporeal limits and individuality but is universal. For him, the epoch of reconciliation implies the superabundance (Überfülle) of spirit, which is able to express richness, variety, and unity at the same time. This will not overcome all conflicts, because the epoch of scission has created many independent unities which aspire to self-affirmation, but will contribute to reducing and appeasing most of them. On the whole, the epoch of reconciliation will promote a process of spiritualization and stress the ethical and holy aspects of inner spiritual life.

10 THE CONTROVERSY WITH HEGEL By developing his vision of history from a philosophical point of view in later years, Eschenmayer often appears to have in mind Hegel’s concept of history, and on the occasion of Hegel’s death he published a detailed analysis of this concept in Hegel which ends with a comparison between them. As Eschenmayer himself explains in an aphorism, which was published in the same period, he wants in particular to oppose the Hegelian concept of the world spirit (Weltgeist) with his idea of a world plan. Now, in the same way as God has established the general connection of the laws and types in nature and life, so he has set for the reign of the spirits [Geisterreich] a world plan, whose development falls into innumerable tasks, so that every star was charged with one of them to solve in its history. There is no universal world spirit which should reach consciousness through nations and states, but a universal world plan. — Eschenmayer 1833, 23 Aph. 310 Eschenmayer here faces the question from a theological-cosmological point of view and criticizes Hegel’s position, which he sees as too immanent and self-producing. From his cosmological point of view, he finds that Hegel focuses too much on the human perspective and that he concentrates too insistently on human beings realizing their rationality (Eschenmayer here considers rationality as a specifically human faculty) in the world. By contrast, Eschenmayer strives to maintain a more transcendent attitude and objects that it is not spirit that substantializes itself but certain ideas entailed by it. He also rejects the idea that single nations or states can temporarily embody the world spirit and its rational constitution. States, nations, and individuals, he argues, often do not match up to the concretization of rationality, and in any case, the rationality they would express is for him a characteristic too closely related to human nature. The world plan, by contrast, transcends the human perspective and emphasizes the objective of spiritualization as a task at least partly going beyond the characteristics of human life.

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Another objection that Eschenmayer makes in relation to Hegel’s conception of history is dialectical advancement, which, in his opinion, does not entail a logical insufficiency, but a moral one. In fact, it implies a sudden transition from the positive to the negative and especially from the negative to the positive. This possibility of rapid change, argues Eschenmayer, implies the attitude of considering the negative and the positive not as opposites, but as directly related and very close to each other. Since he confers a moral meaning on historical action, this signifies closely connecting good with evil, playing down their qualitative difference, and finally accepting the diminishing of evil. In effect, by applying his trichotomy of innocence, scission, and reconciliation, Eschenmayer seems to be not so distant from outlining a dialectical movement concerning history. However, he probably has in mind a transition that entails a passage from one pole to the other, with a middle condition which is the point of equilibrium and indifference. This scheme, namely, is drawn from Schelling’s philosophy of identity and has as a reference model the opposition between positive and negative forces (and their poles). Eschenmayer seemingly judges that in his conception there is a clear separation between good and evil since they qualify two opposite areas which never trespass into the other and which have their equilibrium or zero point as their reciprocal limit.2 In doing so, he is likely referring to the possibility of distinguishing between different degrees of positive and negative moral quality, which nevertheless cannot produce situations of proximity. By contrast, Eschenmayer appreciates, in Hegel’s conception of history, his concern for freedom and his idea of a necessity that is intrinsic and derives from the concept of freedom itself. In illustrating Hegel’s theory, he explains: “World history is not the abstract and senseless necessity of a blind fate, but since spirit in and for itself is reason and its being-for-itself in spirit is knowledge, world history is the necessary development of the moments of reason from the concept of its freedom, therefore the laying out and realization of the universal spirit” (Eschenmayer 1831b, 133). In this sense, Hegel is right, because he underlines that history has a meaning and that its development is not produced simply by chance or destiny imposed from the outside. However, Eschenmayer finds that the Hegelian development of reason ends up stressing the human component and that Hegel too strongly identifies reason with the corresponding human faculty, which would reduce spirit to an immanent, exclusively human product translating itself into culture, action, and development. In this respect, Eschenmayer claims that it is a mistake to think that history is a task chosen by the human spirit itself. On the other hand, he takes a different position to Hegel, because he insists on the existence of a world plan which has a transcendent origin and author. The theory of compensation is here applied not only to individuals, but also to nations, in order to guarantee freedom “in morals, customs, habits, laws, constitutions, arts, sciences, and rites” (ibid., 145). The recalibration is very slow and acts in the course of centuries. According to Eschenmayer, this allows individuals and nations to shape their cultural development freely and ensures nevertheless that in the long run, the world plan will realize itself.

11 THE PLACE OF HOPE IN ESCHENMAYER’S PHILOSOPHY Although Eschenmayer does not develop a specific concept of hope, premises for an account of hope are located in his transcendental conception of the development of history, which implies a final phase of reconciliation after the moment of scission and

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conflict, and by his idea of the world plan, which is directed to a realization of the good, implying peace and harmony in the world. At the same time, since Eschenmayer distances himself at least partly from a vision of history such as the one proposed by Hegel, claiming that Hegel judges too immanently and is too strongly centered on human reason, his conception admits the divine intervention of providence as well as the possibility of a perfectibility which may also transcend the worldly perspective. Nevertheless, Eschenmayer also tries to avoid a standpoint that depreciates the value of human agency and its performance. Therefore, his assumption entails the refusal of a hope exclusively projected towards another world. If hope were to be considered as a passive attitude of expectation consisting of waiting for and putting one’s trust in divine intervention, this would entail depreciating the notion of freedom in its extra-natural derivation and annihilating the specific essence of the human being. In the realm of history, priority has to be conferred on human agency and on its free achievement; accordingly, the idea of virtue as well as the application of ethics are thought to orient human activity and politics in order to progressively shape social life and institutions. In spite of this, however, Eschenmayer is aware that human freedom entails the existence of base drives and motivations and that the choice between good and evil implies the real possibility of the prevalence of evil. His theory of compensation and of a world plan not led, but corrected, by providence, entails a form of hope which also admits the possibility of divine intervention. Nevertheless, this kind of hope can never be a substitute for agency. Eschenmayer clearly states, on this proposal: “Human beings must proceed as if everything depended on them, and only on that condition may they hope that a higher wisdom will grant success to their efforts” (Eschenmayer 1818a, [§129] 207). This statement is important for the question of hope in at least two respects. First, it confirms that for Eschenmayer there is a form of hope concerning human beings which relates to their own agency. In fact, the extra-natural origin of freedom can be considered as an indirect guarantee that the actualization of morals and the choice of the good will have as a consequence a positive achievement and progress towards the realization of the good. Secondly, it admits the possibility that good agency inspired by ethical principles can increase hope in an external support delivered by providence. On the whole, Eschenmayer tries to unite two forms of hope that are in tension (and nearly in contradiction): on the one hand, a hope based on the efforts of human beings, and on the other hand, hope in a divine intervention which limits itself to remedying only extreme mistakes made by human beings and which safeguards, in doing so, the noteworthy value of their freedom.

12 CONCLUSION Eschenmayer understands history as one of the fundamental fields in which human beings can realize freedom, although he also gives room to a transcendent dimension, from which freedom originates, and to a cosmological view, which embraces the universe as a whole. In the realm of history, the potential of freedom is to be realized through human agency, which he understands as the contribution of all single individuals, and which entails the realization of morals in the form of the idea of virtue. In doing so, Eschenmayer rejects a deterministic conception of life, which would transform individuals and nations into passive observers or mere executors, and stresses the relevance of an aware and knowing attitude, which revalues the contribution of ethics, as the science of morals, and the cognitive support of reason in order to perform conscious and conscientious behavior.

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His idea of the real possibility of actualizing freedom is not prejudiced by the conviction that the present world is dominated by chaos and disorder. On the contrary, he thinks of transcendental structures which rule history in its development and of a world plan which at least partially transcends human decision. In order to find a balance for this conception, which could endanger freedom, he sketches a theory of compensation, which nevertheless can only act in the very long run and therefore gives individuals the possibility of perceptibly speeding up or slowing down a moral understanding of life, which also entails better conditions of life, welfare, social and international peace, and happiness. This does not necessarily imply an optimistic vision of the human being, since Eschenmayer thinks that a moral attitude is rare, especially in difficult epochs and situations. Instead, this account stresses the meaning of each single contribution and provides a vision that emphasizes active commitment and personal as well as social responsibility. From this perspective, hope is primarily related to human efforts to progressively embrace a moral vision and realize the good, but it is also underpinned by the transcendental structure of development entailed in history, which aims at reconciliation, and by the idea of a world plan, which admits the intervention of providence. Through the theory of compensation, Eschenmayer intends to assure human beings of the presence of providence, without exempting them from responsibility and from confidence in their own capacity to improve their condition.

NOTES 1.

The concept of non-ground is developed by Böhme, especially in Böhme 1831–1847a and 1831–1847b.

2.

Eschenmayer had presented such a scheme in his work “Deduktion des lebenden Organismus” (Deduction of the Living Organism) ([1799] 2016) and applied it to the main faculties of reason, which he identified with “production” and “reflection.” For him, these exclude each other, that is, reflection can only take place when production is stopped, and vice versa (although there is always a latent presence of the other component). See Eschenmayer [1799] 2016, 67–96, in particular 74–76.

REFERENCES Berger, Benjamin and Daniel Whistler (2020), The Schelling-Eschenmayer Controversy, 1801: Nature and Identity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Böhme, Jakob (1831–1847a), De Signatura Rerum oder von der Geburt und Bezeichnung aller Wesen, in K. W. Schiebler, (ed.), Jakob Böhme’s Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 4, 269–462, Leipzig: Barth. Böhme, Jakob (1831–1847b), Mysterium Magnum, oder Erklärung über das erste Buch Mosis, in K. W. Schiebler, (ed.), Jakob Böhme’s Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 5, Leipzig: Barth. Eschenmayer, Carl August (1797), Säze aus der Natur-Metaphysik auf chemische und medicinische Gegenstände angewandt, Tübingen: Herrbrandt. Eschenmayer, Carl August (1798), Versuch die Geseze magnetischer Erscheinungen aus Säzen der Naturmetaphysik mithin a priori zu entwikeln, Tübingen: Herrbrandt. Eschenmayer, Carl August ([1799] 2016), “Deduktion des lebenden Organismus,” in Cristiana Senigaglia, (ed.), Einleitung in Natur und Geschichte, 67–96, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, frommann-holzboog.

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Eschenmayer, Carl August ([1801] 1969), “Spontaneität = Weltseele oder das höchste Princip der Naturphilosophie,” Zeitschrift für speculative Physik, 2 (1), reprint Hildesheim: Olms: 1–68. Eschenmayer, Carl August ([1803] 2007), Die Philosophie in ihrem Uebergange zur Nichtphilosophie, Erlangen: Walther, reprint Saarbrücken: Müller. Eschenmayer, Carl August (1805), Der Eremit und der Fremdling. Gespräche über das Heilige und die Geschichte, Erlangen: Walther. Eschenmayer, Carl August ([1806] 2016), Einleitung in Natur und Geschichte, Cristiana Senigaglia, (ed.), Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog: 1–65. Eschenmayer, Carl August (1818a), Religionsphilosophie. Erster Teil. Rationalismus, Tübingen: Laupp. Eschenmayer, Carl August (1818b), System der Moralphilosophie, Stuttgart and Tübingen: Cotta. Eschenmayer, Carl August (1824), Religionsphilosophie. Dritter Teil. Supernaturalismus oder die Lehre von der Offenbarung des Alten und Neuen Testaments, Tübingen: Laupp. Eschenmayer, Carl August (1831a), “Aphorismen über Freiheit und inneres Leben,” Blätter aus Prevorst, 1: 1–62 (erste Sammlung). Eschenmayer, Carl August (1831b), “Beleuchtung der Ansicht Hegels über Weltgeschichte,” Blätter aus Prevorst, 1: 132–170. Eschenmayer, Carl August (1833), “Aphorismen über Freiheit und inneres Leben,” Blätter aus Prevorst, 4: 1–47 (vierte Sammlung). Eschenmayer, Carl August (1852), Betrachtungen über den physischen Weltbau, mit Beziehung auf die organischen, moralischen und unsichtbaren Ordnungen der Welt, Heilbronn: Scheurlen. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (1801), “Anhang zu dem Aufsatz des Herrn Eschenmayer betreffend den wahren Begriff der Naturphilosophie, und die richtige Art ihre Probleme aufzulösen vom Herausgeber,” Zeitschrift für speculative Physik, 2 (1): 109–146. In Werke. Historisch-kritische Aufgabe im Auftrag der Schelling-Kommission der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Stuttgart: frommann-holzboog, 1976 ff., vol. I/10, 83–106. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (1804), Philosophie und Religion, in Ausgewählte Schriften, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985, 3: 21–80. Smith, Adam (1761), The Theory of Moral Sentiments, London: Millar.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Undirected Directionality Jakob Friedrich Fries on Hope, Faith, and Comprehensive Feelings1 PAUL ZICHE (Utrecht University)

1 UNDIRECTED DIRECTIONALITY: HOPE AND OPEN FUTURES “Hope” denotes a perspective upon a future that is uncertain and that we cannot cognitively grasp, but to which we nevertheless can and should relate in an epistemically confident way.2 Put like that, hope is characterized by its directionality: it points beyond the present into a future that is not yet determined, and it finds its fulfillment only in this unknown future. At the same time, however, “hope” describes a state: One can live in the state of being “in hope” (just as one can live “in a state of confidence,” “in faith,” or “in expectation”). These two perspectives—that of pointing beyond the present and that of living in a continuous state of hope—seem to contradict one another. The goal towards which hope directs us is not present in the transparent way that we normally require for an ethical or epistemic determination of the present. This openness explains why hope is closely related to religious and theological stances. In a Kantian context, the object of hope is conceived of as blissful existence in an eternal future that we can deserve on the basis of morally good behavior, but that can never be guaranteed and can be given concrete content only in very indirect, vague ways. At the same time, however, hope can play an enormously important role for our theoretical and practical practices and attitudes. These characteristics of hope pose a clearly circumscribed philosophical question: Can we come up with descriptive patterns that capture and render understandable this openness of a future-directed present in such a way that this openness can be integrated into our life in the here and now? In other words, can we combine the state-like and future-directed aspects of hope? This program can be further elaborated in a straightforward way by looking at its negative implications. If we take this program seriously, hope should emphatically not be capable of being understood within the traditional pattern of human cognitive faculties, for instance in a Kantian architectonics of the faculties, or within traditional forms of explanation. On the other hand, it should be precisely these negative characteristics of hope that can be experienced in concrete fashion if hope is also to be understood as a state of living. This phenomenology of hope, and this philosophical program, can explain why “hope” is frequently discussed in philosophical discourses around 1800 in close connection with other, future-directed faculties. (Interestingly, however, “hope” is hardly 183

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ever given a separate treatment as an individual faculty or form of existence.) One of the great challenges of Kantian philosophy consists in its combination of establishing ultimate foundations in the fields of theoretical and practical philosophy with a rigorous demarcation between legitimate and illegitimate claims to knowledge or to foundations. The idea of an undirected directedness, of an openness combined with strong commitments, thus urgently requires further investigation, in particular in the context of the firstgeneration post-Kantian philosophers elaborating Kantian ideas and addressing Kantian problems. This challenge can be rephrased in a variety of contexts: In the complexly structured and seemingly contradictory concepts of Kantian aesthetics (such as “satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest” or “subjective generality”3); in the integration of heuristic strategies into a program of transcendental philosophy in Kant’s “regulative ideas”; or in Kant’s sketch of a system of nature under empirical notions; in the idea of an “active passivity” (Seel 2014); or in the Early German Romantics’ program for an affirmative transgression of the Kantian limitations of cognition. One of the few texts from this period that features the term “hope” prominently in its title, Jakob Friedrich Fries’ Die Lehren der Liebe, des Glaubens und der Hoffnung, oder die Hauptsätze der Tugendlehre und Glaubenslehre, für den spätern Unterricht an Jünglinge und Mädchen geordnet (The Doctrines of Love, Faith, and Hope, or the Main Principles of the Doctrines of Morality and Faith, Arranged for the Advanced Education of Boys and Girls) from 1823 fits precisely into this context. Fries (1773–1843) was one of the most eminent early readers of Kant, and one of the most productive interpreters and most constructive critics of Kant’s philosophy. He was massively critical with respect to the idealists’ reading of Kant, was professionally engaged with medicine and the empirical sciences, and his early education in the Pädagogium of the Brüdergemeine in Niesky both gave him a theological training and immersed him in a way of life that was strongly determined by religion. His particular form of integrating all these strands makes him a key figure in the new field of a philosophy or methodology of the sciences, where he placed particular emphasis on the methodology of devising reliable or fruitful statements concerning the future (via a well-elaborated theory of probabilistic reasoning and an equally prominent theory of heuristics).4 In what follows, I will reconstruct Fries’ discussion of hope in his 1823 monograph (section 2) and explore the relations between this text and the relevant passages in his philosophical key texts (section 4), which agree rather closely with the more condensed version in the 1823 book. By comparing Fries’ ideas with Johann Gottfried Herder’s analysis of the knowability of the future and of the notion of hope (section 3), we can embed Fries’ arguments in a broader context of a prominent realist movement in the years around 1800. Together, these analyses will contribute to a further refinement of our understanding of the complex interaction between various philosophical discourses, religion, aesthetics, and a philosophical foundation for the sciences in this period, and will show that the notion of an “undirected directedness” that is so important for our understanding of hope provides a key to assessing the interaction between these discourses.

2 JAKOB FRIEDRICH FRIES: A RELIGION-BASED ANTHROPOLOGY OF HOPE Fries is fascinated by conceptual triads. Again and again, Kant’s three Critiques provide him with the organizing pattern for his arguments. In his book on Wissen, Glaube und Ahndung (Knowledge, Faith, and Presentiment) from 1805 he compresses the complex structure of

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Kant’s Critiques into a triad of key concepts and key faculties, and the Paulinian triad of faith, hope and love pervades his philosophy of religion, where Fries again explores the links with the Kant-inspired triads. Two features of his text on Die Lehren der Liebe, des Glaubens und der Hoffnung stand out immediately: In the text itself, Fries pays surprisingly little attention to the notion of hope; and he very clearly addresses a non-academic public. Fries is very careful and consistent in pursuing the didactic and pedagogic task that he ascribes himself here, and he does so by combining typical elements of a catechism—such as a well-structured presentation that is easy to memorize and apply while at the same time stating universal truths or rules, and while making only very modest claims as to required previous knowledge, refraining from taking strong positions with respect to standard philosophical frameworks—with a broad and detailed psychological-anthropological and thus broadly accessible mode of presentation. In many respects, Fries’ more explicitly philosophical texts provide the details that this catechetic presentation leaves out. Fries’ argumentation in his text on love, faith, and hope builds upon his strategy of giving a “new” version of Kant’s critical philosophy by reading Kant anthropologically.5 This new reading of Kant, expressed most forcefully in his Neue Kritik der Vernunft (New Critique of Reason) from 1807, which in its second edition of 1828–1831 receives the more informative title of a Neue oder anthropologische Kritik der Vernunft (New, or Anthropological Critique of Reason), also is related to topics from the philosophy of religion throughout.6 The achievements of an empirical psychology and anthropology— disciplinary fields that are elaborated more finely in this period (see Eckhardt et al., 2001)—are integrated by Fries into a philosophy that claims to stand up to Kant’s foundational standards. Kant, he claims, is perfectly right in claiming that only a study of our cognitive capacities can provide the foundation of our scientific and philosophical claims; but Kant does not get this study right because he is too devoted to logical and metaphysical arguments and does not pay sufficient attention to the anthropological facts about our faculties and their employment. Studying our faculties anthropologically takes over the function of Kant’s a priori investigations, without thereby falling prey to the charge of psychologism (see Sperber 2017). In all its functions, an anthropological a priori is, for Fries, just as much a foundational theory as is Kant’s transcendental a priori. The concept of “hope,” which Kant only deals with in passing—though his discussions are illuminating both in the specific context of his own philosophy and for our understanding of “hope” in general7—directly instantiates this strategy. “Hope” is clearly a concept that has a clear and broadly understandable phenomenology, which can be elucidated via anthropological argument, and which extends the range of Kantian standard faculties. Already in 1805, Fries had interpreted Kant’s third Critique on the basis of the phenomenology of a related term, the open, future-directed, and almost untranslatable term Ahndung (Fries 1805; see Beiser 2014, 70f.).8 (Fries will discuss the term Ahnen/Ahndung much more broadly, see section 4.) Fries’ 1823 book on virtue and faith is organized throughout in the form of a highly detailed anthropology (in the sense that has just been stated) of the human faculties. A key step in his argument consists in pointing out that on all levels and all steps of his analysis, it is possible to identify feelings and emotions that are crucial for integrating the states and contents of faith and hope into the complex totality of our lives.9 Feelings are required for this purpose precisely because these states are not accessible to a purely cognitive mode of understanding. Fries agrees with Kant’s arguments as to the limitations of our cognitive capacities, and in his anthropological perspective he includes the dimension of the emotional in order to go beyond these limitations, while fully accepting them in their

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Kantian form.10 In particular, Fries thereby rejects the common distinction between feelings as subjective and immediate on the one hand, and “higher,” reflexive, discursive states or processes on the other.11 In Kant’s philosophy, feelings have a constitutive role to play only in his third Critique, in the stereotypically repeated coupling between “feeling” and “pleasure and displeasure” that can already be found in the first Critique. In his practical philosophy, Kant himself goes beyond traditional distinctions (albeit in a footnote) when he introduces the unusual, actively self-produced feeling of “respect” (Achtung) into the foundations of his ethics (GMS, AA 04:401). But he does not arrive at a consistent position in which feelings and emotions become important throughout all the sub-fields of philosophy, given that his theoretical philosophy does not admit feelings in a constitutive function.12 In the introduction to his book, Fries presents, en passant and in religious terminology, an argument for his anthropological-psychological approach. The “fundamental thoughts of the sacred truths of religion” are “inscribed into our heart, deeply and clearly” (Fries 1823, x),13 and as a consequence, they can only become accessible in human self-cognition, which will have to include an exploration of our innermost heart. Fries states the same idea in different terminology that illustrates how he integrates religious and philosophical argument: The “true purposes of mental life” are directed towards the true, the good, and the beautiful, and it is these true purposes that we get to know only in our “mental/ spiritual self-cognition” (Fries 1823, xii). For Fries, this does not mean that the realm of theoretical cognition and the realm of feeling or faith simply coincide; here, he remains faithful to his Kantian roots. “Heart” and “self-cognition” relate to one another, and the one can and must illuminate the other, but neither can be reduced to the other. This line of argument is of key importance in rejecting the charge of psychologism, i.e., of an unreflective and reductive explanation of thoughts via psychological explananda.14 Fries’ 1823 text, announced as a comprehensive presentation of what human beings have to (religiously) “believe” and “hope” (Fries 1823, ix), only discusses the guiding concepts of faith and hope at its very end. In agreement with the methodological strategies just mentioned, he introduces a large array of feeling-related concepts, most of which are novel additions to a Kantian discourse. Concepts such as “piety” (Frömmigkeit), Herzlichkeit (a hard term to translate: a style of living in obedience to one’s heart, including the virtue of cordiality), “purity of heart” (Herzensreinheit), Andacht (understood as a “feeling of/for the sublime” [Gefühl der Erhabenheit]), “respect and love for the good and the beautiful” (Achtung und Liebe des Guten und Schönen; connected to the faith in a “higher and eternal destiny of the human being”) all contribute to the program of finding ultimate truths inscribed into the most profound depths of our heart (Fries 1823, xxx– xxxii). Also, these descriptions intend to make the point that truth, at least where it concerns faith, human destiny or beauty, can only manifest itself in feelings and not as a purely rational quality of cognitive states. At least some of these terms refer explicitly, but without naming authors, to important discourses of this period; in particular, Fries adopts Friedrich Schleiermacher’s formula of a “feeling of our being dependent upon a higher power” (Fries 1823, xxxi).15 Fries also uses a feeling-term to describe the relationship between knowledge and faith (he distinguishes both in more detail in other texts, see section 4), namely the notion of Vertrauen, which may be translated as both “confidence” and “trust”: “Faith lives in confidence/trust” (Fries 1823, xxxiii). Fries also relies on this concept in introducing the notion of hope: “Our eternal hopes rest upon the humble confidence in God’s benevolence. This confidence gives us the trust that God’s perfect love will guide us, in our eternal life,

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to a perfect purity of our hearts, and in this [purity] we shall arrive at eternal blessedness”— provided, that is, that we deserve this blessedness on the basis of morally good behavior (Fries 1823, xxxv). One of the remarkable aspects of these considerations lies in the fact that confidence/trust can operate on the level of both theoretical reasoning and of practical and religious issues. In theoretical cognition, it is the epistemic indicator of certainty that can embody key aspects of the broader notion of confidence/trust. And indeed, Fries explicitly rejects irrationalist modes of approaching the state of faith and its contents: “We do not propose an enraptured form of higher human wisdom that might succeed without knowledge” (Fries 1823, xxxiii). This gets us back to the broader program that was sketched in the beginning: What we need is an epistemic attitude that is neither (one-sidedly discursive) theoretical cognition nor irrationalist raptures. Fries describes this attitude in a complex phrase that takes up a large number of rather untranslatable terms that we are familiar with from Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, among other texts: “faith directs us [weist hin] towards the secrets of eternal truth that we become aware of [inne werden] in the presentiment [Ahndung] of the sacred and the eternally beautiful” (Fries 1823, xxxiii). The cognitive directedness of a Hinweisen, a “directing towards” or “pointing towards” higher truths, can be linked to Kant’s regulative ideas and the exploratory function of empirical systematicity in the third Critique. Terms such as Innewerden and Ahndung refer to contexts in which religious and aesthetic perspectives are integrated into the domain of theoretical cognition (both of these terms are used prominently, for instance, by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Johann Gottfried Herder, who pursue related agendas).16 This combination of epistemic, religious and emotional notions and perspectives can be worked out concretely into a number of different cognitive-cum-emotional practices. Take theoretical cognition: When one highlights the importance of methodological practices such as heuristic strategies, the formation of hypotheses or conjectures, and the experiential dimension of epistemic certainty,17 all of these dimensions become integrated. This negative take on cognition can be summarized in the claim that purely deductive procedures are insufficient, even in the realm of theoretical cognition: Neither heuristic practices nor the feeling of certainty can be regimented in deductive fashion, but clearly, both are of supreme importance for the successful employment of our cognitive and scientific faculties. Fries consistently employs a highly significant and complexly textured metaphor in his descriptions of the novel (at least within a traditional Kantian discourse) integration of the various dimensions of human cognitive and emotional dimensions. This is the metaphor of “living in” (e.g., living in hope or faith; more on this metaphor in section 4). This metaphor, in all its simplicity, is dual-layered in itself. In the term “life,” it picks up the connotations of organic wholeness. In the prominence it gives to the relational preposition “in” it tries to metaphorically name the mediality of embedding the human form of existence and the human being’s modes of cognition into comprehensive experiential-emotional dimensions.18 The phrase about faith as “living in confidence/ trust” that was quoted above is a prominent example of this metaphorical strategy, and Fries describes the faculty of Ahndung in a similar fashion: “And consequently, the presentiment of eternal truth lives for us in the beauty and sublimity of natural phenomena, and even more profoundly in the spiritual beauty and the sublime ideas of the eternal destination of the human being” (Fries 1823, xxxiv).19

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Hope, while being very visibly present in the title of Fries’ book, is only discussed at the very end of the text, together with the notion of faith, and—in full agreement with what has been stated so far—in a chapter devoted to the emotional/feeling-related aspects of religion. Given the prominence of Schleiermacher’s formulae that highlight the close connection between religion, feelings, the human predicament of dependence, and the infinite, Fries’ arguments do not appear too remarkable. “Hope,” as is customary in most discussions in this time, is discussed in direct connection with “fear” and related to the (Schleiermacherian) feeling of dependence (Fries 1823, 178). However, it becomes obvious that Fries here draws upon everything that has been said so far about novel forms of integrating various human faculties. This feeling of dependence is grounded, in agreement with Fries’ anthropological approach, in another feeling, that of human deficiency (“Gefühl der Mangelhaftigkeit”) (Fries 1823, 178). An important source of this feeling of deficiency lies in the corporeal restrictions of the human being. For Fries, cognition is an embodied process (or, more precisely, the relationship between cognition and the body should be stated in more directionally neutral terms as an inseparable interrelatedness of human bodily and cognitive dimensions) (Fries 1823, 191). Schleiermacher’s religious experience of the limited status of the human being and the physiological analysis of human sense organs and bodily capacities (a religious and a naturalist perspective on the human being) come to coincide here. This explains why Fries does not arrive at pessimist (e.g., materialistically reductive) conclusions. The “feeling of deficiency” conveys a “need to arrive at a consolidated peacefulness,” and it is faith’s task to give us this peacefulness (Fries 1823, 178). Note that the function of faith is described here as a task, a “Sollen” that does not imply any guarantee of success (and, consequently, this again motivates the idea that only the semantic fields of confidence, of hope, etc. can yield an adequate characterization of faith’s role in human cognitive and practical life). Note also that Fries, again in agreement with his arguments against “Schwärmertum,” against enraged and enraptured attitudes, emphasizes that faith does not stand in tension with more traditional epistemic operations: “Already on earth” the enthusiast (der Begeisterte) can look up (aufblicken) to the treasures that “make us feel, already on earth, that we only truly live in the light of eternity” (Fries 1823, 186). As is characteristic of Fries’ mode of argumentation throughout, he here combines two distinct (at least at first sight) faculties, that of “looking” (in the form of “looking up to”) and that of a future-directed “feeling.” The perceptual faculty of feeling is thereby transformed into a term that carries connotations of religious devotion, and Fries explicitly combines a present-day, here and now-function of feeling with the most comprehensive, temporality-transcending religious perspectives. Only a few pages later, Fries again takes up the metaphor of “living in,” now criticizing a directly evidential function of visual data: “Faith does not enlighten us in seeing, but only in confidence” (Fries 1823, 199),20 and he refers here, at least by association, to Romans 8.24, according to which that which can be seen can never be the subject of hope: “For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?” All of these phrases aim at a harmonious integration of various epistemic-emotional domains. One of the most compact renderings of this program is given in Fries’ asking us to “Learn the secret of love!” (Lernet das Geheimniß der Liebe!) (Fries 1823, 189). While secrets seem to be explicitly banned from being known, and while learning is one of the most standardly established strategies for acquiring knowledge, both come together here.

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Fries’ formula does not suggest that we should dissolve these secrets, answer the mysterious questions and thereby make their enigmatic character disappear; it is just as important that we succeed in incorporating these secrets, as secrets, into our ways of experiencing ourselves and the world. Fries rephrases his formula of “getting to learn the secret of love” into a faith-based formula in which the term “secret” drops out and is incorporated into faith itself: “learn to have faith in love” (Fries 1823, 189). Within faith, the standard epistemic strategy of learning, the unfathomable secrets of religion, and the religious calling to get ever closer to those secrets come together.21 In its complex internal constitution, faith will also be able to overcome the restrictions deriving from human corporeality: “Faith elevates itself above these [body-determined] deficiencies of human knowledge and arrives at perfected eternal truth, and via faith, presentiment transfigures [verklärt] our knowledge by drawing upon the light of eternal truth, if we acknowledge, in feeling, the beauty and sublimeness of spiritual life and of natural phenomena” (Fries 1823, 191–192). The limitations of human knowledge can not only be ascribed to, and described in terms of, the limited bodily set-up of humans; faith (hope, confidence, etc.) also aims at repairing another deficit of human knowledge. According to Fries, knowledge is directed towards getting hold of individual insights, and does not grasp its subjects in their exhaustive completeness (Fries 1823, 192). When faith and “presentiment” are introduced as ways of overcoming this limitation,22 it is again their emotional dimension, captured in organic metaphors, that is supposed to repair these individualistic tendencies of the human being’s epistemic states. The same limitation affects human moral judgements. We can understand, for instance, if we follow Kant’s ethical arguments, what duty prescribes to an individual in a particular situation; but this is an individual-centered and strongly limited perspective that fails to grasp the overall “purpose of the world,” or the “true meaning of external things, or the meaning of our historical predicament” (Fries 1823, 194). At the end of his text, Fries returns to the notion of hope in a phrase that, at least at first sight, looks pretty conventional: “If a person has succeeded in seriously embarking upon the path of improvement, this person will be given, together with the feeling of progressive purification, the reliable hope for eternal blessedness” (Fries 1823, 222). With Fries’ analyses of feeling as a background, this compact phrase can again be shown to contain a complex and surprising understanding of the notion of “hope.” Hope is characterized as being reliable (fest), despite being given in the form of a feeling, and, even more remarkable, in the form of a feeling that itself is progressive and has not yet arrived at a final result. Taken together, this can be summarized in the form of a definition (or summarizing description) of “hope” that takes up the program of an openness that can be combined with important foundational functions. Hope results from the emotional index that accompanies the moral precept of self-perfection and that, if this self-perfection is solidified into a progressive approximation to moral perfection, acquires a form of stability which is, together with this future-directedness, the defining feature of hope. The quote given above indicates how precise Fries is in picking his words here: Traditional accounts of hope present us with an apparently clear (but, in fact, not concretely determined) goal towards which hope is directed, namely “eternal blessedness.” Fries, however, sketches a far more complex interaction between the goals or intentional contents of states of hope and the intrinsic character of these states themselves: “Eternal blessedness” and hope’s progressive processuality co-exist; they are not placed in a (e.g., causal, deductive) sequence of steps or of foundational relations, they are “given together.” In highlighting the role of emotions and feelings, captured in the metaphor of “living in,”

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Fries can be seen as aiming at turning this apparently weak form of correlation into a rather strong positive characteristic of states of hope.

3 REALISTIC VISIONS OF THE FUTURE: HOPE AND THE KNOWABILITY OF THE FUTURE IN JOHANN GOTTFRIED HERDER Fries’ search for a critical and constructive overcoming and continuation of Kant’s philosophy coincides in many respects with the ideas and arguments of a large group of critics of Kant and idealism who countered idealism with a realist stance in philosophy.23 In criticizing idealism, these realists promote an attitude, in philosophy and in life more generally, that accepts Kant’s analysis of the limitation of human cognition and that rejects what they think is a narcissistic, subject-centered overestimation of human capacities in the hand of the idealists—an overestimation that they connect with the vices of solipsism, nihilism, excessive skepticism, and atheism. One of the most characteristic argumentative gambits of the realists consists in highlighting the role of feelings, and in the related step of reinterpreting human reason (Vernunft) as a passive-receptive faculty. This move is supported by an etymology of Vernunft as deriving from Vernehmen, a generalized perceptive faculty, e.g., in Jacobi ([1799] 2004, 125) and Herder ([1784] 2002, 133). In a profoundly Kantian move, it is these limitations of human cognition that make room for faith, where Jacobi very strongly emphasizes that the German Glaube covers both the religious dimension (“faith” in English) and the more ubiquitous epistemic aspect of “belief ” (see Jacobi [1787] 2004, 9, 19, 30–32).24 Precisely as in Fries, both Jacobi and Herder support these arguments with a detailed phenomenology of future-directed states. Herder summarizes this phenomenology in two brief texts, both from 1797 and both published in his Zerstreute Blätter (Scattered Leaves/Sheets). Under the title of “Vom Wissen und Nichtwissen der Zukunft” (On Knowing the Future and Ignorance of the Future/On the Knowability and Unknowability of the Future), he discusses the age-old problem of whether it is desirable for humans to know their future; and in a brief text (which presents itself as an appendix to and glossary for a better understanding of the text on the knowability of the future) he gives very concise definitions of the key terms “knowledge,” “presentiment,” “wishing,” “hoping,” and “having faith” (Wissen, Ahnen, Wünschen, Hoffen, Glauben) (see Bidmon 2016, 149–160; Willer 2013; Willer 2016; Schneider 2002). Herder’s text on the future departs from a straightforward distinction between science (Wissenschaft), which he characterizes as “demonstrative,” and religion, which can provide “nothing but hope, confidence, faith,” where all of these terms are again interrelated (Herder [1797] 1998, 284): “The hope of persistence after death can remain nothing but faith; it can never become demonstrated science” (Herder [1797] 1998, 294). While these future-directed faculties are of key importance for Herder, they can never amount to the certainty that strict proof can provide, and they therefore have to be distinguished from the traditional faculties of the understanding. One example of how these considerations interact with the well-established (typically Kantian) analyses of the human faculties: Herder emphasizes the role of the “inner sense,” here referring back to authors from ancient Greece, as the “seer of the future” (Herder [1797] 1998, 288). In this passage, he takes up a faculty, the inner sense, that in Kant’s philosophy is integrated into the process of acquiring (theoretical) knowledge but that, in Herder’s discussion,

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becomes autonomous. The epistemic reliability of the results of employing the inner sense seems to be compromised when inner sense is given the label of “seer”; at the same time, this very term elevates the inner sense into the realm of the religious and ascribes to it the important task of giving an account of our epistemic directedness towards the future. In their epistemic openness and openness towards the future, these arguments go beyond the Kantian analysis of cognition. Herder is optimistic that this strategy does not simply shift him into an alternative paradigm; he believes that he can thereby provide a serious constructive improvement upon Kant’s project. In particular, he feels warranted in announcing a “Science of the future as well as of the past” (Herder [1797] 1998, 290).25 More extensively than Fries, Herder elaborates on the role of organicist concepts in his argument. In Herder’s text, these concepts acquire their function in a peculiar limbo-like situation: Herder gives a counterfactual argument for the impossibility of getting to know one’s own future, but at the same time, and with the very same terms, he presents an affirmative account of how we may cognitively relate to the future after all. The reason why we cannot have cognition of the future is that knowledge of the future could only be possible on the basis of an infinity of complex and complexly interrelated data: “I would have to know my entire existence, as the foundation of my fate, know it down to its deepest foundations, down to the entire series of my ancestors” in order to know myself in my entire complexity and concreteness and make reliable predictions into the future. The impossibility of arriving at this integrated and complete cognition already sufficiently establishes that we cannot provide strict demonstrations that reach into the future (Herder [1797] 1998, 285). What remains possible is a form of future-directed cognition that Herder names, in a strange combination of demonstrative and aleatoric procedures, as a “deriving or . . . guessing” (schließen oder . . . erraten) (Herder [1797] 1998, 287). If we look for a unified description of these procedures, Herder offers us the ability of “grasping the connection of things” (Herder [1797] 1998, 286–287),26 of our being able to get insight into holistic structures,27 i.e., the very ability to arrive at unified cognition in the broadest possible sense. Even if human existence can never be completely grasped and our future fate is cognitively inaccessible, it remains possible to look into the future—but at the price of having to introduce more abstract kinds of object (such as the “connection” of things). In a long footnote to this passage, Herder offers the term Ahnen (here used as an equivalent for Ahndung) as a short term for “our sense for the future.”28 In Herder’s equally compact and complex interpretation of this term, he combines the rather somber and threatening connotations of the human being’s inability to look into the future with the forceful power that this very impossibility can acquire. Typical usages of Ahnen refer to situations that “display something great, grave, dark that lies ahead of us and cannot be grasped by the clear eyes [of the understanding]. This convoluted, much-comprehending cognition only has the more powerful an effect upon us” (Herder [1797] 1998, 287). One of the more remarkable phrases in Herder’s text hovers explicitly between a pessimistic account of human cognition, quoting Albrecht von Haller’s phrase regarding the “interior of nature” (Innere der Natur)29 that defies our cognitive efforts of penetrating into its secrets, and a more optimistic reconstruction of our cognitive capacities. With this phrase, Herder positions himself precisely at the faultline between Haller’s epistemic defeatism and Goethe’s later and far more prominent quote of Haller’s phrase in his 1820 poem “Allerdings. Dem Physiker” (True enough. To the Physicist) where he proposes alternative cognitive stances that do not subdivide nature into a “core” and an outer “shell.” Herder gives a rich quote and rephrasing of Haller’s line that is itself quoted

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repeatedly and in different contexts, typically without identifying Herder as its author: “Into the realm of the inner forces, into the genuine dispensatorium of life, no mortal has ever managed to enter” (Herder [1797] 1998, 291).30 Herder takes up Haller’s critical assessment of human capacities (in the original, the phrase of the impenetrability of the interior of nature is only a minor part of a lengthy poem on the “falsity of human virtues”) and, just like Fries, acknowledges the limitations of our sense organs. At the same time, however, he introduces, in very optimistic undertones, novel forms of cognition: “What do we know? The medium surrounding us can be ready as soon as our eyes close, and the powers of nature are self-sufficient everywhere.—We must not measure or count them” (Herder [1797] 1998, 291). Cognition is possible beyond the methods of calculating and counting, and beyond the traditional modes of observation (closing our eyes is not detrimental to our cognition, according to this passage), and just as in Goethe, this cognition will have to go beyond the distinction between outer and inner, medium and mediated, individuum and totality. In his brief dictionary-like text on the notions “Wissen, Ahnen, Wünschen, Hoffen und Glauben” (Knowing, Presentiment, Wishing, Hoping, Believing/Having Faith)31 Herder concisely defines all of these faculties, starting with “knowledge” and working his way up to “faith.” In the opening passages, he takes up the problem of a “science of the future” (Herder [1797] 1998, 297), again with the critical remark that such a science will be impossible if considered as a complete, “clearly envisaged” causal chain, or, in the terms of his text on the future, as a “demonstrative science.” Again, when he tries to give a positive characterization of this science of the future, he needs to make use of strangely ambivalent characterizations: “for thinking, calm souls, this science of the future will at the very least be a weather forecast, a philosophy of the changeable natural phenomena, of meteorological phenomena” (Herder [1797] 1998, 297). This remarkable list combines the probabilistic character of statements about the future, in the image of the weather forecast, with meteorology itself as an image for the comprehensive omnipresence of the medium within which we need to understand all phenomena. This imagery is particularly prominent among realist authors (see Ziche 2015b). The comprehensive holism that Herder’s medialistic epistemology requires is built into his definition-like characterization of “hope”: “In hope, we comprehend the entire picture of the future” (Herder [1797] 1998, 299), or, in a metaphor from music, in hope we hear a “full chord” (Herder [1797] 1998, 300). The fullness of this experience is not compromised by its probabilistic character, by the uncertainties that remain built into these experiences when measured according to the standards of deductive reasoning. To the contrary: Openness and uncertainty are restated as the complex fullness of the experience of hope. In defining faith, finally, Herder emphasizes that faith does not blend in homogenously with other faculties; it is profoundly different from these other faculties: “Faith, finally, is neither knowledge nor presentiment [Ahnen] nor a mere hoping nor wishing” (Herder [1797] 1998, 300). But again, just like in Fries, faith does not stand in opposition to knowledge; they can be linked, and again it is the notion of confidence (Herder uses Zuversicht, but this term is clearly related to Fries’ Vertrauen) that forges the link between faith and knowledge. Faith is a “quiet confidence in the invisible according to the standards of the visible,” and in this analogical way of arguing, faith can still be called a “result of our experiences” (Resultat unserer Erfahrungen) (Herder [1797] 1998, 300). This makes it possible, arguing the other way around, that faith can be turned into the “basis of all of our judgments, of our cognition, acting, and pleasures” (Herder [1797] 1998, 301). This is in good agreement with Jacobi’s analysis of faith, in particular in his David Hume über

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den Glauben (David Hume on Faith) from 1787, but without Jacobi’s move of exploiting the equivocation between “faith” and “belief.” In distinguishing faith from knowledge or hope, Herder makes clear that he classifies these human faculties on the basis of their being given concrete content. One might say that, while it is possible to compile a confession of faith, it seems pointless to come up with a confession of hope. Hope, after all, is not directed towards clearly and concretely circumscribed states. But, on the other hand, Herder clearly relates hope to modes of cognition that can go beyond the restrictions that apply to theoretical knowledge—again, it is holistic, interconnected states that give content to hope, but these states do not amount to knowledge, even less so than faith.

4 LIVING IN HOPE: FRIES’ HOLIST EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE FUTURE All the texts presented so far share a commitment to capturing the notion of undirected directedness, or of an openness that comes paired with strong (e.g., epistemic) commitments. A particularly strong metaphor for this program can be found in the phrase “living in,” which has been referred to repeatedly. Even more remarkable than the organic metaphor of “life” is the inconspicuous relational term “in” in this metaphor. This “in” can also be found in some standard translations of Romans 8.24, in particular in the translations into German: “Denn wir sind wohl selig, doch in der Hoffnung,” according to Luther. The Greek and Latin texts have the simple instrumental dative or ablative, and this is rendered in English in the King James translation: “For we are saved by hope,” which makes the German phrase only the more remarkable. Fries uses this metaphorical terminology frequently.32 In distinguishing hope from faith, Fries gives a more detailed exegesis of this metaphor. Hope needs to be understood, according to Fries, as operating in a delicate balance between being determined to the extent that it can regiment our behavior or our emotional state without exerting the rigorously binding force of a calculus or a deductive system: “However, this hope of pious faith must not become too strong, because then it would only lead to piety, not to virtue; in this case, the pious person would follow the law on the basis of speculating that he might gain eternal blessedness, not for the sake of virtue” (Fries 1805, 323). In this passage, Fries conceives of the difference between faith and hope as a matter of degree. Hope is determined by its ability to steer human beings towards genuinely virtuous behavior but must not do so in a way that supports goaldirected, instrumental reasoning, and that thus presupposes a clear representation of its goal. The preposition “in” is precisely adequate for expressing this functioning of hope: “In” captures the fact that hope does not function in chains of deductive (nor, by the way, inductive) forms of reasoning, but rather needs to be understood as an embedding into a medium, as a holistic mode of understanding without clear starting points or final results. In his main philosophical work, his Neue oder anthropologische Kritik der Vernunft, Fries presents a more detailed analysis of hope-based states. In this work, hope is discussed both in the first volume, in the context of theoretical cognition, and in the third volume, which is devoted to topics in practical philosophy—the Kantian subdivisions of the system of philosophy are subverted here. Two of the main lines of argument from the texts presented so far come together here. Again, Fries relates hope to particular forms of feelings—but here, in agreement with hope’s holistically integrative role, these feelings are universalized into a “general sensuous feeling of life” (Fries 1828–1831, vol. 1, 95)33

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or a general Lebensempfindung (Fries 1828–1831, vol. 1, 94). The notion of a “feeling of life” (Lebensgefühl) is used prominently in the first paragraph of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, when Kant introduces aesthetic judgement via its ability to relate an individual representation to our “feeling of life” or “the entire faculty of representation” (KU, AA 05:204).34 Fries gives a far more detailed discussion of this term and uses it in his analysis of those mental states in which we experience hope. It is precisely its lack of concrete content, of a specific determination, that characterizes a Lebensgefühl or Lebensempfindung (Fries uses both terms equivalently, and also adopts the term Lebenssinn) (Fries 1828–1831, vol. 1, 95). A Lebensempfindung is an “indeterminate feeling, as it is usually counted among the sense of feeling” (Fries 1828–1831, vol. 1, 94f.). These indeterminate states (states, thus, that are not clearly determined in terms of content, precisely as has been claimed for hope) are analyzed by Fries in terms of the mutual interaction or balance of internal and external factors, and this also characterizes states of hope. Here, Fries can draw upon his expertise in medicine and philosophy of nature: “In the same way, for instance, the sensation of warmth or coldness does not only impinge upon us from the outside but just as much arises in the direction from the inside to the outside. This is also the case, for instance, in feelings and desires, in rapidly engaged [gespannt] expectation, in hope and fear” (Fries 1828–1831, vol. 1, 95).35 Fries here repudiates traditional directional readings of cognitive or emotional processes. More important than the traditional direction from the interior to the exterior or vice versa, and more important than the hierarchies that these forms of directedness imply, is their relational character: Relatedness, for Fries, is more abstract, more profound than directedness, but even this abstract and profound state can be experienced in deep emotions such as the state of hope. Fries here adds two important ideas to his understanding of hope. Again, it is the openness of hope that initiates the conceptual steps he takes. Because hope, in even the most minimal understanding of this term, transcends our present state, it can and must be linked to the human being’s creative abilities, in particular to the faculties of the imagination and to Phantasie (“fancy”) (Fries 1828–1831, vol. 1, 197–202). Imagination, which, via its “free play,” structures Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, transcends the “narrow moment of the present” (Fries 1828–1831, vol. 1, 196). Kant’s free play of the faculty of imagination is not directed towards knowledge and cognition; however, Fries gives the imaginative, creative faculties an enormously important function: “Nearly everybody lives in the creative employment of the poetic faculty or of the fancy” (Fast jeder Mensch lebt im Dichten oder im Phantasiren) (Fries 1828–1831, vol. 1, 196). Here, too, he is operating prominently with the metaphor of “living in,” and he claims that we need the presence-transcending creative faculties everywhere in order to arrive at an understanding of the phenomenon (and the metaphorical implications) of life. From this, he derives a definition of “hope” that he presents in the form of an implicit definition: Hope manifests itself in a “sweeping landscape that is designed by the imagination, reaching into the future; this landscape is at one moment brightly illuminated by hope, at another obscured by fear” (Fries 1828–1831, vol. 1, 197). The backbone of this characterization of hope might be summarized as follows: Hope is that emotional quality that makes it possible to experience the future-directed qualities of the creative power of the imagination in the form of a universalized feeling of life.36 It is precisely these aspects of hope that Fries takes up in the third part of his Neue Kritik, in which he discusses topics from practical philosophy. Again, hope (and fear) are brought about by the creative faculty of fancy and its ability to look forward into the

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future: “It [fancy] contributes the perspective into the future, and thereby gives us hope and fear which, later, provide the sole framework for our pleasure” (Fries 1828–1831, vol. 3, 29). The motive of interaction that characterized Fries’ physiology-based discussion of hope as an interaction between external and internal factors returns here: “Thus, representations, desire, and feeling mutually interact with feeling, and transmute pleasure into pain, and pain again in pleasure” (Fries 1828–1831, vol. 3, 29). While “interaction” might be thought of as being a highly abstract and general notion, it is placed squarely in the realm of feeling; the feelings that Fries discusses have the function of being both feelings and meta-feelings at the same time, feelings that interact with feelings and thereby generate new feelings. The relational structure in general is more important than the (volatile) concrete determinations of the relata in these relations. Fries explicitly takes a step towards acknowledging that this meta-dimension, the dimension of comprehensive, content-transcending connectedness and interactions, manifests itself as a feeling. He has already done so in introducing and exploiting the notion of “feeling of life,” but goes yet further in bringing this form of feeling closer to everyday anthropological notions. He turns the rather everyday term Laune (in German, this term is placed between “mood” and “caprice”) into a technical term for comprehensive meta-feelings (note also that, in the following quote, he uses “feeling” as an emphatic collective singular): “In inner consciousness, the individual stimulations of our nerves unite themselves into a total impression upon our feeling; in feeling [or: in this process], a general sensuous feeling of life emerges in every moment through the joint action of all vital sensations.” This feeling of life then “results in a totality of our state of feeling that we call the mood/caprice [Laune] of a person at a given moment” (Fries 1828–1831, vol. 3, 28). Fries combines two features of Laune that are also highlighted in the dictionary in the relevant entry, namely the comprehensive function of a mood that colors all aspects of a person’s way of existence at a given moment, and the capricious, whimsical, everchanging nature of Laune.37 Kant had discussed Laune in the Critique of the Power of Judgment in a rather critical way, as being a (typically deceptive) way of changing one’s attitude or appearance in a particular situation (KU, AA 05:330, 336).38 The context is important: Kant discusses Laune (the Cambridge translation has “caprice”) in a paragraph devoted to the difference between that “which pleases merely in the judging” and that which “pleases in the sensation.” In this context, he also returns to the idea of a “promotion of the total life of the human being” (KU, AA 05:331) and also refers to hope. The key difference with Fries’ argument lies precisely in the fact that Kant wants to keep the functions of judgment and mere sensation apart, while Fries wants to overcome this distinction (interestingly, based upon motives and ideas from Kant’s third Critique).

5 FEELINGS AND META-FEELINGS: PHILOSOPHICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL INTERPRETATIONS OF HOPE IN FRIES’ WORKS Fries’ (and Herder’s) analysis of hope can be used to further refine our understanding of the period around 1800, in its intense interaction between philosophical, aesthetic, religious and scientific discourses. Three examples: Frederick Beiser’s analysis of Fries as combining Kantian and Romanticist motives in his philosophy (2014, 71) needs to be further enriched by adding the realist discourse to the picture. A similar point needs to be made with respect to the thriving field of an aesthetics of “moods” (see, e.g., Thomas

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2010; Hajduk 2016; Griffero 2019; on Kant: Recki 2010) that is positioned precisely at the intersection between conceptually determined and emotionally open phenomena and judgments. This field could further profit from philosophical proposals for analyzing integrative states of interaction between feelings and judgments. Thirdly, the form of openness that Fries and Herder (whose relationship would itself deserve further attention) implement in their analyses of comprehensive feelings can be fruitfully compared with the dramatic opening up of temporal concepts and the experience of time that is a characteristic achievement of the period around 1800.39 Systematically, Fries and Herder present an ambitious argument in order to show how the problem of undirected directedness, or of openness combined with strong commitments, of understanding a “life in hope,” can be given a unifying description that moves beyond the tensions that seem to inhere in these complex notions. The most remarkable feature of their arguments is to be found in the combination of, on the one hand, making things concrete by claiming that even some of the most complex philosophical notions or problems can be experienced in concrete feelings, and, on the other, the necessary step of abstraction that is required to get into these feelings. The ideas of organic totality and of a medium-embedding “living in” jointly work towards this goal, as does the idea of a complex system of interactions within the realm of feelings themselves. In these ideas, the reflexive structure that has been thought to be a key feature of higher and higher-order cognitive states is worked out on all levels of human cognitive and emotional engagement: Feelings themselves can, reflexively, relate to feelings, and the results of this reflexive interaction manifest themselves again in the form of a feeling. This implies a transition from content-based to structural analyses, which will prove of key importance later in the nineteenth century (and the Friesian school has an important role to play here).40 Put differently: In a state of “living in hope” or “living in confidence,” it is the epistemic marker of hope or confidence itself that functions as the content of these states. This content does not refer to any concrete object, but should instead be understood as the comprehensive context, the “medium,” the totality of life within which our own life (understood as the totality of our cognitive, emotional, creative endeavors) unfolds itself.

NOTES 1.

This paper draws upon results of a project funded by NWO (Dutch Research Council) with the title “Thinking Classified: Structuring the World of Ideas Around 1800”; many thanks to NWO for their support and to my colleagues in this project for intense discussions and joint research activities. Translations in this paper are my own, unless indicated otherwise.

2.

On the notion of “hope” see Bidmon 2016; Lutz 2012. On relevant discussions around 1800, in particular on Kant, see Beyleveld and Ziche 2015. The openness of hope’s future-directedness is visually expressed in a traditional body of emblematic images. Hope, more precisely spes proxima, is typically expressed via the image of a ship in a perilous storm—a traditional emblematic representation of “fortuna”—that is transformed into an image of “hope” by adding stars that may provide guidance in this life-threatening predicament (but, just as is the case with hope, the destination itself is not part of the image); see the collection of emblems available through Alciato at Glasgow University (https://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/emblem.php?id=A21a043).

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3.

These are key terms in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (KU, AA 05:204f., 213–216, 267).

4.

On Fries, see the overview in Beiser 2014, 23–88, and Herrmann and Hogrebe 1999; on Fries’ philosophy of science in particular, see the summary of his innovations in Pulte 2013, and the extensive treatments in Herrmann 2000 and van Zantwijk 2009.

5.

Fries uses “anthropology” in a sense related to the characteristic usage of this term around 1800, when “anthropology” was used more or less interchangeably with “psychology” (see Eckardt et al., 2001). Fries takes his inspiration for an “anthropological” critique of reason from Kant himself: studying human cognition and its objects in terms of human faculties can be extended, according to Fries, to the fields of logic and metaphysics, which makes it possible to study philosophy in its entirety as “philosophical anthropology” (Fries 1828– 1831, vol. 1, xiv; see also xvii, where Fries describes his approach as being of “psychicanthropological nature”). See also van Zantwijk 2005.

6.

On Fries’ philosophy of religion see Beiser 2014, 63–71.

7.

On the notion of “hope” in Kant see Beyleveld and Ziche 2015, which includes reference to further secondary literature. See also Lutz 2012, 287–335; Willer 2013; Bidmon 2016, 139–144.

8.

On the notion of Ahnung see also Hogrebe 1996. Ahndung is here used as equivalent with the word Ahnung, which has become somewhat more commonly used. Ahndung is virtually untranslatable; “presentiment” is a term that can render the future-directedness of Ahndung together with its not being a rational faculty in the standard sense; more on this term in section 4.

9.

The role of profound emotions is already emphasized in the brief introductory statement (Fries 1823, no page numbers): it is “from the innermost depths of our emotional resources” that our piety and “pure love” can become awakened; “piety” is then related to Herzlichkeit and Andacht as the “feeling for/of the sublime” (Fries 1823, xxx). This strategy of relating the specifically religious states of the mind to feelings and emotions remains present throughout the text.

10. Beiser (2014, e.g., 65–66) emphasizes the relevance of Kant’s dualist distinctions for Fries’ argument. 11. See also Fries 1823, 38; here, Fries distinguishes between an “understanding” (Begreifen), exemplified in mathematics, and that which only an “inner feeling” can teach us. This inner feeling’s domain is the field of the good, the beautiful, and faith. 12. But see notions such as that of a “feeling for/of truth” (Wahrheitsgefühl) or a “feeling for/of certainty” (Gefühlsgewissheit) that become prominent in the course of the nineteenth century, in close connection with the activities of the Friesian school (see Albrecht 2015; Ziche 2015a). 13. The same phrase is also to be found in the main text (Fries 1823, 10). 14. On the relevance of psychology for Fries’ arguments, and in particular on the question to what extent he falls victim to an unwarranted psychologism, see Beiser 2014, 79–84, and in particular the recent discussion in Sperber 2017. 15. Cf. Schleiermacher 1821–1822, 31–33. On Fries’ references to Schleiermacher see also Beiser 2014, 71. 16. See also Beiser 2014 on Romantic contexts, including in Fries. On Herder and Jacobi’s writings, see, e.g., Jacobi [1787] 2004, 99 (Ahndung, Gottesahndung), 38 (damit sie . . .

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inne . . . werden: a phrase that oscillates between using this term in a technical sense and a more informal usage—this oscillation is characteristic for quite a few of these terms); Herder [1799] 1998, 346. Herder ([1797] 1998) devotes a brief note to Ahndung (in the equivalent verb form ahnen) in its relationship to knowing, wishing, hoping, and Glaube (here, too, oscillating between faith/belief). The term Ahndung can also be found in Kant’s writings (see, e.g., Ziche 2019). The term Innewerden, used frequently by Kant, but without any further discussion, shows clearly how the post-Kantian, psychology-inspired debate turns everyday concepts into novel faculty concepts that then can be used (semi-) technically. 17. On Fries’ contributions to a methodologically well-founded heuristics, see van Zantwijk 2009. On the prehistory of heuristics in the form of an “ars inveniendi” see van Peursen 1993; on heuristics in Kant see Ziche 2019. 18. Herder uses the term “medium” explicitly. On the role of the “medium” in these contexts see section 3; Ziche 2011; Ziche 2015b. 19. Note that in this passage, the “in” is used in a slightly different way that, however, clearly builds upon the metaphor of “living in.” On the concepts that are employed in this passage, see also the strong phrase in Fries 1823, 202, on the ahndende Gefühl der ewigen Schönheit. 20. See also the far more affirmative phrase “thus, faith’s eye sees the star of hope” (Fries 1823, 188), that refers to the emblematic image that has been mentioned in the beginning. 21. On “secrets” see also, far more extensively, Fries 1805, 250–257. 22. The fact that Fries uses the religious term of a transfigurative “verklären” in the quote given above to describe this form of overcoming cognitive limitations requires further discussion. 23. Jacobi and Herder are key protagonists of this realism; other (more or less) prominent contributors to this movement are Jean Paul, Friedrich Köppen, Wilhelm Traugott Krug, and many others. On realism around 1800, see the monograph Giesbers 2017; see also Ziche 2015b, Giesbers 2020. 24. In principle, this entire text is devoted to showing this link between the epistemic and religious meanings of the German Glauben. See also Jacobi [1787] 2004, 200–202, on the role of Ahndung in obtaining epistemic access to God. 25. At first, Herder characterizes this science in negative terms: “This science of the future will not originate from astrology and chiromancy” (because these fields deal with the future “without ground”; Herder [1797] 1998, 286), but he also positively identifies a number of relevant disciplines: “physiocracy,” “ethomancy,” “the great nemesis of the times.” The term Wissenschaft is not yet rigorously established in this period; Wissenschaft der Zukunft can mean both a specifically future-directed discipline and, more simply, any kind of knowledge about the future. 26. Another significant term for this kind of holist structure (Herder [1797] 1998, 288): the “total economy of our life”. 27. Gebhard (1984) traces the filiations of this formula in manifold discourses in the later nineteenth century, starting with Schopenhauer. 28. These discussions of this term go into far more detail than the compact but prominently placed reference to the term Ahndung in Herder’s Metakritik (Metacritique) (Herder [1799] 1998, 480–481).

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29. This phrase is to be found in a long poem with the title “Falschheit menschlicher Tugenden” (Falsity of Human Virtues) from 1730 (Haller [1730] 1978, 50). Herder’s text can help explain how, in the trajectory from Haller to Goethe, this particular phrase acquired almost proverbial status. 30. Herder’s phrase is used literally in a variety of contexts, without naming Herder as the originator of this phrase (many thanks to modern search technologies!). For a token of this phrase in the context of medicine and the philosophy of nature, see Heller 1808, 25–77. In the context of religious topics, i.e., rather close to Herder’s text, the same quote is used in Donndorff 1815, 23. An intermediary step between Herder’s Zerstreuten Blättern and this broad reception may be found in an announcement of the Zerstreute Blätter in the Neuen allgemeinen deutschen Bibliothek from 1799 that contains this passage (Anon. 1790, 470). 31. On the notion of Wünschen, see also the intense discussion in Willer 2016. 32. Cf., e.g., Fries 1805, 236 (“life in faith,” “life in God”). See also a phrase such as—again stated in Schleiermacherean terms—a “presentiment of the eternal in the finite” (Ahndung des Ewigen im endlichen) (Fries 1805, 237). 33. The “general sensory feeling of life” is also “closely linked with our self-consciousness.” 34. English translations from Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment are by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews in Kant [1790] 2000. 35. The qualification of expectation as “rapidly engaged” requires further study; that Kant characterizes laughter as a “sudden . . . transformation of an engaged expectation in nothing” (plötzliche . . . Verwandlung einer gespannten Erwartung in nichts) (KU, AA 05:332) indicates that this terminology has a longer tradition. 36. On the phenomenology of “expectation” see Fries 1828–1831, vol. 1, 197. 37. The Grimm entry is available via http://woerterbuchnetz.de/cgi-bin/WBNetz/wbgui_py?sigl e=DWB&mode=Vernetzung&lemid=GL02348#XGL02348. 38. In this context, Kant, too, refers to medical issues (“feeling of health”; KU, AA 05:332). 39. Reinhard Koselleck has discussed these semantic and experiential changes extensively (e.g., in Koselleck 1988). A paradigmatic example of these changes is to be found in a changing notion of “natural history,” which was transformed from referring to a descriptive ordering of natural objects into an ordering scheme that studies developmental processes in time; Goethe is a key author in this context (see the overview in Matussek 1998). 40. For example, Ernst Cassirer’s transition from a substance-based semantics and philosophy of science to a theory of functional concepts (Cassirer 1910), Rudolf Carnap’s (and many others’) emphasis on the notion of “order” (Ziche 2016). On the Friesian school, see Blenke 1978; Beiser 2014, 23–26.

REFERENCES Anon. (1799), “Anzeige von Herder, ‘Zerstreute Blätter,’ ” Neue allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, 44: 466–472. Albrecht, Andrea (2015), “ ‘Wahrheitsgefühle.’ Zur Konstitution, Funktion und Kritik ‘epistemischer Gefühle’ und Intuitionen bei Leonard Nelson,” in Ralf Klausnitzer, Carlos Spoerhase and Dirk Werle, (eds.), Ethos und Pathos der Geisteswissenschaften. Konfigurationen der wissenschaftlichen Persona seit 1750, 191–213, Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Alciato at Glasgow. https://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/index.php. Beiser, Frederick C. (2014), The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796–1880, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beyleveld, Deryck and Paul Ziche (2015), “Towards a Kantian Phenomenology of Hope,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 18: 927–942. Bidmon, Agnes (2016), Denkmodelle der Hoffnung in Philosophie und Literatur. Eine typologische Annäherung, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Blenke, Erna (1978), “Zur Geschichte der Neuen Fries’schen Schule und der Jakob Friedrich Fries-Gesellschaft,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 60 (2): 199–208. Cassirer, Ernst (1910), Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff. Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik, Berlin: Cassirer. Donndorff, Johann August (1815), Ueber Tod, Vorsehung, Unsterblichkeit, Wiedersehen, Geduld, Quedlinburg: Ernst. Eckardt, Georg, Matthias John, Temilo van Zantwijk and Paul Ziche (2001), Anthropologie und empirische Psychologie um 1800. Ansätze einer Entwicklung zur Wissenschaft, Köln et al.: Böhlau. Fries, Jakob Friedrich (1805), Wissen, Glaube und Ahndung, Jena: Göpferdt. Fries, Jakob Friedrich (1823), Die Lehren der Liebe, des Glaubens und der Hoffnung, oder die Hauptsätze der Tugendlehre und Glaubenslehre, für den spätern Unterricht an Jünglinge und Mädchen geordnet, Heidelberg: Winter. Fries, Jakob Friedrich (1828–1831), Neue oder anthropologische Kritik der Vernunft, 2nd edn., 3 vols., Heidelberg: Winter. Gebhard, Walter (1984), Der Zusammenhang der Dinge. Weltgleichnis und Naturverklärung im Totalitätsbewußtsein des 19. Jahrhunderts, Berlin: De Gruyter. Giesbers, Tom (2017), The Wall or the Door? German Realism around 1800, diss., Utrecht. Giesbers, Tom (2020), “Debatte über philosophischen Realismus und Fundamentalphilosophie,” in Gerald Hartung, (ed.), Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie. Begründet von Friedrich Ueberweg. Völlig neu bearb. Die Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts, vol. 1 (1): 245–260, Basel: Schwabe. Griffero, Tonino (2019), “In a Neo-phenomenological Mood: Stimmungen or Atmospheres?” Studi di estetica, XLVII: 121–151. Hajduk, Stefan (2016), Poetologie der Stimmung. Ein ästhetisches Phänomen der frühen Goethezeit, Bielefeld: transcript. Haller, Albrecht von ([1730] 1978), “Die Falschheit menschlicher Tugenden,” in Albrecht von Haller: Die Alpen und andere Gedichte, 39–52, Stuttgart: Reclam. Heller, Friedrich Wilhelm (1808), “Ueber die Heilung der Intermittir-Fieber durch einheimische Mittel. Ein historisch-theoretisch und practischer Versuch mit begleitenden Beobachtungen,” Neues Journal der practischen Arzneykunde und Wundarzneykunst, 20: 5–77. Herder, Johann Gottfried ([1797] 1998), “Vom Wissen und Nichtwissen der Zukunft”/“Über Wissen, Ahnen, Wünschen, Hoffen und Gauben,” in Hans Dietrich Irmscher, (ed.), Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, vol. 8, Schriften zu Literatur und Philosophie 1792–1800, 283–301, Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Herder, Johann Gottfried ([1799] 1998), “Verstand und Erfahrung. Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” in Hans Dietrich Irmscher, (ed.), Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, vol. 8, Schriften zu Literatur und Philosophie 1792–1800, 303–640, Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag.

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Herder, Johann Gottfried ([1784] 2002), “Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Erster Teil,” in Wolfgang Pross, (ed.), Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, vol. III/1, Munich and Vienna: Hanser. Herrmann, Kay (2000), Mathematische Naturphilosophie in der Grundlagendiskussion. Jakob Friedrich Fries und die Wissenschaften, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Herrmann, Kay and Wolfram Hogrebe, (eds.) (1999), Jakob Friedrich Fries. Philosoph, Naturwissenschaftler und Mathematiker, Bern: Peter Lang. Hogrebe, Wolfram (1996), Ahnung und Erkenntnis. Brouillon zu einer Theorie des natürlichen Erkennens, Frankfurt: suhrkamp. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich ([1787] 2004), “David Hume über den Glauben oder Idealismus und Realismus. Ein Gespräch,” in Walter Jaeschke, (ed.), Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, Werke, vol. 2, 7–112, Hamburg and Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Meiner/frommann-holzboog. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich ([1799] 2004), “Jacobi an Fichte,” in Walter Jaeschke, (ed.), Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, Werke, vol. 2, 113–182, Hamburg and Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Meiner/ frommann-holzboog. Kant, Immanuel [1790] 2000, Critique of the Power of Judgment, transl. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koselleck, Reinhard (1988), Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Frankfurt: suhrkamp. Lutz, Ralf (2012), Der hoffende Mensch: Anthropologie und Ethik menschlicher Sinnsuche, Tübingen: Francke. Matussek, Peter (ed.) (1998), Goethe und die Verzeitlichung der Natur, Munich: C. H. Beck. Pulte, Helmut (2013), “J. F. Fries’ Philosophy of Science, the New Friesian School and the Berlin Group: On Divergent Scientific Philosophies, Difficult Relations and Missed Opportunities,” in Nikolay Milkov and Volker Peckhaus, (eds.), The Berlin Group and the Philosophy of Logical Empiricism, 43–66, Dordrecht et al.: Springer. Recki, Birgit (2010), “Stimmung und Lebensgefühl bei Immanuel Kant, Ernst Cassirer und Walter Benjamin,” in Kerstin Thomas, (ed.), Stimmung. Ästhetische Kategorie und künstlerische Praxis, 1–12, Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag. Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst ([1821–1822] 1980), “Der christliche Glaube nach Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt,” in Hermann Peiter, (ed.), Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7.1, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Schneider, Jost (2002), “Herders Vorstellung von der Zukunft,” The German Quarterly, 75: 297–307. Seel, Martin (2014), Aktive Passivität. Über den Spielraum des Denkens, Handelns und anderer Künste, Frankfurt: Fischer. Sperber, Peter (2017), Kantian Psychologism, diss., Utrecht. Thomas, Kerstin (ed.) (2010), Stimmung. Ästhetische Kategorie und künstlerische Praxis, Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag. van Peursen, C. A. (1993), Ars Inveniendi. Filosofie van de inventiviteit van Francis Bacon tot Immanuel Kant, Kampen: Kok Agora. van Zantwijk, Temilo (2005), “Fries: Kategoriale Anthropologie,” in Katja Regenspurger and Temilo van Zantwijk, (eds.), Wissenschaftliche Anthropologie um 1800? 86–93, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner. van Zantwijk, Temilo (2009), Heuristik und Wahrscheinlichkeit in der logischen Methodenlehre, Paderborn: Mentis.

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Willer, Stefan (2013), “Zwischen Planung und Ahnung. Zukunftswissen bei Kant, Herder und Schillers ‘Wallenstein,’ ” in Daniel Weidner and Stefan Willer, (eds.), Prophetie und Prognostik. Verfügungen über Zukunft in Wissenschaft, Religionen und Künsten, 299–324, Munich: Fink. Willer, Stefan (2016), “Wunsch,” in Benjamin Bühler and Stefan Willer, (eds.), Futurologien. Ordnungen des Zukunftswissens, 51–61, Paderborn: Fink. Ziche, Paul (2011), “Das System als Medium. Mediales Aufweisen und deduktives Ableiten bei Schelling,” in Christian Danz and Jürgen Stolzenberg, (eds.), System und Systemkritik um 1800, 147–168, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, System der Vernunft. Kant und der Deutsche Idealismus, vol. 3, Kant-Forschungen, 19. Ziche, Paul (2015a), “ ‘Gefühlsgewissheit’ und ‘logischer Takt.’ Neue Erfahrungsmodalitäten und offene Wissenschaftsbegründung um 1900,” Scientia Poetica: Jahrbuch für Geschichte der Literatur und Wissenschaften: 322–341. Ziche, Paul (2015b), “Wirklichkeit als ‘Duft’ und ‘Anklang.’ Romantik, Realismus und Idealismus um 1800,” in Helmut Hühn and Joachim Scheidermair, (eds.), Europäische Romantik. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven der Forschung, 125–142, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Ziche, Paul (2016), “Theories of Order in Carnap’s Aufbau,” in Christian Damböck, (ed.), Influences on the Aufbau, 77–97, Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol. 18, Cham et al.: Springer. Ziche, Paul (2019), “Epistemic Confidence: Kant’s Rationalization of the Principles of Seeking and Finding,” Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus/International Yearbook of German Idealism, 14: 81–102.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Humboldt, Bildung, Language, and Hope1 SUSAN-JUDITH HOFFMANN (McGill University and Dawson College)

INTRODUCTION Wilhelm von Humboldt’s extraordinary work as educational reformer, statesman and scholar epitomizes hope in many areas of life. This hopeful stance towards social institutions is reflected in Humboldt’s scholarly work. In particular, his writings on Bildung and language articulate an ideal of self-development through respectful interaction with others that presents hope for the flourishing of humanity, as well as of the individual, as a matter of openness to possibility, change, and otherness. Humboldt’s theory of Bildung underpinned his revision of the education system in his own time; this paper argues that his work is still relevant today and can be used to guide projects of decolonization and inclusion in contemporary universities. Humboldt argued that the first law of social life must be freedom, and everything that limited freedom was opposed to the development of moral perfection. One could say that this is true of many Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers of the time, but Humboldt’s thought occupies a special place. His erudite scholarship bears the mark of a great public spirit that actually translated into concrete practical achievements, such as the founding of the research-based University of Berlin and the reform of the secondary Prussian school system. Like Fichte, he was concerned with the role philosophy could play in public life, but unlike Fichte, he was actually able to implement his ideas: for example, by making philosophy the central focus of university learning rather than a preparation for the supposedly more important studies of law, medicine, and theology. In his own time, Humboldt was an inspiration to scholars such as George Bancroft and other American statesmen and intellectuals interested in education and culture. Humboldtian ideas and values are equally heartening for our times. In an era in which learned communities grapple with the importance of the preservation and inclusion of indigenous languages and cultures and the thorny issues of cultural appropriation and intellectual freedom, we can turn to Humboldtian insights about language, culture, and Bildung for inspiration. Humboldt’s unique theory of language is the first that fully develops the insight of the Historical school that language must be understood historically, as a living organism, rather than as a finished product. Moreover, he argued that nothing is more important for a nation’s culture than its language and that language expresses the character of those who speak it, thereby echoing and developing the views of Condillac and F. A. Wolf. Humboldt’s contribution is, however, far more than a mere glossing of 203

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Condillac’s ideas, as Humboldt actually did the empirical fieldwork to substantiate his ideas on language. Humboldt’s work on linguistic pluralism and the importance of cultural diversity continues to be relevant for contemporary debates on language and culture. Humboldt has been maligned as a snob who emphasized culture over politics and who allegedly performed a volte face, first opposing all state interference and then designing a policy of questionable German nationalism. Moreover, his claim that the differences in language express differences in character and mentality has been condemned as racialist by thinkers such as Roy Harris, inter alia (Harris and Taylor 1989, xvii). However, I suggest that if one takes a careful look at Humboldt’s notion of Bildung, in particular the role of the state in the Liberal theory of Bildung and its connection to linguistic pluralism, Humboldt’s views can be defended against such criticism. Furthermore, an examination of language and the politics of Bildung point to a hopeful and positive resolution of important contemporary issues, such as the decolonization of our educational institutions at every level. The first section of this study traces a brief history of contemporary educational reform and the relevance of Humboldt in these discussions. The second section presents the conception of hope that I will argue can be discerned in Humboldtian ideals of Bildung and language. The third section examines Humboldt’s theory of Bildung. In the fourth section, I assess the role of the state and the cardinal principles of freedom and diversity in education. The chapter concludes with a selective examination of Humboldt’s groundbreaking insights on language—insights that are closely connected to his concept of Bildung and which contain resources to develop possibilities for decolonizing our intellectual landscapes.

1 HUMBOLDT AND EDUCATIONAL REFORM The ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt have been extensively, and often quite selectively, drawn into service for discussions about educational reform. His ideas have been used in attempts to return to a prefascist German university after 1945, and on several sides of the debate about university reform in the 1960s. More recently, in the 1980s and 1990s, Humboldt appeared in North American debates, both explicitly and implicitly, in attempts to keep the western canon free of multiculturalism.2 Humboldtian ideals were also implicitly brought forth by academics who fought against the business model of a university funded by private interests and run by an administration modeled on a corporate firm. Faced with cuts in funding, universities in North America turned to the private sector for funding and shifted to the kind of applied research that reflects the interests of their sponsors. Consequently, administrative bodies moved towards models of efficiency and accountability, thereby encroaching on pedagogy and curricula in the name of “success rates” and at the expense of faculty power and autonomy. This corporatization has, in many institutions, reduced education into an exercise of completing oft-senseless requirements. The cost of education is usually prohibitive, and students must earn a living and/or rack up hefty debts. The humanities are looked upon with suspicion, and learning is reduced to acquiring “competencies” or skills that are the supposed outcome of university courses. “Brotstudien” have gained the upper hand, and the kind of utilitarian education that Humboldt and Schiller disdained has become the norm. In an effort to reinstate academic autonomy and a culture of Wissenschaft of autonomous research, in which the core humanities curriculum is respected, academics sought to revive, albeit

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implicitly, Humboldtian ideals of liberal education. However, in North America, their efforts have not been very successful, and many institutions retain a very corporate structure where academic freedom and true diversity have been replaced with a micromanaging administration and an insistence on political correctness (see Bonham 2021; Kanelos 2021). A complete return to a Humboldtian-era university is neither possible nor desirable. However, our present awareness of the need to decolonize education is full of hope for a better ideal of education and it is here that elements of Humboldt’s ideas on Bildung and language provide models of inclusivity and diversity. Indigenous scholars have pointed out that the existing corporate structure excludes and alienates people whose research methods cannot be subsumed under the mainstream western canon. They advocate a more inclusive, diverse, and adapted academic landscape, where learning, teaching, and research are defined in a way that reflects the unique contribution that diverse cultural and linguistic groups bring to academia (see Battiste 2013). Much has been done to address inequities at universities, but efforts are usually centered around righting wrongs, making amends for past lies, and focusing on collective responsibility and guilt. Another, possibly more fruitful avenue would be to understand what inclusivity and a more nuanced appreciation of the importance of diversity would look like in our institutions. It is here that Humboldt’s ideas can inform our hopes for changing educational institutions. Decolonization requires more than acknowledgment and collective regret; it means rethinking the structure and content of our institutions such that the vision and goal of intellectual life reflects more than the interests of the dominant group.

2 HOPE For the purposes of this paper, I will distinguish hope from mere desire, and also from any kind of self-delusion. I propose that hope is an imaginative projection into a future of possibilities, a positive disposition of openness, and thus a self-critical awareness of the possibility that one might be wrong. Hope is necessarily an openness to others and thus necessitates an inclusivity and an appreciation of diversity in self and others. This conception of hope is reflected in the Humboldtian notion of Bildung. For Humboldt, the ideal of Bildung is the highest goal of humankind and the perfection of all the powers of the spirit, not just the desire to develop specific capacities and skills.3 The concept of desire gravitates around lack and is usually more egocentric. Fulfilling one’s desires, even if noble, focuses on overcoming personal obstacles and becoming the person one wants to be. Hope is a more consistently constructive and communal disposition than desire. Bildung, too, is far more than individual development and fulfillment, the gebildete Mensch is able to strike the balance between her task to develop herself as a unique voice as well as stand-in for humanity. As Humboldt writes in Über den Geist der Menscheit (On the Spirit of Humanity) (1797), this perfection is the infinite task of mankind and humanity (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 2, 329–330). The Humboldtian hope for education is to develop and preserve the unique and personal talents and character of each individual while at the same time learning and absorbing, as much as possible, all the intellectual diversity we can discover. Humboldt himself is a shining fulfillment of this hopeful ideal, as a man who studied law, classical philology, philosophy, natural science, the new discipline of comparative anatomy, and comparative anthropology, and who launched what is now known as cultural and historical criticism. Moreover, Humboldt closely studied many languages and cultures

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including the Basque language, the Native languages of South, Central, and North America as well as many languages in the Pacific including Hawaii and the South Sea Islands, and the East Coast of Africa. He also studied Chinese, Japanese, Siamese, Tamil, Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, and Sanskrit. He knew all the Romance languages as well as Old Icelandic, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, and Lithuanian. His writings include notes and analyses of over two hundred languages.4 Humboldt’s passionate and disciplined embrace of linguistic and cultural intellectual diversity across the globe informed his extraordinarily thoughtful communal service in his career as a civil servant, first as Prussian envoy to the Vatican in Rome, then as head of education and ecclesiastic affairs in the Ministry of the Interior. Drawing on his experiences and studies of indigenous languages and cultures, Humboldt grounded his radical reform of the Prussian educational system, from elementary school to university, in the principles of freedom, diversity, and a broad and universal humanistic education for all. It is in this positive sense that Humboldt’s own writings disclose hope for his own times and a hopeful vantage point from which we might think through our own social, cultural, and educational challenges. Humboldt’s writings on Bildung and language underscore the importance of both recognizing our unique linguistic and cultural perspectives and the imperative to reach across cultural borders to unite while respecting diversity in the name of humanity. In what follows, I suggest that Humboldt’s conception of Bildung and language inspires hope for educational reform that could be more than a battleground for fulfillment of the individual desires of those who have the power of decision at a particular time, and more than a series of business decisions masquerading as diversity.

3 BILDUNG Humboldt’s writings on Bildung and the role of the state are, like many of his writings, difficult and baffling. As Anthony Grafton has pointed out, “anyone who seriously tries to chase down Humboldt’s main treatises and letters soon finds himself adrift in a dusty sea of partial editions, festschrift articles, and odd volumes of scholarly journals” (Grafton 1981, 372). Humboldt’s very thorough and conscientious approach to intellectual matters often led him to conclude that he had an insufficient grasp of the ambitious writing projects he undertook, and sometimes, therefore, to leave them “in progress.” Moreover, his work is incredibly interdisciplinary, demanding a reader’s understanding of political theory, history, classics, many languages, philosophy, aesthetics, and anthropology in order to do full justice to an interpretation of his ideas. In what follows, I single out some interesting philosophical aspects of Humboldt’s work on Bildung and language, with an aim of rendering explicit the dimension of hope in his work.5 Humboldt’s theory of Bildung is not only to be found in the famous fragment of 1793/1794, Theorie der Bildung des Menschen (Theory of the Cultivation of Humankind); rather, it underpins most of his life’s work, including his astonishingly original work on language. Humboldt’s ideal of Bildung, despite the difficulty in reading him, is, as Gadamer points out, what makes us experience his century and his ideas as contemporary: “The concept of Bildung most clearly indicates the profound intellectual change that still causes us to experience the century of Goethe as contemporary, whereas the baroque era already appears like a primaeval age of history” (Gadamer 1985, 11). Humboldt’s conception of culture and education is not so far from ours, for he emphasized that its

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purpose was to further individual development (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 1, 106f.), whereas intellectual ideas even slightly prior to Humboldt’s time are far more alien to our present culture. Education was largely mechanical rote learning often managed by the scarcely literate. The goal was to endow a young person with useful skills and a respect for the authority of church and state. The notion that the purpose of education was to bring a young person to a state of autonomy and freedom and to develop all their creative capacities was entirely foreign to the educational norms of the time. The more humanistic ideal of education was, until recently, ours as well in western societies in which we value our individualism, creativity, and autonomy above all else. Unfortunately, we have privileged a reductive paradigm of education in other ways. The educational system in North America at all levels, at best, has privileged the natural sciences at the expense of the humanities and has taught a Eurocentric, onesided reading of the history of the world. At worst, it has reduced education to the kind of utilitarian Brotstudien that, while not so much concerned with serving church or state authority, serve the business interests of a marketplace economy. I propose that an understanding of Bildung can serve as a starting point to rehabilitate education in a manner that can inspire us to address these problems in an inclusive, constructive, and visionary manner. Bildung is often translated as “culture” or “education,” but it means both, and also something more than education or culture. Drawing on Humboldt, Gadamer writes, “if in our language we say Bildung, we mean something both higher and more inward, namely the attitude of mind, which, from the knowledge and the feeling of the total intellectual and moral endeavor, flows harmoniously into sensibility and character” (Gadamer 1985, 11). Foreshadowing Heidegger’s critique of the natural sciences and the deleterious impact of technology, Humboldt points out that while science and technology made great strides, the external improvements did not reflect any improvements “within us” (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 1, 283).6 Channeling Rousseau, Humboldt launches his reflection on external progress in society and the question of whether such progress is internally edifying in Theorie der Bildung des Menschens (ibid., 282–287). The ideal of Bildung is the highest goal of humankind and the perfection of all the powers of the spirit, not just the development of specific capacities and skills.7 For Humboldt, the term carries more than the concept of formation and relates to the image of the divine cosmos that human beings carry within themselves: the model or image (Vorbild) one must artistically copy (nachbilden). Bildung has no goal outside itself—it is not a means to an end but the ongoing development of human intellectual, creative, and rational distinction from the merely natural and immediate. It is the infinite task of the individual and of humankind. As merely natural beings we are not yet gebildet (a cultivated consciousness). But human beings have a certain freedom and flexibility from mere determination of circumscribed instincts, and our self-culture demands a “manifold of situations” (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 1, 106) to realize our potential. It is through our Bildung that we grow into the full potential of our humanity in language and custom, and through which we raise ourselves out of the immediately natural, thereby finding our place of interconnectedness in and with the world. The humanistic ideal of Bildung that Humboldt underscores is the very source from which the human sciences in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries owe their life, their special status, and their particular model of truth that cannot be reduced to that of the natural sciences. As Gadamer writes, “Bildung is an element of spirit without being tied to Hegel’s philosophy of spirit,” and “Bildung remains a necessary ideal even

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for the historical sciences that depart from Hegel. For Bildung is the element in which they move” (Gadamer 1985, 15). Gadamer’s association of Humboldt and Hegel is illuminating; however, there is no Hegelian teleology in Humboldt’s notion of Bildung nor is the development of self-consciousness grounded in conflict, as it is in Hegel. I will return to this point in the section on language. For Humboldt, the importance of Bildung is not merely internal: in the Theorie der Bildung des Menschen essay, Humboldt is adamant that nature is much more than just the necessary resistance that makes thinking and agency possible. The cosmos, nature, or the world in this case, is the artistic material through which we define ourselves in a creative way, and this activity extends the very concept of humanity in our person. Nature is not mere matter to be colonized and carved up, the necessary brute matter upon which we exercise our desires: nature is rather the body into which we breathe life. Our very identity is determined by the Wechselwirkung (interplay) between the plasticity of the exterior world and our creative self-activity grounded in reason and imagination.8 The diversity in nature and indeed, the diversity we discover in all otherness, including human beings in their unique cultures, constitutes a process of mutual determination whereby unity and resemblance are created while our unique individual perspective and identity develop. We must endeavor to develop an understanding of nature (world) not so as to master each aspect, but rather to strengthen our own individuality and inner strength through this rich diversity. It is in this diversity that we find human fulfillment and meaning (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 1, 284–285). While the preservation and protection of the environment that is so urgent today was surely not a concern for Humboldt, his account of Bildung, particularly diversity and the importance of contact with both the natural environment and other cultures, points to a hopeful philosophical model of decolonization both in nature and in intellectual endeavors. Especially interesting in this regard is Humboldt’s apprehension over the danger of alienation and loss of self in this adaptation to nature, and nature’s reshaping in light of the imaginative and conceptual artistry of humankind. The concern is twofold: First, every adaptation to nature, or to an other, entails a “scattering” of knowledge and thus the possible loss of self “in infinity” (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 1, 285–286). Fragmented bits of knowledge, and a fragmented self, do not constitute Bildung nor yield ein gebildeter Mensch. Second, the other can be an oppressive force that can assimilate and subsume a unique individuality to a dominant canon. Thus, adapting to the other may result in a kind of learning that is mere acquiescence and not “scholarly Bildung” in the sense that true Bildung is the highest development of a person’s powers in all their unique complexity. The first problem is addressed by the recognition that the development of all our powers that are dependent upon contact with the other are a “brightening and concentrating mirror” (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 1, 285–286) that is followed by a return to a focus on the individuality of the person.9 The individual’s absorption in the external world is followed by a focus on self. The second concern is addressed by Humboldt’s emphasis on the diverse and unique individuality of every human being. The inner impulse of humankind to Bildung is described as a powerful and organic life force. If the indispensable condition of freedom and the presentation of a variety of situations is possible, oppression of the other or by the other will not occur. To this end, Humboldt believes the kind of educational policy that would guard against oppressive intellectual tendencies is one that is grounded in freedom and universality.

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4 FREEDOM, DIVERSITY, AND THE ROLE OF THE STATE Humboldt emphasizes that the Bildung of the individual is dependent upon the individual’s powers and actions; however, education is also a communal task, and it is here that the state, as the representative of the interests of the community, plays a role. In Ideen zu einem Versuch die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen (Ideas for an Attempt to Determine the Limits of State Action), he argues that the state is the administrator of intellectual life: it supplies the laws and institutions for intellectual life and assumes a leadership role in the goal of educating and ennobling the entire population. In this way, Humboldt’s daring and original agenda is nothing less than the integration of private moral conscience with the social power of the community, in which the state is relegated to providing the infrastructure so that individuals can develop their powers and character in all their complexity and diversity (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 1, 106). The state education Humboldt sought to reform represented a specific and narrow ideology and could not accommodate the diversity of human possibility. Schools’ curricula must be comprehensive and organic so that all of the students’ powers would be solicited, and specialization would be reserved for adult life, Humboldt writes in Der königsberger und der litauische Schulplan (The Curriculum for Königsberg and Lithuania) (ibid., vol. 13, 259–260, 263). In Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit, Marie Battiste points out: “Decolonized education seeks to reconcile contemporary education with the past and with the people’s present ensuring that the ideological and self-interests within Eurocentric education are not imposed on Indigenous peoples and they build their own present within their own agency and power” (Battiste 2013, 26). It is precisely the Humboldtian educational vision that is needed to decolonize our institutions. Decolonized institutions ensure that narrow Eurocentric ideologies are not the normative ideal and that indigenous peoples are able to implement pedagogies and models of knowledge that correspond to their unique cultural perspectives. Moreover, Humboldt argued that every kind of intellectual individuality could only find its rightful place if the class structure of the school system was dismantled, such that a general education could be available to the very poorest in society: “Let everyone, even the poorest, receive a complete human education; let everyone without exception receive a complete education, limited only in the respect that it could lead to still further development; let every kind of intellectual individuality find its rightful place; let no one be forced to reach a decision earlier than their gradual development requires” (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 13, 266). It must be acknowledged that Humboldt is one of many thinkers of his time who championed a liberal conception of the state, and that his inclusive model of general education based on the importance of language is drawn from a very traditional western canon, to the extent that he even proposed that carpenters in training should learn Greek! One might suggest that it is precisely such an ideal of education that has been problematic for indigenous scholars, since it seems to perpetuate the power of dominant linguistic groups to impose their language and worldview on indigenous students (Bear Nicolas 2011). However, Humboldt developed a uniquely inclusive humanist tradition of liberalism that went far beyond the more rationalist liberalism of Kant, who emphasized reason and duty over the cultivation of sensibility, and beyond the more general theories drafted by Schiller, Fichte, and Georg Forster, inter alia. Humboldt passionately defended “the highest and most proportional development of all human powers as a whole” (Humboldt

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1903–1936, vol. 1, 106) and filled out this program by writing up extremely detailed explanations of precisely how the liberal state would take shape in education, civil law, relations with other nations, marriage, and religion, and even how the state should protect the mentally ill. His liberalism revolves around a robust definition of freedom and an organic vision of the growth and development of a nation: “Freedom is the grand and indispensable condition upon which the possibility of such a development presupposes; but there is besides another essential—intimately connected with freedom, it is true,—a variety of situations. Even the most free and self-reliant man is thwarted and hindered in his development by uniformity of position” (ibid.). Like Schiller, Humboldt argued that reason is not enough to motivate human action and alone cannot ground moral principles. Reason is a necessary chaperone for all the powers. Humboldt held a Platonic conception of human perfection and happiness as guided by reason, which “orders and chooses means and ends; the task of all other powers is only to execute them” (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 1, 60). He was wary of the irrationalism and primacy of faith over reason he read, along with many others, in Jacobi’s work (Letters to Jacobi 3 June 1789 and 20 June 1780, in Humboldt 1892, 16–21). However, he learned much from his exchanges with Jacobi on the limits of reason and, along with Jacobi, was critical of the French effort to establish a constitution built entirely upon reason alone. Abstraction and empty formalism cannot successfully foster social, political, and moral development of a nation; any reforms must begin with the empirical facts of experience. Moreover, Humboldt argued that social and political reform must develop naturally in tandem with the laws of organic growth. Living creatures need time to adapt to and transform their environment. The best human developments are those that imitate and are in harmony with nature. Given freedom, a manifold of situations and the guidance of reason, Bildung can shape a society to be the best it can be, growing as slowly and as surely as a plant (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 1, 101). Abstract pure reason cannot create a constitution; it can only begin with empirical reality and guide it slowly and carefully, like a trellis that guides the growth of a plant. Organic development, and the time it takes for empirical reality to be receptive to the transition reason proposes, is the only way that will bear fruit. History is an organic process and “constitutions cannot be grafted onto people like shoots onto trees” (ibid., 80). Civic virtue cannot be created by fiat. In The Limits of State Action, “la plus grande capacité de l’Europe,” as Mme De Stael called Humboldt, summarizes the principles of reform: 1. We should never attempt to transfer purely theoretical principles into reality, before the latter, in its whole scope and tendency, offers no further obstacles to the manifestation of those consequences to which, without any intermixture of other influences, the principles arrived at would lead. 2. In order to bring about the transition from the condition of the present to another newly resolved on, every reform should be allowed to proceed as much as possible from men’s minds and thoughts. — (ibid., 239) As Sweet writes, Humboldt believed “a cautious tact, which took account of the web of interest and custom binding people together and engaging their emotional loyalties, was the wiser course” (Sweet 1978, 104). The true function of the state is to enable an environment for the development of Bildung, an environment of freedom that is for everyone and not just for a few. Humboldt writes that it is degrading that a person should

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be “deprived of the right to be a human being” (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 1, 75). From his early to his very last writing, Humboldt consistently maintained “the true aim of our life here on earth to be, not happiness, but the cultivation to the full of the talents with which we have been endowed” (ibid., 100). Drawing on the sensualism of Condillac, Humboldt describes the drive to attain and externalize Bildung as the expression of a vital organic power (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 1, 132, 282–283, 286–287). As Günter Zöller points out in “ ‘Mannigfaltigkeit und Tätigkeit.’ Wilhelm von Humboldts kritische Kulturphilosophie” (‘Multiplicity and Capacity’: Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Critical Philosophy of Culture), Humboldt’s notion of the Bildungstrieb is indebted to research by his contemporary Blumenbach about the biological nature of formative life forces in an organism (Zöller 2010, 180). This craving, which emanates from the freedom of an autonomous mind that externalizes human powers, must be accommodated by the appropriate educational policies. The recognition of diversity, and thus, from our standpoint, the importance of decolonization, is of paramount importance in the Humboldtian vision of education. Far from being a narrow western rationalist worldview proposed as essentialist framework within which educational ideals are to be developed, Humboldt proposed a radical and creative vision that acknowledged the importance of inclusivity, diversity, and language as a living organism. Human beings are far more than “the sum of speech and actions and even the sum of their emotions and thoughts” (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 2, 88). Humankind is a project of hope, an “eternally active and effective whole” (ibid., vol. 1, 87) that can only flourish if the nature of individuals is “expanded in all directions and freed of all restricting obstacles” (ibid., 389). Liberty and diversity are essential elements of the Humboldtian theory of Bildung. This includes diversity of activities such as the cultivation of nature, along with the exercise of intellectual activities. The diversity in people should be reflected in educational policies, since contact with other people enables an enriching, formative relationship (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 1, 106–107). Contact with others, however, must not erode the freedom and independence of each party, otherwise oppressive tendencies will set in and mere emulation and assimilation, rather than bildende development, will be the result of the contact. As I suggested above, Humboldt carefully considers the problem of assimilation and emphasizes that the process of Bildung engages a meeting of minds that “opens up routes of access from one to the other” without oppression.10 Contact with others will stimulate healthy friction that is productive to the process of Bildung (ibid., 80–81).

5 PRACTICAL REFORMS Humboldt’s fascinating educational theory was rife with promising possibilities and thus was a model of hope in his own day. It is also, as I have suggested above, pregnant with a future for thinking through the challenges of reforming our own educational institutions. I shall now briefly trace the impressive concrete accomplishments that quite literally embody Humboldt’s hope in his own time. Humboldt argued that the state should not regulate or interfere in the establishment of schools, agriculture, commerce, and religion. Policing powers were to be restricted to upholding property rights and the legal freedom of every individual. However, in 1809, when Humboldt arrived in Berlin to take up his post as privy councilor and director of ecclesiastical affairs and education in the Ministry of the Interior, he took up the Kultus

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division with a surprisingly firm hand. Scholars such as Jeffrey Grossman and David Sorkin argue that Humboldt betrayed his ideals of Bildung for political training and ultimately played into the hands of those who wanted to enlist Bildung in the service of an absolutist Prussian state.11 From the outset, he made clear that he planned censorship of literary publications and to exert strict control over education, the public and cultural institutions he was responsible for, as well as ecclesiastical affairs (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 1, 80–81). While he remained true to his ambition that Germans could transform their French conquerors through their glorious culture, much like the Greeks had converted the Romans, and that freedom of the individual was of paramount importance, some of his policies and actions appear to be a betrayal of his ideals. It is here that one might think he did a volte face (Hohendahl 1989, 256; see also Spranger 1910, 69–132). In fact, as I will suggest, it is here that we see a concrete example of the direct implementation of his philosophical ideals. Humboldt did not share Hegel’s nor his friend Goethe’s enthusiasm for the emperor12 and was alarmed about the French political and cultural control of Germany, and indeed of Europe. Nevertheless, these fears did not influence his view that freedom, including unlimited press freedom, was the only correct principle (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 10, 37; transl. Sweet 1980, 19). It is true that “a situation of genuine emergency existed at that time” (Sweet 1980, 19) and guidelines that would require writers to focus on events which could calm the politically precarious instability of the present rather than inflame and peddle fake news were a temporary and unfortunate necessary evil. The time was not ripe for complete freedom; nevertheless, Humboldt never changed his mind about his ideals and goals. In 1809 Humboldt wrote to Gotz that “unlimited freedom of the press was surely the correct principle” and that “censorship should be done away with entirely”; nevertheless the emergency situation in Prussia required “utmost circumscription” (Humboldt 1903– 1936, vol. 10, 37; transl. Sweet 1980, 19). He continued to remain committed to developing educational policies that would pave a path for individuals from all classes to be wellequipped for freedom. Humboldt was “walking a particularly thin line between what he considered ideally desirable and what seemed expediently necessary” (Sweet 1980, 20) but remained adamant that the censor must remember “that the true and abiding interest of the state consists in the freedom and development to the spiritual energies of the nation and that he was delegated to perform his duties in order that legitimate and wholesome freedom could be better maintained and protected” (ibid., 66; transl. Sweet 1980, 20). Moreover, subsequent events in Humboldt’s life clearly demonstrate that no aboutface or hypocrisy sullies his commitment to Bildung and freedom. The man whose unpublished Über das Studium des Altertums und des griechischen insbesondere (Concerning the Study of Antiquity and Especially the Greeks”) (1793) had inspired the great classical scholar A. F. Wolf implemented his superb humanistic ideals in Prussian educational reforms, despite the turbulent and unstable political times. The practical outcome of Humboldt’s eighteen months in charge of the Kultus post is astonishing. To this day we speak of “Humboldtian” ideals of education. Starting with only his ideal of Bildung and no practical experience in the administration of schools, or what teaching in schools involved, Humboldt revolutionized the Prussian educational system and provided a model for education many countries have emulated since. With his two subordinates, Georg Heinrich Ludwig Nicolovius, an ardent follower of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and Wilhelm Süvern, an experienced former gymnasium director, and the shared belief amongst the reform bureaucrats, as well as military men such as Clausewitz, that Bildung was the foundation upon which Prussia’s modernization

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depended, Humboldt saw to it that in elementary school, “the most ordinary day laborer” had the same “Fundament” as “the most highly educated person” (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 13, 278). Humboldt revolutionized secondary education as well by setting up the humanistic gymnasium as a school that specifically prepared the way for university. Humboldt was able to include bureaucrats in discussions and debates about the reforms and nevertheless managed to translate his memoranda—today, classic assertions about the ideal of Bildung—into concrete changes in curricula, academic performance standards, and the role of schooling in society.13 The school plans for Königsberg and Prussian Lithuania are among the most famous of these memoranda and establish the relationship vocational education has to general education (K. E. Jeisman, cited in Sweet 1980, 95; see also Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 13, 259–283). Humboldt asserted that vocational and general education should be kept apart and that vocational training should take place after general education: “general education should strengthen, clarify and regulate the Kräfte, the capacities each person has for human development, whereas specialized education aims at facility in applying acquired skills” (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 13, 277). General education should prepare a student to learn how to learn and to learn what was necessary in order to determine whether they were suited for scholarly pursuits. Regardless of scholarly aptitude, all students should have the opportunity to develop as gebildete persons, so that they can be thoughtful citizens and participate in a community organically moving towards more and more enlightened freedom. Humboldt centralized education and continued the dismantling of the jurisdiction of towns, foundations, or particular patrons begun by Zedlitz, and made the state the sole authority for education.14 He was careful to implement measures that would prevent any possible abuse of the state’s authority by setting up advisory committees with substantial power occupied only by already well gebildtete intellectuals: “The department will choose as regular members of the deputation only men who will devote themselves to philosophical, mathematical, philological, and historical study,” since these “can raise knowledge of particular subjects to Wissenschaft.” Without such Wissenschaft, Humboldt writes, “no scholarship in a particular field can be transformed into true intellectual Bildung” (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 10, 180). Finally, Humboldt founded the famous University of Berlin within a year of his arrival in his new post. Building on the groundwork laid by Fichte, Schleiermacher, Schelling, and Wolf (see Anrich 1962; Weischedel 1960), who had emphatically opposed the new French Polytechnique model of specialized professional education and instead insisted on a humanistic approach, with Wissenschaft (in a Fichtean sense) and Bildung at the heart of university education, Humboldt established a university in Berlin which continues to be a model of excellence in teaching and research, and indeed, the model of the modern university worldwide. Regrettably, he was not able to ensure that the university became endowed with landed property so that it would be protected against changes in government that might threaten pedagogical autonomy. Nevertheless, in little over a year, between 1809 and 1810, and undeterred by political instability and some opposition to his ideals, Humboldt realized his hope for an educational system grounded in the principle of free, inclusive, and universal education in elementary, secondary, and university institutions.

6 LANGUAGE, DIVERSITY AND HOPE Humboldt’s emphasis on cultural diversity and the genuine inclusivity in his theory of Bildung is evident in some aspects of his groundbreaking work in linguistics, which offers

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the kind of openness to others that is a characteristic of hope. The scope and significance of Humboldt’s work on language is extraordinary and another example of his remarkable ability to put the theoretical into practice: he established a highly original theory in philosophy of language alongside a groundbreaking contribution in empirical linguistics. Humboldt’s “Über die Verschiedenheiten des menschlichen Sprachbaues” (The Diversity of Human Language Construction) of 1827–1829 constitutes a decisive break with the representational view of language that has dominated studies of language throughout the history of philosophy since Aristotle. His new conception of language established that language does not merely represent and communicate ideas and concepts but is a generative, formative organ of thought (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 6, 151). Moreover, the differences in languages are far more than a mere difference in sounds and signs, but rather constitute a difference in worldview (ibid., vol. 4, 27). For this reason, he found the distinction between philosophy of language and empirical linguistics in his time objectionable (ibid.). The reception of Humboldt’s views on language is complex and has been selectively appropriated such that views as radically different as the Sapir-Whorf theory on linguistic relativity and Chomsky’s universalist generative grammar are both considered Humboldtian (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 4, 27)! In fact, Humboldt was categorically opposed to the notion of a philosophical grammar precisely because it was based on Latin language and assimilated non-European languages under a reductive and colonizing framework. However, the present purpose is not to examine Humboldt’s contribution to philosophy of language, hermeneutics, or modern linguistics in any detail (see MüllerVollmer 1993; Zimmermann et al. 1994) but to focus on some aspects of his philosophy of language which are connected to the dimension of hope for our times that I have drawn from his theory of Bildung. As I argued above, Humboldt’s conception of Bildung is a model of hope for the decolonization of institutions that paves the way for genuine inclusivity and reconciliation with indigenous peoples. Humboldt offers a model of a broad general education that is grounded in freedom and diversity and is careful to avoid the problem of assimilation and cultural appropriation in its ideals. Humboldt’s philosophy of language and his empirical linguistics, which, for him, were inseparable sides of the same coin, play an important role in his vision of hope for an education based on Bildung. First, in Humboldt’s wide-ranging empirical work on over two hundred languages, he broke with conventional phonocentrism and Eurocentrism in the philosophy of language. For Humboldt, language and writing form an interconnected evolving whole, where writing is the embodiment of the Bildungstrieb (formative drive) in language in a formative, rather than a representational or mirroring, role. Moreover, language “in actuality only exists in spoken dialogue, its grammar and dictionary hardly even comparable to its dead skeleton” (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 6, 147). Writing and speaking do not represent ideas: rather, both are formative of organs of thought. This performative model of the human mind and of knowledge breaks with the traditional epistemological norm and opens up possibilities for including oral knowledgekeeping in the canon. Traditionally, oral knowledge and history have been dismissed as merely subjective and rife with biases, whereas written knowledge and history are taken to be more objective, rational, and authoritative (Hanson 2009). However, as indigenous Elders15 have realized for centuries, and as Humboldt’s insights underscore, knowledge develops in spoken dialogue and languages. Cultures evolve in what indigenous tribes often call the “sharing circle” in which stories are told and recalled. The circle of Elders

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serves the role of “peer review,” and Indigenous oral knowledge is not only performative, dynamic, and collective, but also authoritative. Thus, a serious look at Humboldt’s ideas on language opens an avenue for decolonizing and rethinking our institutions to include indigenous ways of knowing in a manner that does not include them alongside the traditional canon but radically rethinks the traditional canon. According to Humboldt, knowledge is an outgrowth of our linguistic nature, and speech, or “living sound” is home: to hear it after a long absence on foreign soil is a kind of sudden happiness to find again an essential part of ourselves as individuals and as members of a community. Language draws an intimate circle around the people to whom it belongs, and it is only possible to leave this circle by entering one of another people (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 7, 60). Learning a new language is key to understanding a new worldview since each language contains a particular conceptual approach and the entire “fabric of concepts” of a particular people. This task is never complete since one always brings one’s own “home and self ” into the foreign language, always “translating” and referring back to one’s mother tongue. The loss of language is therefore a serious alienation from self that is detrimental to one’s development, such that there is no doubt that a nation should prioritize the preservation of all its written and spoken languages. Language is an organism: each part stands in a harmonious relation with the others and is inextricably bound up with the intellectual and emotional evolution of peoples who speak it, such that forbidding its speaking would constitute an irreparable emotional harm. Moreover, the diversity and unique perspectives of language can only be preserved in living communication (ibid.). Humboldt makes clear from the outset that the diversity of structure in languages is a necessary condition for the evolution of the human mind and that there is a reciprocal influence of one upon the other.16 Anticipating Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s ontological hermeneutics and their emphasis on the linguisticality of all understanding, Humboldt argues that language arises from the innermost nature of human beings and possesses an autonomy that, although it “visibly declares itself to us,” is nevertheless inexplicable and must not be misunderstood as a product or creation of peoples. Humboldt famously writes that language “is not product (ergon) but an activity (energeia)” (Humboldt 1903– 1936, vol. 7, 46). The mental powers that give rise to language are inexplicable. Language is not a product that a scientific enquiry can lay hold of: rather, it is an activity, an involuntary emanation from the mind. Language as such has an ontological priority over its speakers and belongs to no one. As Humboldt himself notes, his account of language is “totally different from that of purposive theory, since it does not proceed from a set goal, but from an admittedly unfathomable cause” (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 7, 97). While much of human beings’ activity can be explained by natural science, through “the powers of nature and the quasimechanical advancement of human activity,” the emergence of individuality in persons and communities makes “sudden and inexplicable” interruptions in the physiological cause-and-effect path of nature. The mental power that generates language is grounded in freedom and thus “language creates of its own accord” and the possibility of explanation ceases (ibid.). Languages evolve alongside and by way of flourishing peoples, and when the rich diversity of peoples is freely and creatively unified in “cooperating mental forces” then a glimpse of language as an intellectually creative force is disclosed. The diversity of languages arises from the differing contexts of freedom, feelings and imagination, natural mental talent, and mental evolution, which is related to environment and community.

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It is true that Humboldt believed in an ideal of linguistic perfection in which the form of expression could exhibit the highest (i.e., clearest) forms of thought, but he did not think that any specific language would be such a language. Linguistics does not need the “too hypothetical-seeming” viewpoint of linguistic completeness or perfection as a foundation. Such an ideal is merely useful as an incentive to address the possibility that there may be a gradual progression in languages. Not only does Humboldt reject the ideal of perfection and of a purposive, teleological model, but he also rejects the Hegelian model of the development and progress of thought as grounded in a struggle for domination. In Über Denken und Sprechen (On Thinking and Speaking) (1795–1796), Humboldt argues that language begins in the first act of reflection, that is, the differentiation between the thinker and their thought, and is a move away from mere desire, a kind of empirical stupor, to a self-consciousness, an impulse, a Bildungstrieb that is grounded in hope (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 7, 581–582). Nowhere does he follow a Hegelian model in which self-consciousness, social recognition, and freedom are riddled with conflict and strife. In Humboldt’s view, it is not necessary to repress natural conflict and aggression or to succumb to an imperial colonizing force to enter into a relation with the other, as in Hegel’s infamous master-slave dialectic. Humboldt offers an account of the development of self-consciousness as guided by the formative word (bildendes Wort) that orients human beings with an essential openness and receptiveness to the other (ibid., 18). Thinking needs the mediating function of language to be understood by the thinker herself. Moreover, thinking is essentially intersubjective such that any concept can only be understood and refined through the mirror of an other, and thus has an essentially constructive communal disposition.17 Nowhere in Humboldt’s writings can one find an account of a resulting alienation, fragmentation, and assimilation by the other. This is a positive, inclusive, and thus hopeful theory of language and understanding that points towards collaborative and constructive possibilities over a more Eurocentric-teleological account of the progress of self-consciousness and understanding. It must be acknowledged that Humboldt makes many comments about “higher” and “lower” languages, maintains that the goal of language is the expression of thought, and argues that some languages are better adapted to this goal than others. Languages that have no written tradition and are syllabic with no alphabetic writing lack an element of contact, which is productive of the development, diversity, and creativity within a language. On the other hand, written language that is mere form can also reify and thwart the development of the spirit of a language. Nevertheless, Humboldt does seem to conclude that, overall, languages that are only preserved in an oral tradition as opposed to a written one suffer a disadvantage in their very constant and consistent structure, which is less likely to evolve in the same way as a language that is both spoken and written can. Clearly, including oral knowledge-keeping in academia such that it can enjoy “a healthy friction” and enable all forms of knowledge to evolve and develop together is entirely in keeping with Humboldtian ideals. It is interesting that, in the end, Humboldt is critical of his own possible ethnocentrism and concludes that all languages, even the most rudimentary ones, are worthy of the most profound study. The study of languages is the study of the thoughts and feelings of humankind in all domains and all stages of their development, and, as such, they are all equally important.18 Humboldt insists that the differences in language must not be evaluated according to their structure: it is unjust, he argues in his Essai sur les langues du nouveau continent (Essay on the Languages of the New Continent), to call the American languages rude or savage although their structure is formed very differently.19 Each

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language is “a fragment of the universal language of the human species” (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 3, 339). Moreover, he laments the destructive colonizing forces which immediately destroyed and oppressed the noblest tribes such that no free intellectual activity was possible.20 It follows that Humboldt’s claim that certain languages are better adapted to the “clearest thoughts” than others is not at all a dismissive or negative judgment on a language or the people who speak it, and certainly not a claim that some teleological perfection is to be discerned in the development of languages. In his “Lettre à M. Rémusat sur la nature des formes grammaticales” (Letter to M. Rémusat on the Nature of the Grammatical Forms of Language) Humboldt rejected his brother’s ideas that American languages were the remains of earlier and higher forms of civilization and that one could read the decline of a culture in their form (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 5, 299). The excellence of a language can be assessed by the extent to which it inspires a people and the extent to which their ideas have creativity and harmony with their environment. The lexicographical volume of a language does not reveal its richness and complexity. The extraordinarily wide range and intellectual depth of Humboldt’s ideas with his many fruitful and original insights inspired his hope to design inclusive educational institutions that would draw on all the rich diversity in human beings to promote a healthy, diverse, and creative culture. For us, Humboldt’s ideas inspire towards the same goal, with a particular eye to our very contemporary projects of decolonization without cultural appropriation, and genuine intellectual collaboration. His legacy of hope is a methodical and consistent philosophical probing that examines important questions in all their theoretical and empirical complexity in a manner that is inclusive of genuine diversity.

NOTES 1.

I would like to thank Judith Norman, Jean Coleno, and Anna Ezekiel for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

2.

See Peter Uwe Hohendahl’s excellent and thorough discussion of the use of Humboldt’s ideas in postwar discourse on educational reforms in West Germany and the United States (Hohendahl 2011).

3.

In Über die innere und äußere Organisation der höheren wissenschaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin (On the Inner and Outer Organization of the Higher Scientific Institutions in Berlin) (1809) Humboldt writes: “As soon as one stops seeking actual science, or imagines that it does not need to be created from the depths of the spirit, but can be strung together extensively by [mere] collecting, then everything is lost irrevocably and forever: lost for science, which, if this continues for a long time, gets away and leaves even language as an empty husk, and lost for the state. For only the science that stems from within and can be planted deep within reshapes the character, and the state is concerned as little as humanity with knowledge and speech, but with character and action” [“Sobald man aufhört, eigentlich Wissenschaft zu suchen, oder sich einbildet, sie brauche nicht aus der Tiefe des Geistes heraus geschaffen, sondern könne durch Sammeln extensiv aneinandergereiht werden, so ist Alles unwiederbringlich und auf ewig verloren; verloren für die Wissenschaft, die, wenn dies lange fortgesetzt wird, dergestalt entflieht, daß sie selbst die Sprache wie eine leere Hülse zurückläßt, und verloren für den Staat. Denn nur die Wissenschaft, die aus dem Innern stammt und in’s Innere gepflanzt werden kann, bildet

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auch den Charakter um, und dem Staat ist es ebenso wenig als der Menscheit um Wissen und Reden, sondern um Charakter und Handeln zu thun”] (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 10, 253). 4.

Humboldt was in contact with the pioneering scholars in the study of language of his time, as his fascinating correspondence, which he considered part of his research, clearly demonstrates. He communicated with Jean-François Champollion and Jean-Pierre Rémusat in Paris as well as John Pickering in the United States, inter alia.

5.

I am, as are all contemporary writers on Humboldt, greatly indebted to Paul Sweet’s comprehensive biography and his judicious interpretation of Humboldt’s public and private life (Sweet 1978; Sweet 1980). The historian’s careful and scholarly understanding of the very complex social, cultural, and political context of Humboldt’s life and work has made the task of singling out the interesting philosophical dimension of hope a far less complicated undertaking.

6.

Unless stated otherwise, translations of Humboldt’s writings are my own.

7.

“The true purpose of humanity—that prescribed to it not by changeable inclination, but by eternal, inalterable reason—is the highest and most proportional cultivation of its forces to a whole” [“Der wahre Zwek des Menschen—nicht der, welchen die wechselnde Neigung, sondern welchen die ewig unveränderliche Vernunft ihm vorschreibt—ist die höchste und proportionirlichste Bildung seiner Kräfte zu einem Ganzen”] (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 1, 106).

8.

“Within [the human being] is perfect unity and thorough interpenetration, thus he must translate both into nature” [“In ihm ist vollkommene Einheit und durchgängige Wechselwirkung, beide muß er also auf die Natur übertragen”] (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 1, 284–285).

9.

As Christoph Lüth writes in On Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Theory of Bildung, there is an element of anthropocentrism in the theory of Bildung such that a self lost in nature and alienated from itself cannot occur: “the infinite mass of objects would be exchanged for the narrower circle of humankind’s faculties and the interplay between them. An image of human activity would be revealed, no longer in fragmented form, but as in a ‘simultaneously brightening and concentrating mirror’ in direct relationship to our inner Bildung” (Lüth 1998, 48; cf. Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 1, 286).

10. “Therefore people must join together, losing not individuality but an exclusionary isolation; the union must not turn one being into another, but, as it were, open avenues from one to the other. Whatever one possesses for himself, he must compare with what he receives from others, and modify accordingly, but not thereby suppress it” [“Daher müßen sich die Menschen untereinander verbinden, nicht um an Eigenthümlichkeit, aber an ausschließenden Isolirtsein zu verlieren; die Verbindung muß nicht ein Wesen in das andre verwandeln, aber gleichsam Zugänge von einem zum andren eröfnen; was jeder für sich besizt, muß er mit dem, von andren Empfangnen vergleichen, und danach modificiren, nicht aber dadurch unterdrükken lassen”] (Humboldt 1903–1936, vol. 1, 122). 11. “Bildung itself was subordinated, having abdicated its sovereignty to patriotism and political training” (Grossman 1997, 71; see also Sorkin 1984). 12. Goethe writes: “Napolean was the man! Always enlightened, always clear and decided, always endowed with sufficient energy to carry into effect whatever he considered advantageous and necessary. His life was the stride of a demi-god, from battle to battle, and from victory to victory. It might well be said of him, that he was found in a state of

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continual enlightenment. On this account, his destiny was more brilliant than any the world had seen before him, or perhaps will ever see after him” (Eckermann 1850, 245–246). 13. As Sweet writes: “It was Humboldt’s distinct accomplishment to generate creative action leading to concrete results (although the actual results, as is usual in history, were not always those for which he was aiming). Decisiveness and promptness in dealing with whatever called for action on a given day were his hallmark as an administrator, but more remarkable were the consistency of argument and the coherence of the set of principles that he applied to the problems at hand. The result was twofold: first, a record of accomplishment in a very brief time that was exceptional; second, a body of official papers that, taken together, comprise a Humboldtian ideology that still has not lost its power to excite admiration and controversy” (Sweet 1980, 43). 14. Zedlitz established the Oberschulkollegium along with the state supervised finishing examination, the Abitur, in 1788. 15. Elders are those who have learned and appropriated knowledge such that they live by such knowledge and can pass it on to others. They have been mentored and taught by others in enough depth that they are ready to pass along important knowledge and spiritual truth. Elders are not necessarily older persons; their “Elder” status refers to the extent of their studying. 16. “The purpose of this introduction—of presenting the languages in the heterogeneity of their construction as the necessary foundation of the progress of the human spirit, and to more precisely discuss the mutual influence of one on the other—required me to get into the nature of language in general” [“Der Zweck dieser Einleitung, die Sprachen in der Verschiedenartigkeit ihres Baues, als die nothwendige Grundlage der Fortbildung des menschlichen Geistes darzustellen und den wechselseitigen Einfluss der einen auf die andre näher zu erörtern, hat mich genöthigt, in die Natur der Sprache ueberhaupt einzugehen”] (Humboldt 1907, vol. 7, 97). 17. “But in human beings, thinking is essentially bound to social being, and, aside from all physical and emotional relations, in order to think at all the human being requires a you corresponding to the I. . . . The concept only achieves its determinacy and clarity by being reflected in this other thinking force” [“Im Menschen aber ist das Denken wesentlich an gesellschaftliches Daseyn gebunden, und der Mensch bedarf, abgesehen von allen körperlichen und Empfndungsbeziehungen, zum bloßen Denken eines dem Ich entsprechenden Du. . . . Der Begriff erreicht seine Bestimmtheit und Klarheit erst durch das Zurückstrahlen aus einer fremden Denkkraft”] (Humboldt 1907, vol. 6, 160). 18. Chateaubriand was disdainful, as were many of Humboldt’s contemporaries, of his lack of discrimination in his studies: “he’s learning all the world’s languages and even all the patois” (Chateaubriand 1948, 191; my translation). 19. In Über die Buchstabenschrift und ihren Zusammenhang mit dem Sprachbau. Die Amerikanischen Sprachen (On Alphabetic Writing and Its Connection with the Construction of Language: The American Languages), Humboldt protests the characterization of indigenous languages as “savage”: they “would only very unjustly be called rough and savage, but what decisively differentiates their construction from the fully formed [languages is that], as far as we know, [they] have never had alphabetic writing” [“die man zwar sehr mit Unrecht mit dem Namen roher und wilder bezeichnen würde, die aber ihr Bau doch bestimmt von den vollkommen gebildeten unterscheidet, haben, soviel wir bis jetzt wissen, nie Buchstabenschrift besessen”] (Humboldt 1906, vol. 5, 107).

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20. “For the unfortunate nations were immediately so oppressed, and their noblest tribes for the most part exterminated in such a way that no free, or at least no spiritual national capacity could be imagined” [“Denn die unglücklichen Nationen wurden gleich so niedergedrückt, und ihre edelsten Stämme grossentheils dergestalt ausgerottet, dass an keine freie, wenigstens keine geistige nationelle Thätigkeit zu denken war”] (Humboldt 1906, vol. 5, 124).

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Spranger, Edouard (1910), Wilhelm von Humboldt und die Reform des Bildungswesens, Berlin: Reuther and Reichard. Sweet, Paul (1978), Wilhelm von Humboldt: A Biography, vol. 1, 1767–1808, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Sweet, Paul (1980), Wilhelm von Humboldt: A Biography, vol. 2, 1808–1835, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Weischedel, Wilhelm, with Wolfgang Mueller-Lauter and Wolfgang Theunissen (1960), Idee und Wirklichkeit einer Universitaet. Dokumente zur Geschichte der Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversitaet zu Berlin, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, vol. 1, Berlin: De Gruyter. Zimmermann, Klaus, Jürgen Trabant, Kurt Müller-Vollmer and Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut (1994), Wilhelm von Humboldt und die amerikanischen Sprachen. Internationales Symposium des Ibero-Amerikanischen Instituts Pk, 24.–26. September 1992 in Berlin, Paderborn: F. Schöningh. Zöller, Günter (2010), “Mannigfaltigkeit und Tätigkeit. Wilhelm von Humboldts kritische Kulturphilosophie,” in Jürgen Stolzenberg and Lars-Thade Ulrichs, (eds.), Bildung als Kunst. Fichte, Schiller, Humboldt, Nietzsche, 169–189, Berlin: De Gruyter.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In the Hope of a Philosopher of Nature DANIEL WHISTLER (Royal Holloway, University of London)

This essay concerns the ontogeny of philosophers of nature. In the wake of Iain Hamilton Grant’s influential contention that philosophy of nature works to replace the question “why?” with “when?” (Grant 2015; 2020), I am suggesting that this substitution recurs in the way philosophers of nature understood the conditions of their own philosophizing, i.e., the switch from “why?” to “when?” is repeated on a metaphilosophical level. And I am particularly interested in this present essay with F. W. J. Schelling’s early future-tensing of the conditions of philosophy of nature—the projection of its possibility into the future. That is, in Schelling’s early work, I argue, philosophy of nature is something to hope for.

1 THE MESSIANIC STRUCTURE OF PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE From the moment Kant began writing of his hopes for the systematic completion of philosophy, an eschatological modality infected the self-understanding of the German Idealists. Just as, in Nietzsche’s wake, philosophical progress came to be measured by a series of prophecies proclaiming that, this time around, the end of metaphysics was finally at hand, so too philosophy in Kant’s wake occurred under the eschatological horizon of the true system. It is not by chance that Jacobi dubbed Fichte “the true Messiah of speculative reason” (Jacobi [1799] 1994, 501): the tone of German Idealism was pervasively messianic, oscillating violently between hope for a system-to-come and disappointment with those systems that had already come. Philosophers of nature fully participated in this messianic discourse. They were motivated precisely by such a hope for a systematic understanding of the natural world, but, during the late 1790s, this system kept being deferred into the future, as a revelation yet to be vouchsafed to science. This can even be gleaned from some of the titles that Schelling gave his first forays into philosophy of nature: Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur als Einleitung in das Studium dieser Wissenschaft (Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as an Introduction to the Study of this Science) (1797), Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (First Sketch of a System of Philosophy of Nature) (1799), Einleitung zu seinem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie (Introduction to the Sketch of a System of Philosophy of Nature) (1799). According to their very titles, all of the above were cast as propaedeutics and preludes to some complete expression to come. Schelling is explicit on this point in the opening to the Erster Entwurf: “The author has too lofty a 223

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notion of the magnitude of his undertaking to announce in the present treatise anything more than the first outline, let alone to erect the system itself.” He continues that the reader should postpone judgment and expect a future publication, for “all of the facts are not yet in” and she must “await my explanation” (HKA I/7, 65; [1799a] 2001, 3).1 This instruction to the impatient reader to wait expectantly for the completion of the system is a frequent one in Schelling’s corpus as a whole—a corpus permeated by a generalized messianic tendency to defer the fulfillment of philosophy, to always publish and lecture prematurely in preparatory sketches, notes and introductions. Schelling is a philosopher who forever lives in hope of his own supersession—as the Introduction to the Weltalter (Ages of the World) drafts notoriously puts it, Perhaps the one is still coming who will sing the greatest heroic poem, grasping in spirit something for which the seers of old were famous: what was, what is, what will be. But this time has not yet come. We must not misjudge our time. Heralds of this time, we do not want to pick its fruit before it is ripe, nor do we want to misjudge what is ours. It is still a time of struggle. The goal of this investigation has still not been reached. — 1856–1861, 8.206; [1815] 2000, xl This is not an isolated passage: Schelling frequently philosophizes in hope. That is, just like Hölderlin’s writing of poetry, his writing of philosophy is permeated with the affects of expectation and anticipation: he writes out of dissatisfaction with the present and belief in the future—in hope of the coming of some new mythological expression of absolute philosophy (i.e., “the greatest heroic poem”). Schelling was not, however, alone in structuring philosophy of nature messianically. In his commentaries and reviews on Schelling’s Erster Entwurf, A. C. A. Eschenmayer also takes up this call to postpone the system. On the one hand, he is frustrated with the Schellingian strategy of deferral, for, “instead of being solved,” the “ultimate problem . . . is merely put off for future work”; however, on the other hand, he is happy to likewise assert with Schelling that “it seems still too early to speak of a system of philosophy of nature” (Eschenmayer [1801b] 2020, 17, 41). Indeed, Eschenmayer explicitly channels Christian eschatological language: “The time for this is not yet at hand” ([1801a] 2020, 216).2 As Schelling will later put it resuming these early debates with Eschenmayer, “It was still impossible to think of a system of philosophy of nature”; instead, “there remained nothing else but to lead the science to the point from which it could begin to become system” and thereby present “the germs of the system . . . in outline and introduction” (HKA I/10, 97; [1801] 2020, 55). Another example of how the very science of philosophy of nature came to be couched in this discourse of hope and expectation is visible in the ways in which C. F. Kielmeyer’s name was utilized by philosophers of nature in the late 1790s. Kielmeyer may have been the instigator of “a new epoch” of philosophical research in the life sciences, according to Schelling (HKA I/6, 253); nevertheless, his role was not merely as catalyst for the beginnings of nature-philosophizing. He was also positioned as a messianic figure— the Messiah of nature-philosophical reason—whose second coming would bring about the systematic completion of the science. In the Erster Entwurf, Schelling mentions Kielmeyer among a list of philosophers capable of “providing a comparative physiology”— “a science not yet attempted,” but one which, when accomplished, will greatly further the cause of philosophy of nature (HKA I/7, 113; [1799a] 2001, 50). And it is Eschenmayer who again picks up on Schelling’s hint in this passage, portraying Kielmeyer’s future return to the academic fray as a messianic completion of the nature-philosophical

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enterprise. For Eschenmayer, the future of philosophy of nature depends on nothing less than the production of “the first lines of a physiologia comparata of both plants and animals”—and this is to be expected from Kielmeyer, who “might make known to us his results in these fields” (Eschenmayer [1801b] 2020, 44). Kielmeyer acts for Eschenmayer as that philosopher of nature for whom all others must await in expectation, since only then will the “ideas” for and “first outlines” of a system of philosophy of nature be transformed into the definitive system itself (see further Azadpour and Whistler 2020). * Hope structures the nature-philosophical expectation for the system-to-come. And yet, what I want to argue in this essay is that, even more fundamentally, hope also motivates belief in the very possibility of philosophy of nature in the first place. That is, in Schelling’s earliest articulations of the discipline in 1797, he writes in hope of being able to undertake the philosophy of nature at all. The very existence of a scientific practice that could lay claim to the name “philosophy of nature” is considered an article of hope, rather than a matter of fact. In 1797, what Schelling was expectantly awaiting was the very advent of philosophizing about nature, not merely its fulfillment. This is the claim I wish to justify later in this essay by way of a commentary on the opening to Schelling’s 1797 Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Before then, in the opening sections, I want to consider the context to this question of the ontogeny of philosophers of nature, i.e., the question of when one becomes a philosopher of nature. And I do so in terms of three “scenes” from the early development of Schellingian philosophy of nature, which, I argue, correspond to three distinct tendencies in the way eschatology and philosophizing about nature coalesce in his work. As a preliminary, I begin in the next section by suggesting some key features of nature-philosophical investigation that motivate the ontogenetic metaphilosophy I then go on to elucidate.

2 HOW DOES A PART OF NATURE REALIZE IT’S A PART OF NATURE? The English approximation of Naturphilosophie, “philosophy of nature,” makes explicit the genitive implied in the German. In so doing, it draws attention to the fact that, rather than the “of nature” functioning solely as an objective genitive, i.e., philosophy “about nature” (such that nature would be a derivative representation to be scrutinized and evaluated by a “pure” philosopher standing outside of it), the “true concept” of philosophy of nature is to be understood primarily as a subjective genitive, i.e., as nature’s philosophy or philosophy as nature.3 In other words, philosophy of nature—far from being some regional and derivative application of a pre-formed philosophical framework—is a “physics of the All” that engulfs all other philosophical domains (Grant 2006, 28). It enacts a thoroughgoing naturalization of philosophy in which ideas, moral values, freedom and even God are to be explained from the perspective of nature. Understood in this way, philosophy of nature shares some common ground with contemporary environmental philosophy. There is one problem (at least) that both attempts to think philosophically about nature encounter—that of recognition, specifically the human’s alienation from and misrecognition of nature.4 Articulated in less anthropocentric terms, the problem is one of nature’s self-alienation or lack of selfrecognition. It is a problem of the human—as a part of nature—failing to realize that it is, in fact, a part of nature. At a certain point in its evolution, nature has come to misrecognize

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itself. Schellingian philosophy of nature has much to say on the epistemic problem of nature’s self-recognition, particularly in the 1799 poem Epikurisch Glaubensbekenntniss Heinz Widerporstens (Heinz Widerporst’s Epicurean Confession of Faith).5 This poem is so significant because, unlike Schelling’s other writings on nature from the period, it gets round to talking about the human and does not break off its narration of the emergence of the natural world prematurely before consciousness has been fully derived. Uniquely, it supplies a naturalistic genealogy of consciousness. In the poem, nature is conceived as a dynamic force of productivity that surges forward incessantly (or potentiates itself) to bring about products of ever-increasing complexity. Nature as productive force (or what the poem dubs the Riesengeist): Sich gewaltig dehnt und bewegt, In toten und lebend’gen Dingen Tut nach Bewusstsein mächtig ringen; Daher der Dinge Qualität, Weil er drin quellen und treiben tät, Die Kraft, wodurch Metalle sprossen, Bäume im Frühling auf geschossen. Extend[s] and move[s] onwards with might. In what is living and even what has died It struggles towards consciousness with active strides. This explains how all things appear, For it swells up and makes them persevere; This force, through which metals sprout, Which forces trees in spring to fill out. — HKA II/6.2, 485; [1799b] 2014, lines 195–201 Consciousness is a belated product of this series of natural potentiations, which, once they have produced thought, are themselves repeated once more as thought, as an object for a subject coming to know itself in consciousness. In Schelling’s narrative, this repetition of nature in thought is immediately framed around the concept of recognition or, rather, misrecognition. Man is nature failing to recognize itself or, to put it another way, nature becomes alienated from itself in the human; it becomes isolated, turns the natural world into a foreign object and becomes terrified of itself: [The conscious subject] erwacht, sich selber erkennet kaum . . . In der eignen großen Welt allein. Fürchtet wohl in bangen Träumen, Der Riese [i.e., nature] könnt sich ermannen und bäumen Und wie der alte Gott Satorn Seine Kinder verschlingen im Zorn. Denkt nicht, dass er es selber ist, Seiner Abkunft ganz vergisst, Tut sich mit Gespenstern plagen[.] [The conscious subject] awakes to scarcely understand how he seems . . . Alone in his own vast land. Fearful that frightening dreams might foretell The giant [i.e., nature] plucking up its courage to rebel,

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And like the first god of the golden age Devouring its own children in a rage. He fails to realize that he and the giant are the same, For he has forgotten his previous names, And torments himself with ghosts of the dead[.] —ibid.; ibid., lines 219–234 As soon as it becomes conscious, nature is alienated from itself; the human subject cannot recognize herself in the natural world. Moreover, Heinz Widerporst then goes on to consider various practices by which this moment of tragic alienation can be overcome, and so nature can appear as one once more. That is, the poem recommends a number of epistemic and ethical practices by which an alienated part of nature—the modern human— can come to recognize itself as a part of nature. One such model for resisting such dualism is an outlook of anti-religious hedonism; however, for present purposes, a more pertinent model for the overcoming of nature’s self-alienation is to be found in the account Schelling goes on to give of the genesis of the philosopher out of nature. Salvation is to ultimately be found “hinauf zu des Gedankens Jugendkraft, / Wodurch Natur verjüngt sich wieder schafft” (“at last dwelling within the youthful power of thought, / Through which nature recreates itself from naught”) (ibid.; ibid., lines 246–247)—where this recreation or reconstruction of nature in thought is synonymous with the practice of philosophy of nature itself. In other words, according to Heinz Widerporst, it is by means of the philosophy of nature that the human realizes herself part of nature once again and is brought back once and for all to “die Anbetung der Materie und des Lichts” (“the worship of matter and light”) (ibid.; ibid., lines 298). An alienated part of nature realizes that it is, in fact, a part of nature by becoming a philosopher of nature. Philosophy of nature is itself the solution to the problem of alienation, because it is able to show that all consciousness (and everything else distinctively human) is derived from the natural world. The story of becoming a philosopher of nature is, then, the story of recognizing one’s immanence in and as nature, one’s belongingness to the natural world—it is the philosopher, above all, who realizes that everything forms one series and there is no place outside of the natural world, no dualism separating consciousness from nature. Everything is natural. The problem of nature’s self-alienation is thus transformed into a story of the emergence of philosophy of nature—or in other words, the central question in thinking the reconciliation of nature with itself is framed as: how to become a philosopher of nature? Becoming a philosopher of nature means overcoming nature’s self-alienation; it means philosophizing as nature. And what I am concerned about in the rest of this essay is the possibility of this philosophizing in nature and as nature. For Schelling, the philosopher must, in some sense, become nature in order to philosophize about anything at all, and this demand to take up nature’s viewpoint is named all sorts of things over the course of his development—depotentiation, intellectual intuition, abstraction, sympathy, ekstasis, Mitwissenschaft and higher empiricism—but always there is the same need for the subject to abandon the human standpoint and participate in nature’s construction of the world.

3 HOW TO BECOME A PHILOSOPHER OF NATURE What I aim to do, therefore, is to set out three temporal models from Schelling’s early philosophy of nature (1797–1801) for conceiving the philosopher in and as nature. These

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models correspond to three texts: (1) the concept of abstraction developed in Über den wahren Begriff der Naturphilosophie (On the True Concept of Philosophy of Nature) (1801); (2) the methodology of recollection proposed in Heinz Widerporst itself (1799); and (3) the ironic opening to Schelling’s first foray into philosophy of nature, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797).6 I expound them in what follows in reverse chronological order, so as to resist any latent teleological narrative of Schellingian “progress” and so highlight more effectively the ways in which the earlier models and their aporia resist and put into question the achievements of the later ones.7 What is at stake in all three texts hinges on the running together of the question of how one becomes a philosopher of nature with that of when one becomes a philosopher of nature. That is, each of these metaphilosophical “scenes” from Schelling’s early work implies a certain temporality concerning the coming-to-be of both philosophy of nature as a science and the philosopher of nature as a practitioner of that science, e.g., the consciousness described in Heinz Widerporst has always been thinking of nature without knowing it; the philosopher of Über den wahren Begriff is now in the middle of making an abstractive and, paradoxically, immersive leap into nature; and the philosopher of nature of the Ideen is yet to come into being, and so, at present, is a figure of hope, rather than of reality.

3.1 The Present of Philosophy of Nature—or, Abstraction In his essay, Über den wahren Begriff, published in January 1801, Schelling tries to articulate what distinguishes his methodology from Fichte’s; or, more precisely, he tries to defend his methodological shift into philosophizing about nature. He writes against the Fichtean: “Many people misled by the term ‘philosophy of nature’ expect transcendental deductions of natural phenomena . . . . For me, however, philosophy of nature is a selfsufficient whole and is a science fully differentiated from transcendental philosophy” (HKA I/10, 85; [1801] 2020, 46).8 He continues, “The reason that those who have grasped idealism well have not understood philosophy of nature is because it is difficult or impossible for them to detach themselves from [the methodology of Fichtean idealism]” (ibid., 92; ibid., 51). The shortcomings of the latter are clear to Schelling—and they precisely concern the problematic of alienation from nature described in the previous section. Fichte remains bound by the concerns and structures of the self, never transcending them to intuit anything more: “During the entire [Fichtean] investigation I never get out of myself ” (ibid., 88; ibid., 48). The Fichtean idealist is removed from the natural world and remains trapped in “the circle of consciousness” (ibid., 90; ibid., 49). Schelling attempts to overcome this alienation, to re-immerse the philosopher in the natural world, through a practice that he labels in this text, abstraction. Abstraction names that methodological practice that distinguishes him from Fichte, and so enables an immersive knowledge of nature (of the more-than-self): “To see the objective in its first coming-into-being is only possible by depotentiating . . . . This is only possible through abstraction” (HKA I/10, 90; [1801] 2020, 49). Abstraction makes a genuine intellectual intuition of nature possible: it carves out a metaphysical space for nature to properly show itself and appear in the philosophical text. There is an irony here: Schelling is using the practice of abstraction to distinguish himself from Fichte, when abstraction had in fact been central to Fichte’s own methodology (e.g., Fichte [1797–1798] 1994, 10–11). But nevertheless, Schelling believes he has now successfully reformed this concept, away from its Fichtean roots: for Schelling, unlike for

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Fichte, abstraction takes one towards the world. While the Fichtean idealist raises herself above the adulterated objects of ordinary experience through an act of abstraction (potentiation), in a subversion of the idealist the Schellingian philosopher transcends “beneath” the limits of consciousness into the depths of nature (depotentiation). Hence, in Über den wahren Begriff, the philosopher must reduce her intuiting down to the lower potencies, so as to become one with the unperceived, hidden natural world: she must become like nature. Abstraction is the practice that immerses the philosopher in the world. Nature in all its diversity (not merely as consciousness) only becomes visible through a process of abstractive depotentiation by which philosophy shifts away from the high potencies in which Fichte philosophized and scours the low potencies for how nature comes to be—“with this abstraction one moves from the realm of the Wissenschaftslehre into pure-theoretical philosophy” (HKA I/10, 90; Schelling [1801] 2020, 49). Abstraction, then, names for Schelling in 1801 the very practice of immersing the thinker into nature, such that philosophy can in fact be done from nature’s point of view—such that, in other words, philosophy of nature is possible and the human’s alienation from nature is overcome. And what is important for my purposes is that Schelling believes that this overcoming of transcendental idealism’s self-alienation from its embeddedness in nature has only now become possible as a result of his successful emendation of the concept of abstraction. Philosophy of nature can now take place and is now taking place for the first time. In 1801, abstraction names that practice by which a part of nature is actually in the process of now realizing that it is, in fact, a part of nature.

3.2 The Past of Philosophy of Nature—or, Recollection Two years earlier, Schelling had argued for the actuality of philosophy of nature by way of a very different model. In Heinz Widerporst and other texts from the period, the philosopher of nature operates as a Platonic anamnesis: she is the one who recognizes what has always been the case, i.e., that we already think in and as nature. The poem’s overall polemical intent is to distinguish those who use the categories of otherworldly religion to describe the world and thereby set the human apart from it (as a spiritual being alienated from nature) from those, like Heinz himself, who recognize that we have always already been a part of nature. Heinz spends the poem attacking the falsifications and ideological deceits of the spiritualist camp, in order to provoke the reader into a true recognition of her identity with nature. Hence, the poem begins, Kann es fürwahr nicht länger ertragen, Muss wieder einmal um mich schlagen, Wieder mich rühren mit allen Sinnen, So mir dachten zu zerrinnen Von den hohen überird’schen Lehren Dazu sie mich wollten mit Gewalt bekehren, Wieder werden wie unser einer, Der hat Mark, Blut, Fleisch und Gebeiner. I cannot bear it any longer, But must rise again to lash out stronger; Once more stir up all my senses Which’ve gradually lost their defenses To all those high, otherworldly screechings

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Through which they force me to accept their teachings; I must again become one of our own— Made up of just blood, flesh, marrow, bone. — HKA II/6.2, 484; [1799b] 2014, lines 1–8 Accompanying Schelling’s naturalist genealogy of consciousness is an inchoate genealogy of religion (as the perversion of consciousness). Religion is a deceitful by-product of nature’s potentiation—a ghost that does not result from a genuine moment in nature’s process of production but is an illusion engendered by lack of self-recognition. And, as already discussed above, the second half of the poem locates the remedy for such religious alienation in a philosophy of nature. It is with the emergence of the philosopher of nature that the human realizes herself part of nature once again and forever does away with the pernicious falsifications of otherworldly religion. The point is that the philosopher of nature is able to play such a role by recollecting the natural processes that led to her philosophizing about nature. The problem of nature’s self-alienation in consciousness is framed in terms of forgetting (e.g., “Completely forgetting its provenance [Seiner Abkunft ganz vergisst]”)—and so the solution, i.e., becoming a philosopher of nature, is therefore one of remembering. This is in line with the famous imperative from the Allgemeine Deduktion (Universal Deduction) of 1800: “The Platonic idea that all philosophy is remembering is true in this sense: all philosophizing consists in a remembering of the state in which we were one with nature” (HKA I/8, 363). Memory ties us to nature, and to reconstruct the past is to reconstruct ourselves as part of nature.9 We become natural by reconnecting with our past. Hence, the poem, Epikurisch Glaubensbekenntniss Heinz Widerporstens, is itself an exemplary performance of philosophy of nature by its own lights: it recollects in detail the evolution of the Stufenfolge that ends in philosophical thinking. The very task of philosophy of nature here becomes the description of the conditions of its own possibility—that is, its own past.

3.3 The Future of Philosophy of Nature—or, Hope The third model for becoming a philosopher of nature that I want to elucidate is to be found in the opening pages to the 1797 Ideen. It is here that Schelling is most explicitly concerned with the when of the coming-to-be of a philosopher of nature, and this is because he is ultimately pessimistic about it happening any time soon. Philosophy of nature cannot take place now, so it is to be deferred into the future; the opening words to the Ideen are written in hope—hope for a transformation of philosophy that will finally make possible the scientific thinking of nature. It is these words on which I focus for the rest of this essay and, through them, I try to draw out in detail the model Schelling here sets up for a philosophy of nature structured by hope.

4 THE PHILOSOPHER’S FREEDOM The claim that opens Schelling’s 1797 Ideen is exhilarating: “Was Philosophie überhaupt sei, läßt sich nicht so unmittelbar beantworten” (“What philosophy is as such cannot just be answered immediately”) (HKA I/5, 9; [1797] 1988, 9). It represents Schelling’s metaphilosophical transposition of Spinoza’s “we do not yet know what the body can do” (Spinoza Ethics III, P25): philosophers still do not know what philosophy is capable of— its capacities, powers and extension. For Schelling, the philosopher must test limits and take thinking as far as it can go.10 “Philosophie überhaupt” is not yet fully manifest either

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in the work of his contemporaries or in the canon of doctrine that Schelling inherited; it must be brought to light for the first time. Even in this first sentence, the futural aspect of Schelling’s model is already clear: the revelation of philosophy “as such” is still to be accomplished. Indeed, the futural dimension is reinforced by Schelling’s use of “unmittelbar” in this opening sentence—a word with a host of resonances. Not only does it imply that the present is insufficient, i.e., that the revelation of philosophy “as such” is a matter for the future, it also implies an epistemological framework (i.e., that what is is not immediately apparent) which, in turn, gives rise to a series of polemical interventions: 1. Like Kant in Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie (On a Recently Prominent Tone of Superiority in Philosophy), Schelling’s “unmittelbar” reads as a critique of indolent philosophers of vision who believe themselves already in possession of the whole truth without any need for conceptual labor. That is, Schelling implicitly affirms Kant’s rejection of “an alleged philosophy . . . in which one does not have to work but need only hearken and attend to the oracle within, in order to gain complete possession of all the wisdom to which philosophy aspires” (Kant [1796] 2002, 431–432). 2. Unmittelbar nevertheless also reads as a criticism of Kant too. As Schelling makes explicit in the next sentence, philosophy is not the work of analysis: “If it were so easy to agree about a definite concept of philosophy, one would only need to analyze this concept to see oneself at once in possession of a philosophy of universal validity” (HKA I/5, 9; [1797] 1988, 9). One cannot find the concept of philosophy merely by breaking down the resources the tradition has already provided; analysis is insufficient on its own. Rather, one must make something— do something—in order to know anything at all about philosophy. 3. Furthermore, the use of unmittelbar disallows any kind of philosophical innatism, whether appeals to natural light or divine implantation—and, indeed, this is an implication that Schelling will explicitly go on to draw out in the sentences that follow: “Philosophy is not something with which our mind, without its own agency, is originally and by nature imbued” (HKA I/5, 9; [1797] 1988, 9). At stake here seems to be a critique of any point of view from which the whole of philosophy is contained within its starting point (such that philosophizing would consist, in toto, in the mere analytic development of some self-evident opening principle, e.g., Reinhold’s Grundsatz). 4. The refusal to establish the concept of philosophy immediately is also implicitly a critique of phenomenological immediacy: the concept is not revealed to the intuitive gaze straightaway, pace Goethe (at least in some of his moods). Indeed, this sentiment will go on to inform Schelling’s critique of the “researcher into Nature” two paragraphs later: being absorbed in natural phenomena is insufficient. At stake in all of these models is the idea that the revelation of philosophy as such will only result from a process of mediation—it will only come to be after the fact. Philosophy as such will come to be known (foreshadowing the later Schelling) per posterius. In other words, Schelling’s mature constructivism is already present here: one must first construct philosophy, experiment with making it, before one can know what it is.

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Philosophy is to be experienced Q.E.F. (as made), i.e., only by rolling up one’s sleeves and actually doing some philosophy. And this is indeed what is intended a few sentences later: “It [the concept of philosophy or Philosophie überhaupt] is throughout a work of freedom” (HKA I/5, 9; [1797] 1988, 9). This claim is important not just because it clarifies the preceding critique by emphasizing that there are no pre-established limits to the construction of philosophy (i.e., the concept of philosophy might end up moving in all sorts of unprethinkable directions), but also because of its identification of freedom with the freedom of the philosopher to construct a concept per posterius.11 Schelling is here setting out a condition for the possibility of philosophy that verges on being an anticondition: philosophy is not determined by fixed forms or categories, but by a free power to create, by poiesis. Schelling conceives of the activity of philosophy as expansive, ameliorative: once one starts philosophizing, philosophy is never the same again. To put it another way, if the Kantian critiques could be seen as having taken away the future from philosophy (i.e., philosophy will always be what it is now determined as being), Schelling is intent on giving it back. This is the sentiment that informs the next sentence of the Introduction: “The idea of philosophy is also only the result of philosophy itself ” (HKA I/5, 9; [1797] 1988, 9). What does this conception of philosophizing mean for the Ideen as a whole? This is suggested in the second paragraph to the Introduction: “Instead, therefore, of prescribing an arbitrary concept of philosophy in general or of the philosophy of nature in particular, in order thereafter to resolve it into its parts, I shall endeavor to let such a concept itself first come into being before the eyes of the reader” (HKA I/5, 10; [1797] 1988, 9). This sentence is of course repeating much of the material from the first paragraph (as the initial “therefore” [nachher] makes clear): an idea of philosophy is to be constructed and not presupposed—and it is for the writer to make the concept of philosophy and for the reader to watch it emerge in the text. However, what seems new here is Schelling’s performative insistence that the text that follows—the Ideen in its entirety—will be that which constructs the concept of philosophy. He implicitly claims that what he is doing in the Ideen in particular—as an exercise in philosophy of nature—is for some reason the best way to “make” the concept of philosophy in present circumstances. To put it another way: Schelling seems to be claiming that even though the Ideen seems to be a book about some very specific issues in the philosophy of nature, it is in fact a book about philosophy “as such.” To read the various discussions of chemistry, forces and matter on later pages is to see “Philosophie überhaupt” appear before one’s eyes. In other words, philosophy of nature is accorded a privileged position as the exemplary means for producing the concept of philosophy as such. To watch nature come into view in the Ideen is also to watch philosophy do the same.

5 THE SENTIMENTAL PHILOSOPHER12 However, while the above might accord the practice of philosophy of nature some privilege, Schelling immediately pours cold water on any optimism this might engender about the possibility of ever so practicing it. The first main section of the Introduction, “Über die Probleme, welche eine Philosophie der Natur zu lösen hat” (“On the problems which a philosophy of nature has to solve”), starts with an account of the difficulty of becoming a philosopher of nature. It stipulates that one of the problems for philosophy of nature to solve—if not, its fundamental one—is that of making itself possible, or, more

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precisely: the fundamental problem that philosophy of nature is required to solve is how the philosopher can get access to nature in the first place. This new section begins with a description of a “researcher into nature” [Naturforscher], whom Schelling is going to contrast with the genuine philosopher of nature. This researcher is characterized by an attitude of absorption towards what is immediately and abundantly there. Nature “is there for him” and that is “enough” (HKA I/5, 10; [1797] 1988, 9). The figure of the Naturforscher seems to correspond—at least at first blush—to an experimental natural scientist, an empiricist who holds fast to nature as it appears; however, the language soon takes on a romantic turn as well, with an invocation of the Novalisian veil of Isis: these researchers “have devoted their entire lives to [nature] and have not ceased to pray to the veiled goddess” (ibid.; ibid., 10). Indeed, ultimately the researcher (like a kind of “beautiful soul”) dwells in his own, abstracted world, such that all of nature exists for him solely “in his imagination” (ibid.; ibid., 9). The Naturforscher is both an empiricist who documents what is at hand in the natural world and a visionary who approaches nature through the imagination. Schelling seems to, therefore, envisage empirical natural science and romantic immersion as convertible, and what binds both comportments together is their valorization of immediacy. Nature is what is immediate. In other words, they are uncritical or— following Schiller—naïve, pretending to maintain “an undivided sensuous unity and harmonious whole” with nature (Schiller [1796–1797] 1985, 193). And so, it is no surprise that Schelling goes on to criticize them in the following terms: the researcher— whether empiricist or mystic—is unable to ask the genuinely critical question, namely, the question of the possibility of nature. He writes, “The question of what is possible is raised only by one who believes that he does not hold the reality in his hand” (HKA I/5, 10; [1797] 1988, 9). That is, Schelling reasons as follows: when one is absorbed in something, one is indifferent to transcendental conditions, and so to attend to the transcendental is to relinquish the primacy of immediacy, to abandon naivety. The critical philosopher is born from alienation. Like Schiller himself,13 Schelling describes the genesis of the transcendental philosopher in terms of a loss of immediacy, a distancing from what the Naturforscher is immersed in. The philosopher is a tragically sentimental figure. In this vein, the next paragraph begins to set out a fairly standard Schillerian picture— the sort dramatized in Hölderlin’s Hyperion, for example—in which origins are defined in terms of an impossible naïve position of immediate abundance, contentment and serenity. Schelling writes, “Man was still at one with himself and the world about him” (HKA I/5, 10; [1797] 1988, 10). This is a state of harmonious unity with nature, what Schelling calls, a “(philosophical) state of nature” (ibid.; ibid.), irrevocably lost to the transcendental philosopher. That is, more generally, under the title, “Über die Probleme, welche eine Philosophie der Natur zu lösen hat,” Schelling tells a story about how philosophers came to be, i.e., the ontogenesis of transcendental philosophers—and they came to be out of alienation from naïve immersion in nature. Only by losing nature is “the question of what is possible” raised (ibid.; ibid., 9); only by losing nature does consciousness become critical. This, then, is one of the problems—and presumably the most urgent one—that philosophy of nature has to solve: how to overcome the alienation of nature that the very possibility of philosophy is premised on, how bring about that return to immersion in nature for the philosopher (so as to properly philosophize in and as nature). In other words, the philosopher needs to learn how to enjoy nature again.14 So, what is at stake in these opening pages of the Ideen—framed as one of the fundamental problems of philosophy of nature—is what makes a philosopher. And the

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problem is this: if freedom to construct is what makes philosophy possible and freedom to construct is itself only made possible by a loss of nature, how to philosophize about nature? Or, to be blunt: Schelling opens the Ideen with the question of how it is at all possible to write the Ideen, how it is possible to do precisely what he is claiming to be doing in that very book. The Ideen opens by putting itself, as well as Schelling’s own status as a philosopher of nature, into question.

6 CONCLUSIONS: WHAT WILL PHILOSOPHY BECOME? Hence, there is a tragic irony to Schelling’s endeavors in the Ideen. He is investigating the conditions of possibility of that which resists transcendental investigation. Schelling, as a philosopher, is stuck outside the very comportment towards nature that has traditionally made “research into nature” possible. There is a choice: either one researches into nature and so is indifferent to what makes nature possible, or one engages in critical philosophy but is alienated from the natural realm. It strikes me that there is a concession to Fichte here. From the perspective of the transcendental philosopher, Schelling seems to be admitting that philosophy of nature is a problematic undertaking—why worry about philosophy of nature when nature is that phenomenon which resists the transcendental gaze? Philosophy of nature becomes, on this view, a surd or remainder. However, of course, Schelling does not rest satisfied with such an implicit identification of “Philosophie überhaupt” with the search for conditions of possibility: it is clear from the very first words of the Introduction to the Ideen that he is intent on radically opening up the question of what philosophy is and can be. If philosophy is merely to be identified with critical philosophy—i.e., with the search for conditions of possibility—then the whole enterprise of the Ideen (as an exercise in philosophy of nature) seems to fall flat. For the Ideen to work and for philosophy of nature to be possible, then what philosophy is cannot be determined in a Fichteo-Kantian way; instead, in a Schillerian vein, the philosopher must “seek lost nature” (Schiller [1796–1797] 1985, 191). And yet, it still remains true that, despite all of this, at present philosophy is still preliminarily understood by Schelling in terms of the Fichteo-Kantian model: “How a world outside us, how a nature and with it experience, is possible—these are questions for which we have philosophy to thank” (HKA I/5, 10; Schelling [1797] 1988, 10). In these opening pages of the 1797 text (prior to the experiment that will reveal per posterius what philosophy can in fact be), all Schelling can do is gesture towards an impossible future. Schelling’s Introduction inhabits a benighted, tragic present.15 In general, any conclusions drawn about the ontogenesis of the philosopher of nature from these opening pages will be pessimistic. In 1797, Schelling’s is a voice crying out in the wilderness: all that he can practise is a philosophy determined entirely as transcendental, but, all the same, he is adamant that “what philosophy is as such cannot just be answered immediately.” The subject who is set on becoming a philosopher of nature is figured as tragic, vainly trying to do the impossible—to think as nature. For the Schelling of 1797, rather unfortunately, the human—as a part of nature—cannot (yet) properly recognize itself as a part of nature. And yet. . . Schelling does still leave open the possibility of a philosophy “to come” radically different from the present—a philosophy based on a nonalienated form of freedom. The Introduction to the Ideen is written in the hope of such an immersion back into nature, in the hope of a philosopher able to be absorbed by it and enjoy it, while at the same time remaining a philosopher.

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This is the hope for a philosopher of nature with which Schelling begins in 1797. It is the hope for a philosopher who will manage to take up both an immediate and mediated relation to nature, who will be able to be both naïve and sentimental at the same time, like “the genius” invoked in the closing pages of Schiller’s Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry). Schiller, for this part, identifies this naïvesentimental ideal with the figure of J. W. Goethe, “a poet in whom nature functions more faithfully and purely than any other, and who, among modern poets, is perhaps least removed from the sensuous truth of things” (Schiller [1796–1797] 1985, 206). Goethe takes up the impossible position of satisfying the demands of philosophical reflection and naïve immersion. And, for this reason, it is perhaps unsurprising (even if coincidental) that, after the publication of the Ideen, Schellingian philosophy of nature was to be renewed under Goethe’s tutelage. During 1799, Schelling often worked in daily collaboration with Goethe to the extent of being dubbed “Goethe’s protégé.”16 As Schelling himself wrote of this time together: “I was with [Goethe] for a long time every day, and had to read aloud my work on philosophy of nature and explain it to him. What a fluorescence of ideas these conversations have produced for me, you can well imagine” (Schelling 1968–1975, I.176–177; translated in Richards 2002, 464. See also Nassar 2010, 304–321). Here—perhaps—we can glimpse Schelling’s earlier messianic hope for philosophy of nature realized under a Goethean (rather than Fichtean) conception of Philosophie überhaupt.

NOTES 1.

References to Schelling are given to the Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe [HKA] or Schelling 1968–1975 and then to the English translation, where one is used. The importance of this passage is evidenced by Schelling’s return to it in 1801 where he quotes from it at length in Über den wahren Begriff der Naturphilosophie (On the True Concept of Philosophy of Nature) (HKA I/10, 97; Schelling [1801] 2020, 54).

2.

Eschenmayer continues, “It appears to [me] still too early to be able to reach a definite judgment on [Schelling’s Erster Entwurf] . . . . All the ideas that the author lays out for us still exist merely in outline. If the author will now provide us with the system itself, we will seemingly possess a full revision of his nature-philosophical concepts” ([1801a] 2020, 223).

3.

The very term “philosophy of nature” thus exemplifies the structure identified in Hass’ definition of “cogenetivity”: “The genitive force is mutual, co-extensive. In the cogenitive the preposition (‘of ’) becomes proposition (‘is’)”—that is, philosophy’s nature is nature’s philosophy (Hass 2014, 44).

4.

For a summary, see Hailwood 2015. For other ways in which Schellingian philosophy of nature speaks to contemporary environmental philosophy, see, for example, Nassar 2020.

5.

Indeed, even the very problem of whether nature is the appropriate kind of “thing” to recognize and be recognized is something with which Schelling can help greatly, i.e., by moving the debate away from the Hegelian model of mutual recognition.

6.

These are, of course, not the only models that Schelling elucidates for the becoming-nature of the philosopher, even during this short period of time; however, they provide a useful tripartite schema from which to begin the analysis.

7.

Teleological readings of Schelling’s trajectory have been common since (and, I am sure, before) Paul Tillich’s 1912 dissertation identified in “Schelling II” (the post-1809 writings)

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the fulfillment of Schellingianism which “Schelling I” (the early writings) had been trying and failing to articulate (Tillich 1974, 24). Such a reading goes beyond a mere intellectual narrative to the extent it operates on a logic of supersession that locates “real” or “proper” Schellingianism at a postulated endpoint. One virtue of resisting this (still popular) interpretive strategy is that of disrupting any tendency to treat the earlier publications as merely points of transition, solely stations on the way to something more interesting. 8.

I have dealt with the nature-philosophical practice of abstraction at length elsewhere (see Berger and Whistler 2020, Chapter Five, as well as Whistler 2017).

9.

This conception of construction as memory will of course resurface very visibly in Schelling’s writings after 1809.

10. This is Schelling at his most non-Kantian: the present task for the philosopher is precisely not critique—it is not the setting of limits to philosophical activity based on what the tradition has accomplished. In what follows, it will quickly become apparent that part of what is at stake in the Ideen is Schelling’s decided ambivalence towards the transcendental. 11. Hence, whenever one encounters an appeal to “freedom” in the Introduction to the Ideen, one needs to bear in mind (as in so many passages in Schelling’s work) its metaphilosophical resonance, i.e., the freedom to philosophically construct, the freedom to make philosophy (on this point, see further Whistler 2020). 12. As this subtitle suggests, relatively implicit in what follows is a contention that the Schillerian categorical framework of Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry), published around 18 months before the appearance of Schelling’s work, helps make sense of it. There is of course a long scholarly tradition of using these categories to understand the products of German Idealism culminating most famously in Hans Freier’s Die Rückkehr der Götter (The Return of the Gods) (1976). 13. That is, Schiller explicitly aligns the sentimental poet with the idealist, framing the competing demands of immediacy and mediacy in terms of “experience” versus “reason” ([1796–1797] 1985, 230). To lose an immediate relation with nature is to become philosophical: “the mind cannot tolerate any impression without at once observing its own activity and reflection” (ibid., 202). That is, Schiller here too provides a naturalistic account of the genesis of philosophizing. Moreover, just as Schelling will (later in the Introduction) frame the birth of the philosophical attitude as a kind of “sickness” (HKA I/5, 14; [1797] 1988, 12), for Schiller philosophy comes to be when “our feeling for nature . . . is like the feeling of an invalid for health” ([1796–1797] 1985, 189). 14. i.e., loss of nature leads to freedom and freedom is essentially bound up with the ability to philosophize, to ask the question of the conditions of possibility of experience. And, once again, this should not surprise us: as the opening to the Introduction had already made abundantly clear, philosophizing is made possible by the freedom to construct and such freedom is not granted immediately. Schelling reaffirms this point once more at this stage in his narrative: “There are no native sons of freedom” (HKA I/5, 10; [1797] 1988, 10)—that is, the capacity to philosophize is given to no one immediately; philosophy is a result, not a beginning. 15. Something of a vicious cycle is described in these paragraphs. Schelling tells the story of how philosophy comes to be out of a cission from nature that is made necessary because of an inner drive to freedom. This loss is what makes philosophy of nature possible (as philosophy), but it is what makes it impossible (as research into nature). Moreover, this very story of how philosophy tragically comes to be has a strange status, because it is told

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by a philosopher. It describes the conditions of possibility of the very philosophizing going on in the Ideen. So, this is a story about how the Ideen came to be, but it is one that by the very fact such a story is true manifestly exhibits the implausibility of the Ideen as an exercise in philosophy of nature. The Ideen came to be through the loss of nature, such that its descriptions of nature must always fail. The opening pages problematize the very status of the book that follows; they recount their own origins, providing a genetic definition of themselves (rather like the Phänomenologie des Geistes [Phenomenology of Spirit] will do in a more extended way); but, in so doing (and unlike the Phänomenologie), this very writing shows itself to be impossible, even fictional. The text here writes out its own impossibility. Or, perhaps even (referencing Schelling’s later investigations into the philosophy of mythology), one could claim that philosophy is here constituted as the practice of describing what it cannot constitutionally describe. 16. The expression is Paulus’, quoted in Schelling 1968–1975, II.148.

REFERENCES Azadpour, Lydia and Daniel Whistler (2020), “Editors’ Introduction,” in Kielmeyer and the Organic World: Texts and Interpretations, 1–10, London: Bloomsbury. Berger, Benjamin and Daniel Whistler (2020), The Schelling-Eschenmayer Controversy, 1801, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Eschenmayer, Adam Karl August von ([1801a] 2020), “Review of F. W. J. Schelling’s First Outline and Introduction to the Outline,” transl. Judith Kahl and Daniel Whistler, in Benjamin Berger and Daniel Whistler, (eds.), The Schelling-Eschenmayer Controversy, 1801, 215–224, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Eschenmayer, Adam Karl August von ([1801b] 2020), “Spontaneity = World Soul, or the Highest Principle of Philosophy of Nature,” transl. Judith Kahl and Daniel Whistler, in Benjamin Berger and Daniel Whistler, (eds.), The Schelling-Eschenmayer Controversy, 1801, 17–45, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb ([1797–1798] 1994), “An Attempt at a New Presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre (1797/98),” transl. Daniel Breazeale, in Daniel Breazeale, (ed.), Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre, 1–118, Indianapolis: Hackett. Freier, Hans (1976), Die Rückkehr der Götter, Frankfurt: Metzler. Grant, Iain Hamilton (2006), Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, London: Continuum. Grant, Iain Hamilton (2015), “Everything is Primal Germ or Nothing Is: The Deep Field Logic of Nature,” Symposium, 19 (1): 106–124. Grant, Iain Hamilton (2020), “Recapitulation All the Way Down? Philosophical Ontogeny in Kielmeyer and Schelling,” in Lydia Azadpour and Daniel Whistler, (eds.), Kielmeyer and the Organic World: Texts and Interpretations, 133–148, London: Bloomsbury. Hass, Andrew W. (2014), Hegel and the Art of Negation, London: Tauris. Hailwood, Simon (2015), Alienation and Nature in Environmental Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich ([1799] 1994), “Jacobi to Fichte (1799),” transl. George di Giovanni, in George di Giovanni, (ed.), Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, 497–536, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Kant, Immanuel ([1796] 2002), “On a Recently Prominent Tone of Superiority in Philosophy (1796),” in Henry Allison et al., (ed. and transl.), Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, 425–446, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Nassar, Dalia (2010), “From a Philosophy of Self to a Philosophy of Nature: Goethe and the Development of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 92 (3): 304–321. Nassar, Dalia (2020), “An ‘Ethics for the Transition’: Schelling’s Critique of Negative Philosophy and its Significance for Environmental Thought,” in G. Anthony Bruno, (ed.), Schelling’s Philosophy: Freedom, Nature and Systematicity, 231–248, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richards, Robert J. (2002), The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph ([1797] 1988), Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, transl. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph ([1799a] 2001), First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, transl. Keith R. Peterson, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph ([1799b] 2014), “Two Poems: Heinz Widerporst’s Epicurean Confession of Faith and The Heavenly Image,” transl. Judith Kahl and Daniel Whistler, Clio 43 (2): 195–201. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph ([1801] 2020), “On the True Concept of Philosophy of Nature,” transl. Judith Kahl and Daniel Whistler, in Benjamin Berger and Daniel Whistler, The Schelling–Eschenmayer Controversy, 1801, 46–64, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph ([1815] 2000), The Ages of the World (Third Draft), transl. Jason M. Wirth, Albany: SUNY. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (1856–1861), Werke, Stuttgart: Cotta. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (1968–1975), Briefe und Dokumente, ed. Horst Fuhrmans, Bonn: Bouvier. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (2009), Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe [HKA], Manfred Durner et al., (eds.), Stuttgart: frommann-holzboog. Schiller, Friedrich ([1796–1797] 1985), On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, transl. J. A. Elias, in H. B. Nisbet, (ed.), German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism, 177–232, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spinoza, Benedict (2003), Collected Works, transl. S. Shirley, Indianapolis: Hackett. Tillich, Paul (1974), Mysticism and Guilt-Consciousness in Schelling’s Philosophical Development, transl. Victor Nuovo, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Whistler, Daniel (2017), “Abstraction and Utopia in Early German Idealism,” Russian Journal of Philosophy and Humanities, 2 (2): 3–22. Whistler, Daniel (2020), “The Schlegelian Context to Schelling’s Account of Freedom,” in Thomas Buchheim et al., (eds.), Schellings Theorie der menschlichen Freiheit in der Freiheitsschrift von 1809, 71–89, Berlin: De Gruyter.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Knowledge, Faith, and Ambiguity Hope in the Work of Novalis and Karoline von Günderrode ANNA EZEKIEL (University of York, UK and Parami University, Myanmar)

This chapter considers ideas about hope in the work of two Romantic writers who have historically been notorious for their morbid outlooks. Romanticism has often been associated with sickliness, suicide, and yearning for death, and the lives and writings of Novalis (1772–1801) and Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806) contributed to this reputation. Both died young: Novalis of tuberculosis aged 29, and Günderrode by suicide aged 26. Both left writings that lend themselves to interpretation as death-desiring, deathoriented, even suicidal: famously, Novalis’ Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night), written following a vision on the grave of his fiancée Sophie von Kuhn, includes a section titled “Longing for Death,” while Günderrode published several pieces expressing desire for reunion with a lover after death or featuring suicidal protagonists. This, as Nicholas Saul puts it, can make their deaths seem “the logical consequence of their Romantic convictions and an almost superfluous proof of the dangerous, allegedly inherent affinity of Romanticism and death” (Saul 2006, 581). Both Novalis and Günderrode had friends and followers who worked to construct a mythos of mysticism, otherworldliness, and morbidity around their lives and works. Novalis’ friend Ludwig Tieck described Novalis as having a “pious longing for death” after Sophie’s death, which “planted the kernel of death in him” (Novalis 1960–1975 [hereafter “NS”], 4:554). Letters between Günderrode’s friends immediately following her death already described her character and suicide in mystifying, fatalistic terms (Wolf [1979] 1997, 295–297). Her friend Bettina Brentano-von Arnim, in particular, took steps to make sure the story was well known, writing a “Report on Günderrode’s Suicide” for Goethe’s mother, Katharina Elisabeth Goethe (Brentano-von Arnim [1808/1839] 1990) and describing the events in person to Goethe in 1810 (Wolf [1979] 1997, 53). Goethe, who was instrumental in establishing the identification of Romanticism with sickness and death, visited the site of Günderrode’s suicide in 1814, writing: “They showed me the place on the Rhine, in a willow thicket, where Miss Günderrode took her life. The narration of this catastrophe on the very site, by people who were nearby and had taken part in it, gave me that unpleasant feeling that a tragic location always arouses” (cited in Wolf [1979] 1997, 53–54; my translation). 239

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Despite these reputations, in Novalis’ case more recent scholarship recognizes the optimism in his work, especially the importance of his revaluation of death to provide grounds for hope in a world full of suffering and loss (e.g., Beiser 2021; Saul 2006). In Günderrode’s case, too, scholarship has begun to explore the ways that Günderrode reimagined death, as well as her responses to philosophical debates on identity, metaphysics, politics, aesthetics, and friendship (e.g., Battersby 1995; Nassar 2021). Apart from fascination in uncovering ideas about hope in work that overtly valorizes death, there are further reasons for considering Novalis and Günderrode together. Both are “philosophical poets” (Licher 1996, 398) in the Romantic tradition, steeped in the thought of Kant and Fichte. Günderrode was an avid reader of Novalis: she wrote two poems explicitly responding to his work (Günderrode 1990–1991 [hereafter “SW”], 1:382, 391) and excerpted his writings in her notebooks. His influence is evident in her writings; however, she departed from his thought in significant ways. This paper draws out some of these differences by placing their work alongside each other, in doing so showing how they each responded to Kant’s framing of the question of hope in relation to the limitations of reason. Novalis and Günderrode provide grounds for a number of different kinds of hope. The first section of this chapter briefly sketches the most obvious of these: the hope for union with loved ones after death. In this section, I also explain Günderrode’s unique metaphysics, which underlies her understanding of life, death, and love, and entails significant differences from Novalis in most areas of her thought. Section 2 explores what I am calling “epistemological hope”: the hope for knowledge or awareness of things beyond the limitations of reason. Section 3 considers Günderrode’s “moral hope,” that is, her ethical thought, which she contrasts to that of Kant. Section 4 considers “ontological hope”: the hope for improvement in the world as a whole, including the nonhuman world. Finally, section 5, on “political hope,” examines Günderrode’s and Novalis’ hopes for the betterment of society. In both cases, these are closely connected to their ontological hopes. Novalis famously advocated a “raising,” “Romanticization” or “cultivation” (Bildung) of society and nature, which would be effected by human beings. For Günderrode, by contrast, this kind of improvement is largely beyond human control (although human beings can contribute to it), leaving us in a state of hopeful ambiguity regarding the possibility of the eventual realization of an “immortal ideal” for the earth and the establishment of ideal human communities.

1 HOPE FOR UNION WITH LOVED ONES AFTER DEATH For Novalis and Günderrode, the question of whether we can expect to one day be reunited with our loved ones was concrete and urgent. Both experienced considerable loss: in short succession, Novalis lost his fiancée and two of his younger brothers (his detailed study of Kant stems from this period), while Günderrode’s father died when she was five years old and she was predeceased by three younger sisters, two of whom she nursed through their fatal illnesses. Her letters show her despair during these events and her search for consolation in philosophy. It is not surprising, therefore, that both Novalis and Günderrode articulated longing for union with loved ones after death. In the Hymns, Novalis presents a consoling vision of unity with an infinite night, mediated by a dead lover: “tender beloved—sweet sun of the night,—now I wake—for I am yours and mine—you heralded the living night to me . . . feed on my body with spiritual fervor so I mix myself airily, more deeply with you, and then the wedding night

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lasts forever” (NS 1:133; see also 135; translations of Novalis’ writings are my own). This imagery follows Christian traditions that understand immortality, not as the survival of the individual in paradise, but as posthumous union with the divine. Novalis imagines this as a merging in which selfhood—one’s own and that of one’s loved ones—is dissolved in a divine whole, sometimes depicted as an ocean: Whose heart does not . . . skip delightedly, when . . . that powerful feeling, for which speech has no other name than love and lust, expands in him, like a powerful, alldissolving mist, and he sinks quivering with sweet fear in the dark, alluring womb of nature, the poor personality is consumed in the plunging waves of delight, and nothing remains but a burning point of immeasurable procreativity, a swallowing eddy in the great ocean! — NS 1:104 Novalis’ understanding of death as union with loved ones through dissolution together in an infinite whole inverts the value of individuality and consciousness, on the one hand, and the loss of these, on the other (NS 1:88–89; NS 2:416–418). For Novalis, death is the end of the self as an individual, conscious being, but that self is part of a greater whole and continues to exist as part of the latter. Thus, he writes: “Death is a self-overcoming” (NS 2:414 #11). Günderrode also uses oceanic imagery to present a longed-for union with lovers (or sometimes other individual beings in general; see SW 1:52) and the divine after death. For instance, in “Die Pilger” (The Pilgrims) she uses a traditional Christian metaphor of the pilgrim, representing the life of the human being, traveling back to the sea, representing God (SW 1:106–108). Her poem “Piedro” also uses images of the ocean to portray immersion in an absolute whole, in this case imagined as a compensatory consummation of union with a dead lover (SW 1:103–105). Scholars have tended to assume that Günderrode’s images of merging with the ocean represent annihilation and, therefore, that she longs for death, conceived as oblivion (e.g., Dormann 2004, 204; Heimerl 2003, 408; Licher 1996, 287). However, as I have argued elsewhere (Ezekiel 2016b), unlike Novalis, Günderrode maintains that we continue to exist after death as experiencing selves, if not as individuals in the sense that we usually see ourselves. However, this only becomes evident when Günderrode’s ideas about death are considered in light of her metaphysics. The clearest exposition of Günderrode’s metaphysics is found in an epistolary exchange titled “Briefe zweier Freunde” (Letters of Two Friends) and the unpublished essay “Idee der Erde” (Idea of the Earth). The latter forms part of Günderrode’s preparatory work for the “Letters” and in places the two texts use identical wording. In these pieces, Günderrode explains that every entity in the world is composed of indestructible “elements” (Elemente), which temporarily combine to form objects. At death (or the destruction of inanimate objects), the elements are decomposed, return to the whole, and become available for recombination in new forms: [L]ife is only the product of the deepest contact and attraction of the elements; I know that all its blossoms and leaves, which we call thoughts and sensations, must wither when that contact is dissolved, and that individual life is given up to the law of mortality. But as certain as this is to me, just as much is something else beyond all doubt for me: the immortality of life in the whole. For this whole is just life, it surges up and down in its parts—the elements—and whatever has returned to it through

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dissolution (which we sometimes call death) mingles with it according to laws of affinity, i.e., the similar mingles with what is similar to it. — Günderrode forthcoming Thus, individuals obtain a kind of immortality through their continued existence as part of the whole: “the particular survives immortally in the All” (ibid.). As I explain in section 2, Günderrode indicates that, despite the “withering” of “thoughts and sensations,” these immortal elements are not just physical atoms or forces but possess a degree of awareness. Above, Günderrode described the mechanism by which the elements are joined together to form new entities as following “laws of affinity.” She expands on this claim elsewhere, explaining the force that pulls elements together as operating through harmony, attraction, or love (SW 1:33–34, 325). In “Letters,” the character known as the Friend tells their correspondent, Eusebio,1 that their hopes are pinned on the possibility of this kind of union after death: [The idea] that you could be lost to me was the most painful of thoughts. I said2 that your I and mine should be dissolved in the ancient primordial matter of the world; then I consoled myself that our befriended elements, obeying the laws of attraction, would find each other even in infinite space and join with each other. So hope and doubt surged up and down in my soul. — Günderrode forthcoming Rather than equating death with oblivion, Günderrode identifies her metaphysical model and the place of individual entities within it with an idea of reincarnation. The Friend writes that “the idea of the Indians of the transmigration of souls corresponds to this opinion” (Günderrode forthcoming). In another work, “Geschichte eines Braminen” (Story of a Brahmin), a Brahmin explains to the narrator how the forces wander through all forms until they develop consciousness and thought in human beings; how from human beings on an infinite series of migrations leading to ever higher perfection awaits souls; how eventually, through mysterious ways, they will all unite with the primal force from which they emanated and will become one with it, and still at the same time remain themselves, and thus unite the divinity and universality of the creator with the individuality of the creature. — Günderrode forthcoming I revisit this idea of a “primal force” in section 4. But first, let us examine in more detail how Günderrode conceptualized the possibility of a posthumous union with loved ones of which we are aware. This reveals a difference in how Novalis and Günderrode responded to Kant’s limitation of human cognition to phenomena—and its implications for both subjectivity and our relationship to the rest of the world.

2 EPISTEMOLOGICAL HOPE Kant’s Copernican revolution, which limited human cognition to knowledge of phenomena, also ruled out direct knowledge of the self, or subject, through internal reflection. Instead, Kant presents us with the transcendental unity of apperception: “the ‘I’ as an ‘empty form’ (a pure logical necessity . . .) that ‘accompanies my representations,’ ” as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy describe it ([1978] 1988, 30). In response to this elimination of a substantive self, Novalis and Günderrode, like other of

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Kant’s successors, imagined non-cognitive possibilities for knowledge of both the subject and the noumenal world in general. Both accepted the Kantian limitation of discursive, conceptual knowledge to a realm of appearances, but sought to overcome this limitation through feeling, intuition, and other practices. Much has been written about Novalis’ efforts to complement the discursive reason of Kantian cognition, “scholasticism,” or science with other forms of knowledge (e.g., Kneller 2021, 32; Millán-Zaibert 2008; Nassar 2013, 44f.). Rather than describing this again here, in this section I provide an exposition of Günderrode’s thought that highlights its differences to Novalis’ account. Writing to a friend in 1801, Günderrode responds to the Kantian rejection of knowledge of the thing-in-itself, including the subject, expressing her hope that this will one day change: [S]ometimes I have no opinion of myself at all, my self-observations are so fluctuating. In general it’s totally incomprehensible to me that we have no consciousness other than perception of effects, never of causes. All other knowledge seems to me . . . not worthy of knowledge, as long as I don’t know the cause of the knowledge, my faculty of knowledge. To me, this ignorance is the most unbearable lack, the greatest contradiction. And I think if we really ever enter the borders of a second life, then one of our first inner phenomena would have to be that our consciousness would grow larger and clearer; for it would be unbearable to drag this limitation into a second life. — Günderrode forthcoming Much of Günderrode’s work attempts to conceptualize and convey the possibility of a consciousness that is “larger and clearer” than that which attends individuated human existence. For example, her prose poem “Ein apokaliptisches Fragment” (An Apocalyptic Fragment) describes an experience of awareness of the world beyond the self, as the self is merged with that world: “I was released from the narrow bounds of my being, and no more a single drop; I was given again to everything, and everything belonged to me. I thought, and felt, surged in the ocean, gleamed in the sun, circled with the stars; I felt myself in everything, and enjoyed everything in me” (Günderrode forthcoming). This poetic passage (and parallel passages elsewhere in Günderrode’s writing; see, e.g., SW 1:439) needs explication. Is Günderrode describing a kind of awareness that we can experience while alive, or something that occurs after death? I suggest she is doing both, i.e., that she presents two possible forms of non-cognitive knowledge or, rather, awareness.3 The first involves hints or intimations of the world beyond the limitations of human reason. This is similar to the glimpses of such a world described by Novalis, for example in his reference to sleep, opium dreams, and the vision on the grave of his beloved in Hymns (NS 1:133–134). As with Novalis, this form of expanded knowledge or intimation is possible while we are alive. Günderrode provides literary descriptions of this form of knowledge in many pieces, including “An Apocalyptic Fragment” and “Story of a Brahmin,” but she provides a clearer account in her dialogue “Die Manen” (The Manes). Here, she describes direct, immediate knowledge of something behind everyday phenomena through a faculty she calls “inner sense,” the “spiritual eye,” and “the deepest and finest organ of the soul.” She writes: “Forces that are only spiritual cannot be revealed to our outer senses; they do not work upon us through our eyes and ears, but through the only organ by which a connection with them is possible: through the inner sense—on this they work immediately” (Günderrode forthcoming).

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This model is clearly influenced by Hemsterhuis’ idea of the “moral organ,” and likely also by Schleiermacher and others.4 However, there are also indications that Günderrode is here responding to Kant’s dismissive view of certain accounts of inner sense, especially that of Swedenborg. Swedenborg’s “inner sense” is not the same as the “inner sense” of the Critique of Pure Reason, which Kant defines as “inner intuition” or “the intuiting we do of ourselves and of our inner state” (Kant [1781/1787] 1996, A33/ B49–50; see also A48–49/B66–72, A107). In his 1766 Träume eines Geistersehers (Dreams of a Spirit-Seer), Kant specifically addresses Swedenborg’s conception of the inner sense as a means of communicating with spirits.5 Kant’s description of Swedenborg’s claims in this piece includes numerous points that correspond with points in “The Manes.” These include the possibility of an “immediate inner connection” with the spirit world; the idea that everyone has the capacity to connect with the spirit world but only those whose inward “spiritual sense” has awakened can do so; the statement that individuals connect with the spirits of those with whom they have something in common; the claim that this connection endures through death; and the possibility of an effect by spirits— including spirits of the dead—on the living. Unfortunately, there is not space here for a more detailed account of these similarities. However, the number of correspondences, and Günderrode’s framing of her account as a response to “doubters and vilifiers” of the inner sense, suggest that Günderrode may have read Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and have been concerned to the refute the kind of objections to these ideas that emerge in Kant’s text. The second form of non-cognitive knowledge that Günderrode offers is something that occurs after death. It is in relation to this latter form of knowledge that Günderrode’s account diverges sharply from that of Novalis. This is because Günderrode’s conceptualization of postmortem forms of experience is supported by her unique and strange metaphysics, which present death as a radical transformation of the self. On Günderrode’s model, not only are the “elements” that constitute us as individuals recycled after our death, but these elements continue to carry aspects of our consciousness and our selfhood. Interestingly, this entails that our consciousness and self are not indivisible unities but can be divided up and conjoined with the selves and consciousnesses of others. This interpretation of a second form of non-cognitive knowledge in Günderrode is supported by works, such as “An Apocalyptic Fragment” and “Ein Traum” (A Dream), in which Günderrode describes awareness after death. In these pieces, she uses terminology that distinguishes this kind of awareness from discursive forms of cognition, i.e., the limited form of human cognition that she complains about in relation to Kant’s work. In “An Apocalyptic Fragment” the narrator describes a “numbing” that occurs upon death, followed by “muffled” and “tangled” experiences characterized by the absence of memory (SW 1:53). In “A Dream,” the sleeping “spirits of antiquity” are described as “stupefied” and hearing only a “confused roaring” of the events of the world (SW 1:439). As portrayed by Günderrode, these non-conscious forms of awareness are experienced by a self that is broader than, and very different to, the individuated human being. This means that, while Günderrode accepts the Kantian limitation of human cognition, she does not accept that we will be subject to this limitation forever. Other forms of existence are possible and, with them, other forms of knowledge and experience. This is quite different than for Novalis, whose hoped-for union with others after death does not include awareness (see NS 2:104 #1; Millán-Zaibert 2008; section 1, above).

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3 MORAL HOPE Günderrode’s acknowledgement of the cognitive limits of human beings and her claims for the possibility of non-cognitive awareness has implications for her moral thought. In explicit contrast to Kant’s moral philosophy, she strongly distinguishes our moral obligations to other human beings from our relationship to the divine, insisting on a firm division between religion and morality. The clearest account of Günderrode’s moral thought is found in “Story of a Brahmin,” which describes the Bildung of Almor, a man of mixed European and Asian heritage. As a child, Almor participates in religious ceremonies but has no inward relationship to religion; he subsequently travels to Europe to take up a life of business, enlivened with frivolous pleasures (SW 1:303–304). After some years, Almor experiences a moral awakening (SW 1:304–305). However, he eventually becomes disillusioned with morality and travels to Persia, where he lives as a hermit. Here, he learns to listen to his “inner voice,” which reveals to him the presence of something divine running through the world we experience: he describes this as “an infinite force, an eternal life, that is everything that is, that was, and will become” (Günderrode forthcoming). Importantly, this period of solitary contemplation is only a further stage in Almor’s spiritual development. The final stage occurs when he travels to India and is instructed by a Brahmin regarding the divine nature of this “infinite force,” and regarding the “community [that] exists between human beings in whom the inner sense has arisen and the world-spirit” (Günderrode forthcoming). “Story of a Brahmin” ends with Almor settled happily in a tiny community comprising himself, the Brahmin’s daughter, and (interestingly) the spirit of the now-deceased Brahmin. Günderrode specifically equates Almor’s moral awakening (a relatively early stage in Almor’s development) with Kant’s moral thought. Almor narrates how, at this point in his life: The moral world . . . was unveiled to me: I saw a community of spirits, a realm of effect and countereffect, an invisible harmony, a purpose to human striving, and a true good. I was lost to my professional work . . . . For before I determined an area in which to be active, I wanted to know: who was I? what should I be? what position befitted me? and which laws ruled in the realm whose citizen I wanted to be? — Günderrode forthcoming Almor continues: “I found that wisdom and virtue, the objects of my highest striving, could be attained by mastering sensuality [and] the passions, and by the exercise of my forces in noble and useful activity. If I considered myself a citizen of the moral realm, I found myself obliged to promote its welfare just like my own” (ibid.). Lastly, Almor describes how he “stepped . . . into the free activity of a thinking being that sets its own purpose for its conduct; out of limited personal self-interest into the great fraternity of all human beings for the good of all. The merely mechanical and animal life that I had escaped lay behind me like a musty dungeon” (ibid.). The terminology identifies the above account of Almor’s moral period with Kantian moral philosophy. Furthermore, Almor’s motivation for moving on from this orientation to life is the conflict it engenders between reason and nature, or between different parts of Almor’s personality (SW 1:305–306)—a problem Kant’s contemporaries complained about in relation to his moral thought (e.g., Schiller [1793] 2005, 152).

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This discovery motivates Almor’s withdrawal from society for a period of selfreflection. This is how he comes to realize that his relationship with other human beings is not the most important factor in human existence: “I discovered aptitutes within me that these finite relations would no longer satisfy” (Günderrode forthcoming). Almor determines that human beings can live in three ways, corresponding to three aspects of their nature: animal (satisfaction of physical needs and desires), human (relationships with other human beings, including morality), and spiritual (religion).6 He explains: Just like health, preservation, propagation are the highest for merely animal life, humanity . . . is the highest for human beings as human beings; as such they have humankind as their object. Their pure relationship to it, morality, consists in itself, satisfies itself, and needs no other motive nor prospects than itself and humankind. Anyone who needs some sort of religion as a buttress to their morality, their morality is not pure, for according to its nature this must consist in itself. Thus a human being can do without religion . . . . But the spirit seeks the spiritual, its thirst searches for the source of life, it seeks its forces, which find no proportion on earth, something unearthly, an infinite object of contemplation for its spiritual eye, and it finds all this in religion. — Günderrode forthcoming The above quotation includes criticism of Kant’s use of the practical postulates of freedom, God, and immortality (or at least the latter two) in his moral thought. According to Günderrode, by integrating religious ideas in his moral system, Kant fails to maintain the distinction between morality and religion, thus compromising both. On the other hand, Günderrode does not argue for rejecting other elements of Kantian morality, such as the categorical imperative or the idea of the moral world; rather, she relativizes these (like any other moral or ethical models) to the social and political side of human life and insists this be kept distinct from religion. Günderrode does not articulate an alternative to Kantian morality—she is concerned with the formation of spiritual communities (like the one featured at the end of “Story of a Brahmin”) rather than with creating a moral system to govern relations between members of this (or other kinds of) community. However, she does express a few general ideas about “virtue” (Tugend), including a hope for what it can accomplish. In “Letters,” the Friend claims that “what the great thoughts of truth, justice, virtue, love and beauty claim . . . is the enduring, the eternal,” and adds: “are not all virtues and excellences approximations to that highest perfect condition[?]” (Günderrode forthcoming; see Ezekiel forthcoming b; Nassar 2021). To understand what Günderrode means by this, we must return to her metaphysics, including her idea of the “infinite force” or “eternal life” which, according to Almor “is at the same time the ground of all things and the things themselves, the condition and the conditioned, the creator and the creature” (Günderrode forthcoming).

4 ONTOLOGICAL HOPE Almor’s description of the “infinite force” that underlies the processes and entities of nature is echoed elsewhere in Günderrode’s writings, such as “Letters” and “Idea” (SW 1:359–361, 446–449). It is also reflected in work by other thinkers of the time, including Novalis, who presented natural (and human) history as the emergence or selfdifferentiation of a single, animating force, often conceived as progressing towards a

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future recuperation of unity. In Novalis’ version of this model, the multifarious entities that constitute the universe have emerged from an original whole, which continues to animate them; these entities are currently passing through a period of separation and individuation as they move towards reunification. The latter, however, will be a “higher” form of unity than the original because, instead of an undifferentiated mass, it is an articulated unity of harmoniously related parts: “Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is unified again, but this unification is a free interconnection of independent, self-determined beings” (NS 2:454–456 #94). From the above claim, Novalis derives an ethical imperative to promote the realization of this new unity, famously stating that human beings “are on a mission: our vocation is the cultivation of the earth” (NS 2:426 #32). Novalis views the reclamation of unity as the specific task of human beings, who are conscious and who all possess, at least in germ, the artistic creativity or “genius” necessary to overcome the fragmentation that characterizes our experience of the world, especially the fragmentation between subject and object (NS 2:420 #22, 466 #118, 524–526 #13; see Kneller 2021; Nassar 2013, 42f.). Günderrode, too, views the establishment of a harmonious, articulated unity as a desirable outcome for the universe as a whole. However, she differs from Novalis both in decentering human activity from this process and in her emphasis on the uncertainty of the achievability of this outcome. Like Novalis, Günderrode claims that human beings should work to increase the extent to which the world manifests the unity-in-multiplicity that characterizes “infinite spirit”—or (as she calls it in “Letters” and “Idea”) the “idea of the earth.” In her account of virtue, sketched at the end of “Letters” and “Idea,” she defines truth, justice, and other virtues as various ways of promoting unity: “Truth is only the expression of what is altogether the same as itself . . . . Justice is striving, in isolation from each other, to be the same. Beauty is the outer expression of equilibrium achieved with itself. Love is the reconciliation of personhood with the All” (Günderrode forthcoming). On this basis, she claims that human virtues contribute to establishing the harmonious, articulated whole that she claims is the goal of the universe: “whatever is the same as itself, and externally and internally bears the expression of this harmonious being in itself . . ., that is precisely that perfect, immortal and unchangeable thing” (Günderrode forthcoming).7 However, unlike most of her contemporaries, including Novalis, for Günderrode human beings do not have a special role to play in this realization of the “idea of the earth.” Rather, they participate in this process in the same way as every other finite entity. That is, like the latter, human beings help the whole to develop through individuation and the interaction of these individual parts. Günderrode claims that it is through individuation that matter becomes more animated and, eventually, conscious: the elements that constitute the beings of the universe “become different, after they have been forced up to life . . . they have become livelier, like two who have trained in long struggle are stronger when it has ended than before they struggled” (Günderrode forthcoming).8 These more developed forms are then reabsorbed by the whole and the process is repeated, so that “each mortal gives back to the earth a raised, more developed elemental life, which it cultivates further in ascending forms” (ibid.). In this way, the earth as a whole, “by assimilating ever more developed elements, must become ever more perfect and universal” (ibid.). On Günderrode’s account, virtuous behaviors—whether truth-telling, justice, artistic creation, or love—are simply human expressions of, or the human way of experiencing,

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processes that are also ongoing at other levels. Thus, while human beings can certainly contribute to increasing the harmony and cohesiveness of the universe, and while they may do so in their own, particular way, this is also something that occurs at lower or higher levels of what Almor calls the “infinite series of migrations leading to ever higher perfection.” For Günderrode, the desired final state for “the earth” would comprise the full interpenetration or correspondence of spirit and matter, soul and body, form and essence, force and appearance which, she maintains, are currently unbalanced, out of proportion, and incompletely joined (SW 2:256). Over time, the repeated dissolution and reemergence of finite forms may be able to address this balance, if the universe is ever able to integrate these forms into a single, coherent body. Günderrode calls this ideal final body an “organism”: This perfect sameness of inner essence and form cannot, it seems to me, be achieved in a multiplicity of forms. The essence of the earth is only one, therefore its form may also only be one, not various, and the earth would only attain its actual true being when it dissolved all its appearances in a collective organism, when spirit and body penetrated each other so that all body, all form would also at the same time be thought and soul, and all thought at the same time form and body, and a truly transfigured body, without lack or illness and immortal, and thus wholly different from what we call body or material, when we attribute to it transience, illness, inertia and deficiency, for this kind of body is, as it were, only a failed attempt to produce that immortal divine body. — Günderrode forthcoming The above explains the basis for Günderrode’s ontological hope: that is, her hope for an eventual, fully harmonious integration of all the diverse beings of the universe into one, achieved partly through human activity and partly through processes going on everywhere in nature. If that happens, there will emerge “that perfect, immortal and unchangeable thing, that organism, that I consider the goal of nature, history and the times” (Günderrode forthcoming). However, Günderrode emphasizes that this is a hope, not a certainty: I do not know whether the earth will be successful in organizing itself immortally like this. There may be a disproportion of essence and form in its primal elements that always hinders it from this; and perhaps the totality of our solar system is needed to bring about this equilibrium; perhaps even this does not suffice for it and it is a task for the entire universe. — Günderrode forthcoming Thus, in her ontological hopes Günderrode emphasizes human limitations, but also the participation of human beings in processes beyond themselves which may, perhaps, result in the outcome she considers desirable.

5 POLITICAL HOPE Novalis’ political ideals, like those of Günderrode, were informed by his metaphysical commitments.9 In his essay “Christenheit oder Europa” (Christianity or Europe), Novalis describes the same process that characterizes the emergence and development of the world as a whole as occurring in human history. In this alternative or mythologized

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history, the European Middle Ages is characterized by cultural unity, represented by the Catholic Church (NS 3:507–509). With the advent of Protestantism, along with industrialization, this unity fragmented and lost cohesion; on the other hand, Europe enjoyed developments in industry, science, trade, and political arrangements (NS 3:509– 512). The next stage, Novalis suggests, would be a reunited community that combined the developments of Enlightenment and the industrial age with the cultural cohesiveness of the Middle Ages: a “new golden age” or a “great age of reconciliation” (NS 3:519). The unifying principle under which the nations of Europe (and the world) must unite, according to Novalis, is religion—specifically, a revised form of Christianity: “Only religion can reawaken Europe and safeguard its people, and, with new magnificence, install Christianity visibly on earth in its old peacemaking office” (NS 3:523; see also 524). Novalis ends “Christianity or Europe” with the assurance that the golden age of recuperated unity will certainly come: “Just be patient: it will, it must come, the holy age of eternal peace. . . . Until then . . . remain true unto death to the true, eternal faith” (NS 3:524). In this text, Novalis slips from hope for regaining unity to faith in such an outcome. In this regard, he differs from Kant, whose political writings recognize the uncertainty of conclusions drawn from history regarding its progress (IaG, 08:17, 26–30; ZeF 08:368; see Goldman 2012; Kleingeld 2012, 173f.). This also separates Novalis from Günderrode, who, like Kant, emphasizes the incompleteness of our knowledge of history and, correspondingly, insists on the essential ambiguity of the future. This ambiguity is reflected in Günderrode’s “ontological hope,” discussed in the previous section, as well as in her political hopes. “Christianity or Europe” was written in 1799 but not published until 1826, twenty years after Günderrode died. Nonetheless, Günderrode’s “Letters” includes an account of human cultural, religious, and social development that parallels Novalis’ account in several respects. The “Letters” associate the current age, especially Protestantism, with excessive individuation and a loss of social, political and cultural cohesiveness: “we are isolated from nature by restricted circumstances, from true enjoyment of life by even more restricted concepts, from all large-scale activity by our forms of government” (Günderrode forthcoming). By contrast, the past, especially the ancient world and the Middle Ages, is recognized as a site of inspiration (SW 1:352).10 Unlike Novalis, however, Günderrode does not advocate a revitalization of Christianity that can spread across and unify the world; she rejects the idea that the solution to the current cultural and political stagnation should involve a rejuvenation of Europe’s past. Instead, she emphasizes the value of expanding one’s creative and spiritual life by absorbing or assimilating ideas from outside one’s own culture. In “Letters,” the Friend wonders: “Perhaps now we have achieved a level of cultivation [Bildungsstufe] where our highest and worthiest aspiration should aim at understanding the great masters of the ancient world, fertilizing our meager life with the wealth and fullness of their ideas” (Günderrode forthcoming). However, Eusebio rejects this idea: “The great masters of the ancient world are certainly there to be read and understood, but . . . those masters were there [at that specific time and place], and that is why they shall not be born again; infinite nature will always reveal itself anew in infinite time” (ibid.). Instead, Eusebio sends the Friend some texts on Hinduism, which he claims will reveal the “one thing, a holy thing” that produces itself in the things of the phenomenal world (ibid.). In other words, Günderrode’s notion of Bildung requires engagement not primarily with one’s own past but with other cultures, demanding an expansion beyond the limitations of one’s own history.

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The notion that human beings should cultivate themselves individually, as nations, and as a species was widespread at the time Günderrode was writing: it was espoused by Kant, Herder, Schiller, Fichte, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, among others. The idea was often co-opted by those with colonial ambitions, who claimed that some (generally European) cultures were at a higher level of “cultivation” than others.11 A moment of this appears in Novalis’ “Christianity or Europe,” where he argues that, while other (in this case, European) countries are at war, “the German educates himself [sich bildet] to . . . participate in a higher epoch of culture” (NS 3:518f.). Novalis’ idea that certain countries will lead others to higher levels of cultivation, and his claim that it will be a revitalized Christianity that unifies the peoples of the world, are potentially susceptible to colonialist interpretations. Günderrode’s work runs counter to these colonialist tendencies.12 Rather than spreading outward from a “new Jerusalem” (NS 3:524), for Günderrode, the ideal community arises spontaneously among small groups of individuals united in shared contemplation of “the ground of all things.” These communities may perhaps grow and join together to form larger ones; however, Günderrode does not indicate that this is inevitable, likely, or desirable (see Ezekiel forthcoming b). In fact, despite calling for the establishment of new social forms that join their members in religious life (such as the one that features at the end of “Story of a Brahmin”), Günderrode seems to have been skeptical about the success or desirability of political movements that attempt to spread, including those established on the basis of a new religion. An example is her play Mahomed, der Prophet von Mekka (Muhammad, the Prophet of Mecca), which casts Islam as the requisite “new religion” (see Ezekiel 2016a). Here, the harmony and benevolence of the new Islamic community becomes increasingly oppressive as it gains political success (see SW 1:110–200; Ezekiel [2020] 2022). A further difference between the political thought of Novalis and Günderrode lies in their attitudes to revolution. In “Christianity or Europe,” Novalis argues against revolution in general and the French Revolution in particular as the object of political hope. His argument is based on the conviction that revolutions establish only temporary political forms, which he contrasts with the enduring forms established by religion: Don’t revolutionaries seem like Sisyphus? He’s just managed to balance on the peak and already the mighty burden is rolling back down the other side. It will never stay up unless an attraction towards heaven maintains it hovering on the heights. . . . Join [the State] to the heights of heaven through higher longing, give it a connection to the cosmos, then it will contain an inexhaustible mechanism. — NS 3:517–518 By contrast, Günderrode is an advocate of political revolution (see Ezekiel [2020] 2022). Political change, and even peace, are not things that can or should be accomplished for all time; that, she claims, “is a peace of slackness, dying off ” (Günderrode 2016, 234). Their results—even their happening at all—are also uncertain. This is indicated, for example, in her play Udohla, in which the hoped-for revolution fails to materialize (SW 1:203–231). Thus, Günderrode’s attitude to political change retains an element of ambiguity. While we may hope for widescale change, we cannot guarantee that it will come, that it will last, or that it will have the effects we want. Instead, we can develop our own inward relationship to the divine and attempt to find (perhaps only a few) like-minded individuals with whom we can form a community—at least for a time.

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CONCLUDING REMARKS The work of Kant and Novalis is probably more familiar to the reader than that of Günderrode, whose work on hope I attempt to introduce here. I believe that the biggest contribution Günderrode makes to post-Kantian thinking on this subject is her insistence on epistemological and political modesty. Despite her claim that it is possible to move beyond the Kantian limits of cognition, in practice she respects firm limits when it comes to making claims about the future or establishing political institutions or ethical rules. As a result, she calls on her readers to develop their own inner lives and relationships with people close to them, rather than trying to “scale up” ways of thinking or living in order to extend them to all human beings. Partly as a result, Günderrode’s thinking on hope and progress runs counter to colonialist tendencies in European thought. Throughout her writings, Günderrode steadfastly maintains the distinction between hope and expectation or faith, emphasizing the ambiguity essential to the former. This distinction is articulated explicitly in the “Letters” and “Idea” and appears in more literary form in her poems, plays, dialogues, and short stories. It is the guiding thread of her drama Udohla, in which the character Sino continues to hope for political change, even after the anticipated savior betrays him by refusing to lead the uprising Sino wants. This mingling of hope and uncertainty is presented beautifully in Sino’s closing words: Your destiny, young friend, has been decided, But ours the distant future still conceals, The future that I will not live to witness, The rising that these eyes will never see. Deceived, I often thought I saw The purple seam of morning in the east, . . . In that I erred, the day is not yet here. But you, oh friend, perhaps you will behold it, And if it comes, youth, then remember me, And help to spring the people’s heavy chains; And thus repay me for my stolen love. . . . Heaven will reveal through signs, When it is well-disposed to the great works. Until that time bear silently its will, And hope for the returning of the god. —Günderrode [1805] 1922, 122–123; my translation; see also SW 1:231

NOTES 1.

These characters are likely based on Günderrode and her lover, Georg Friedrich Creuzer: they referred to themselves by these names in their correspondence. Creuzer’s views on hope are discussed by Allen Speight in his contribution to this volume.

2.

Possibly “hesitated” or “was apprehensive” (zagte) rather than “said” (sagte) (SW 1:358).

3.

For a detailed account of these forms of consciousness, see Ezekiel forthcoming a.

4.

On the influence of these and others’ ideas of the inner sense on Günderrode’s work, see Dormann 2004.

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5.

There is debate about the extent to which Kant was criticizing Swedenborg and the extent to which his mockery masked a degree of acceptance of or identification with some of Swedenborg’s ideas (see Grier 2002, 1–2).

6.

These three forms also correspond to the different levels of Almor’s Bildung, beginning with his life as a businessman enjoying physical pleasures, through his moral awakening, to his religious or spiritual development.

7.

For more on Günderrode’s account of virtue, see Nassar 2021.

8.

For more on Günderrode’s vitalism and the role of consciousness in her work, see Ezekiel [2020] 2022.

9.

At the time, it was common to conceive of natural and human history as continuous and driven by the same principles (see, e.g., Herder 1784–1:20–27, 4:246; Nees von Esenbeck 1841, vol. 1, 80–81; for more examples and discussion, see Ezekiel [2020] 2022).

10. To an extent, this is a conventional Enlightenment and Romantic valorization of the artistic accomplishments of the ancient world. For example, cf. Friedrich Schlegel’s valorization of the ancient world in “Rede über die Mythologie” (Speech on Mythology), which Günderrode quoted in her notebooks. Here, Schlegel argues that modern literature lacks the greatness of ancient poetry, and attributes this to a lack of cohesive culture in modern times (KFSA 2:312). This claim motivates his call for a new mythology to unite and revitalize modern literature (KFSA 2:319–320). 11. In her paper in this collection, Susan-Judith Hoffmann argues that Humboldt’s model of Bildung opposes colonial models. On this topic, including efforts to counter these colonialist claims, see also Muthu 2003. 12. This is not to claim, however, that Günderrode avoided the European tendency to appropriate ideas from Asia and create idealized and problematic stereotypes. In particular, her syncretistic approach to religion tends to gloss over genuine differences and, as a result, fails to engage Asian, North African and Middle Eastern cultures on their own terms.

REFERENCES Arnim, Bettine [Brentano-]von ([1808/1839] 1990), “Report on Günderrode’s Suicide,” in Jeannine Blackwell and Susanne Zantop, (eds.), Bitter Healing: German Women Writers. From 1700 to 1830. An Anthology, 455–472, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Battersby, Christine (1995), “Stages on Kant’s Way: Aesthetics, Morality, and the Gendered Sublime,” in Peggy Zeglin Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer, (eds.), Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics, 88–114, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. Beiser, Frederick (2021), “Romanticism and Pessimism,” in Elizabeth Millán Brusslan, (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Romantic Philosophy, 573–586, Palgrave. Dormann, Helga (2004), Die Kunst des inneren Sinns. Mythisierung der inneren und äusseren Natur im Werk Karoline von Günderrodes, Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann. Ezekiel, Anna (2016a), “Introduction to Muhammad, the Prophet of Mecca,” in Karoline von Günderrode, Poetic Fragments, 121–151, Albany: SUNY Press. Ezekiel, Anna (2016b), “Introduction to ‘Piedro,’ ‘The Pilgrims,’ and ‘The Kiss in the Dream,’ ” in Karoline von Günderrode, Poetic Fragments, 87–105, Albany: SUNY Press. Ezekiel, Anna (forthcoming a), “Chapter 8. Through Consciousness Parted from Dream: Alternative Knowledge Forms in Karoline von Günderrode,” in Gregory Moss, (ed.), The Significance of Negation in Classical German Philosophy, Dordrecht: Springer.

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Ezekiel, Anna (forthcoming b), “Earth, Spirit, Humanity: Community and the Nonhuman in Karoline von Günderrode’s ‘Idea of the Earth’,” in Kir Kuiken, (ed.), Romanticism and Political Ecology, Romantic Praxis. Ezekiel, Anna ([2020] 2022), “Revolution and Revitalisation: Karoline von Günderrode’s Political Philosophy and Its Metaphysical Foundations,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 30 (4): 666–686. Goldman, Loren (2012), “In Defense of Blinders: On Kant, Political Hope, and the Need for Practical Belief,” Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Philosophy, 40 (4): 497–523. Grier, Michelle (2002), “Swedenborg and Kant on Spiritual Intuition,” in Stephen McNeilly, (ed.), On the True Philosopher and the True Philosophy: Essays on Swedenborg, 1–20, London: The Swedenborg Society. Günderrode, Karoline von ([1805] 1922), Udohla, in Leopold Hirschberg, (ed.), Gesammelte Werke der Karoline von Günderode, vol. 2, 87–123, Berlin: Bibliophiler Verlag D. Goldschmidt-Gabrielli. Günderrode, Karoline von (1990–1991), Sämtliche Werke [SW], ed. Walther Morgenthaler, 3 vols., Frankfurt and Basel: Stroemfeld and Roter Stern. Günderrode, Karoline von (2016), Poetic Fragments, by Tian, ed. and transl. Anna Ezekiel, Albany: SUNY Press. Günderrode, Karoline von (forthcoming), Philosophical Fragments, ed. and transl. Anna Ezekiel, New York: Oxford University Press. Heimerl, Joachim (2003), “Dem Tode verfallen: Die Ballade ‘Piedro’ im Kontext des literarischen Werks der Karoline von Günderrode,” Wirkendes Wort, 53 (3): 401–416. Herder, Johann Gottfried (1784), Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menscheit, Riga: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch. Kant, Immanuel ([1781/1787] 1996), Critique of Pue Reason, transl. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett. Kant, Immanuel (1766), Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik, Königsberg: Johann Jacob Kanter. Kleingeld, Pauline (2012), Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kneller, Jane (2021), “The Poem of the Understanding: Kant, Novalis, and Early German Romantic Philosophy,” in Elizabeth Millán Brusslan, (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of German Romantic Philosophy, 19–39, Palgrave. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Jean-Luc Nancy ([1978] 1988), The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, transl. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester, Albany: SUNY Press. Licher, Lucia Maria (1996), Mein Leben in einer bleibenden Form aussprechen. Umrisse einer Ästhetik im Werk Karoline von Günderrodes (1780–1806), Heidelberg: Winter. Millán-Zaibert, Elizabeth (2008), “Borderline Philosophy? Incompleteness, Incomprehension, and the Romantic Transformation of Philosophy,” Internationales Jahrbuch des deutschen Idealismus, 6: 123–144. Muthu, Sankar (2003), Enlightenment Against Empire, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Nassar, Dalia (2013), The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy, 1795–1804, Chigaco: University of Chicago Press. Nassar, Dalia (2021), “The Human Vocation and the Question of the Earth: Karoline von Günderrode’s Philosophy of Nature,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 104: 108–130.

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Nees von Esenbeck, C. G. (1841), Das System der speculativen Philosophie, vol. 1, Naturphilosophie, Slogau: Prausnitz. Novalis (1960–1975), Schriften. Zweite, nach den Handschriften ergänzte, erweiterte und verbesserte Auflage in vier Bänden [NS], ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, 4 vols., Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer. Saul, N. (2006), “Morbid? Suicide, Freedom, Human Dignity and the German Romantic Yearning for Death,” Historical Reflections, 32 (3): 579–599. Schiller, Friedrich von ([1793] 2005), “On Grace and Dignity,” in Jane V. Curran and Christophe Fricker, (eds.), Schiller’s “On Grace and Dignity” in Its Cultural Context: Essays and a New Translation, transl. Jane V. Curran, 123–170, New York: Camden House. Schlegel, Friedrich (1958f.), Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler et al., 35 vols., Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh. Wolf, Christa (ed.) ([1979] 1997), Der Schatten eines Traumes. Gedichte, Prosa, Briefe, Zeugnisse von Zeitgenossen, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Georg Friedrich Creuzer and the Claims of the Symbolic ALLEN SPEIGHT (Boston University)

Despite having produced a remarkably extensive oeuvre over his long life (1771–1858) and having had a significant influence during this time on the developing views of several less forgotten figures of the period—Hegel, Schelling and Schlegel among them—Georg Friedrich Creuzer has had few posthumous champions to offer a reintegration of his work within the scholarship on German Idealism and Romanticism. There are no English translations (and only one French translation) of his magnum opus, the project to which he gave the name Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen (Symbolism and Mythology of the Ancient Peoples, Especially the Greeks), which appeared in multiple volumes over three editions (the first published 1810–1812; the second 1819–1821; and the third 1836–1843).1 While Creuzer did not consider himself a philosopher (or rather insisted that he did “philological-mythological ethnography” as opposed to the philosophy of symbols, myths or systems of belief), his work nonetheless had an important influence on philosophers interested in questions of myth and symbol. Creuzer’s contributions to the history of the philosophy of late antiquity were significant, especially his philological work on the Neoplatonists, which resulted in editions of Plotinus (1835) and Proclus and Olympiodorus (1820–1822). More broadly, his application of Neoplatonic approaches to the contemporary study of mythology and the debate that raged in German scholarly circles following it represented a significant moment in scholarship on the ancient world, even if the field took a different turn in its often explosive reaction to his work—the so-called Creuzerstreit, which drew in academics such as Johann Heinrich Voss, K. O. Müller and Christian August Lobeck and changed the study of mythology in ways that would no longer be marked by Creuzer’s influence. Finding the right context for re-approaching Creuzer’s work within the milieu of German Idealism and Romanticism is not an easy task for contemporary readers. Creuzer has remained something of a footnote to larger projects in the philosophy of religion of this period sketched by Hegel, Schelling and Schlegel—and in fact may be better known today in academic circles for his ill-fated romantic relationship with Karoline von Günderrode—but there are important elements of his scholarship that are worth further exploration. Although his work and the explosive intellectual debates that it aroused during the Creuzerstreit have been characterized perhaps most frequently in terms of questions such as the rise of German national identity and the contributions of later German Romanticism to that identity,2 this chapter will focus instead on an under255

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explored line of connections between Creuzer and larger projects within the milieu of German Idealism and Romanticism—in particular, his construal of the notions of symbol and myth in a way that may shed light on the question of the origin of art and its relation to the study of religious culture and mythology. The following chapter will first sketch Creuzer’s own intellectual background (part 1) and then turn to an explication of his account of the symbol (part 2). The final section (part 3) will explore the resources Creuzer offers for a new way of conceiving of art’s origins and nature, especially in relation to the larger Romantic and post-Romantic emphases on the importance of art and its simultaneously new construal of religion: coupled with this reinvestigation of art’s origins, Creuzer suggests a new awareness of the role of the unconscious in the realm of art and religion. This consideration had importance for several figures who draw on Creuzer’s account—including his contemporaries Goethe and Hegel and twentiethcentury figures such as Walter Benjamin and E. H. Gombrich—for its connection both to new ways of seeing the relation between the dominant classical and Christian/Romantic motifs in contemporary philosophical thought as well as to the consideration of the notion of hope in the post-Romantic age.

1 CREUZER’S BACKGROUND Many accounts of Creuzer’s life begin with the start of his long appointment at Heidelberg—he arrived in 1804 following a brief appointment in Marburg and remained, except for a period in Leiden, until his death in 1858—and the connections with key Romantic figures associated with Heidelberg at the time such as Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, and Friedrich and August Schlegel. The longer story of Creuzer’s intellectual interests in the questions that come to frame his project with respect to the symbolic needs to be traced, however, in his earlier academic life, including the time he spent in Jena during the heyday of the Romantic movement there. Among the important and under-explored influences during his time at Jena were the lectures of Schiller, which Creuzer apparently attended avidly.3 Following the suggestion of the Heidelberg-based scholar of Roman law Friedrich von Savigny, Creuzer accepted the appointment at Heidelberg and promptly began to turn out a series of publications, including Idee und Probe alter Symbolik (Idea and Test of Ancient Symbolism) (1806). One of the most important questions for Creuzer during this period was the status of the Greeks vis-à-vis other ancient cultures then coming into scholarly focus (particularly, in the wake of the Napoleonic campaigns, Egypt, but also India, Persia and other pre-classical civilizations). Creuzer’s position within the contemporary debate on these issues might best be characterized in terms of positions represented on the one hand by Johann Joachim Winckelmann and on the other hand by Johann Gottfried Herder, the former concerned to show the uniqueness of the Greeks and the latter the connection of a range of civilizations emerging over history. Creuzer’s project can be said to combine the interest in expanding the larger history of religions and cultures while still giving an account of why the Greeks remained culturally crucial for scholarly (wissenschaftlich) European culture. It was apparently a set of influences—that of Friedrich Schlegel, whose Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. Ein Beitrag zur Begründung (On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians: A Contribution to a Foundation) appeared in 1808; the mythologist and political journalist Johann Joseph Görres, whose Mythengeschichte der asiatischen Welt (History of Myths of the Asian World) appeared in 1810; as well as no

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doubt his intense philosophical and religious conversations with von Günderrode—that led to Creuzer’s expanding interests in comparative mythology from earlier cultures going beyond his interest in the Greeks.4 In fact, one of the striking facets of Creuzer’s expansion of the discussion of comparative myth between the first (1810–1812) and second (1819–1821) editions of Symbolik und Mythologie is the latter’s inclusion of a much wider range of scholarship on ancient religious culture from India to Egypt—as well as the host of methodological questions that came along with this expansion, since it was with this second expanded edition of Symbolik und Mythologie that the Streit which bears Creuzer’s name began to erupt in earnest. In the debate over Creuzer’s work, Voss turned the sharpest attacks against him in the Antisymbolik (Antisymbolism) starting in 1824 (a title and work which certainly deserves its place among vitriolic academic screeds next perhaps only to Ulrich von WilamowitzMoellendorf ’s legendary answer to Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy in Zukunftphilologie! [Future Philosophy!]) and Lobeck and Müller also penned attacks5 (although, as Blok [1994] has argued, the latter in his two reviews of Creuzer may have shared more in common with him than it might have appeared). The effect of the debates was to move the emerging field of historical scholarship on mythology and ancient religious practice well beyond Creuzer’s unique blend of rationalism and romanticism. If the debate of the Creuzerstreit represented a sort of high water-mark of Idealist/ Romantic generation attempts to take up questions of myth and mythology, this may only seem confirmed by the appreciative philosophical perspectives on Creuzer’s work from those who defended him against attacks during this debate—notably, those of Hegel in the sections on the symbolic form of art in his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst (Lectures on the Philosophy of Art) and Schelling in his later mythology, both of whose approaches to the pre-classical world have met a dwindling fortune over the years.6 Yet high watermarks, like turning points in great battles, are often worth revisiting precisely for those with an interest not only in examining what may have been lost as the tide turned, but also for understanding better the presumed tide that followed. It will be suggested here that Creuzer’s approach to the question of the symbol is worth revisiting not only, as others have argued, in the context of a deeper appreciation of the borrowings that Hegel, Schlegel and Schelling made of Creuzer, but in their own right as offering some potential for contemporary work on questions such as the origin of art. The following section will examine Creuzer’s account of the symbol in the first book of Symbolik und Mythologie and the final section will take up the potential resources it may offer for contemporary work on questions such as the origin and status of artistic activity.

2 CREUZER’S ACCOUNT OF THE SYMBOLIC Creuzer’s accounts of the notions of the symbol and the symbolic in the first book of Symbolik und Mythologie have had a strong influence on a number of figures, not only contemporaries with philosophical interests in these topics (as mentioned, above all Hegel, Schelling and Schlegel) but also twentieth-century figures who have returned to his work, including Walter Benjamin, E. H. Gombrich and others. Creuzer’s approach methodologically is grounded in his work in classical philology, and in particular draws on Neoplatonic and other writings from late classical philosophy about early (pre-Greek or Roman) notions of symbolism. Of particular interest is the emphasis he places on nature and the natural origin of symbology: Creuzer in fact entitles a significant part of

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his introductory discussion of symbolism (Chapter 3 in Book I of the first and second editions), “Ideas toward a Physics of Symbol and Myth”—and even if he does not fully explicate what he means by the notion of a “physics” of symbolism, it is clear that the connection he wants to draw is one between the emergence of the symbol and the natural phenomena in which it is initially embedded (Creuzer 1819–1821, I:52). Hence his stress throughout the discussion on the role of natural “oracles” (trees, birds, stones, etc.) in Greek religious practice, as well as on important linguistic descriptions that he takes to capture certain human experiences within the realm of nature. Creuzer offers initially a differentiation of three meanings of the symbolic. The first meaning derives originally from the notion of split halves—in the most literal sense of the Greek word symbolon, which derives from the verb symballein (literally “to put-togetherwith”) and can refer to a broken table or figure which, for example, might serve as evidence of a guest-host relationship (or when given to separated friends or family members and brought back together again offered proof that the two bearers were connected—a not-infrequent move within recognition plot structures in Greek tragedy) (Creuzer 1819–1821, I:28). Related to this original meaning are “all connections which one verifies with a visible sign [Zeichen], including the use in contracts, politics and economics” (ibid., 29). The second and third meanings—from which what Creuzer calls the “higher” senses of the term derive—involve on the one hand a bringing together in the sense of an encounter—particularly an “encounter with the unexpected” (unverhofft begegnen) and on the other hand figuring out of “dark intimations” (aus dunkelen Andeutungen errathen) (ibid.). Creuzer’s characterization of the symbolic involves two notions that are each distinctive but may also be in tension with each other. The first is his notion that a symbol involves an “oscillation” (Schweben) or “ambiguity/indecisiveness between form and essence” (Unentschiedenheit zwischen Form und Wesen); the second is his notion of the symbol’s brevity or concision (die Kürze). Let us look at each of these in turn. The “oscillation” that Creuzer mentions in connection with symbols involves a meaning which inevitably remains beyond our grasp. Creuzer draws on Plato and the relation between the sun and reflected light to emphasize this connection: In the symbol a universal concept [Begriff] has arisen, which is present and then flees, and when we want to grasp it, it evades our gaze. Thus on the one hand it radiates from the world of ideas, as from the full ray of the sun, and can be called similar to the sun, to use Plato’s phrase, it is on the other hand cloudy because of the medium in which it comes to our eyes. Just as the play of colors in the rainbow arises through the image of the sun as it breaks into the dark clouds, so the simple idea of the light in the symbol breaks apart into the colorful beam of meaningfulness [Bedeutsamkeit]. Thus the symbol is meaningful and arousing just through the incongruence of essence with form and because of the superabundance [Überfülle] of content in comparison with its expression. The more it stimulates the more there is for thought. — Creuzer 1819–1821, I:58–59 If Creuzer sketches the notion of oscillation in terms of the openness of thought’s engagement, he pivots to the notion of brevity or concision (die Kürze) with a description initially in terms of its imposition on a viewer: “imposing brevity [die imposante Kürze]” is, he says, “the fundamental characteristic [Grundcharakter] of the oldest doctrines of religion.” Creuzer’s discussion of the notion of brevity in ancient symbols is striking and has been much quoted. A central passage for many readers of Creuzer (including Benjamin

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and Gombrich, who both offer an analysis of it) is this description of the “concision” as a kind of “sudden appearance,” which is worth quoting in full: It’s like a suddenly appearing spirit [Geist], or a bolt of lightning, which at once illuminates the dark night. It’s a moment which engages our whole essence [Wesen], a view into a limitless distance, from which our spirit returns enriched. For this momentariness is fruitful for the feeling disposition, and the understanding, since it dissolves into its constituent parts and makes its own the manifold which the pregnant moment of the image encloses. — Creuzer 1819–1821, I:59–607 Creuzer’s account of the brevity of symbols does not simply rely on the analogy to such experiences, however. The discussion of brevity within Symbolik und Mythologie is in some ways prepared for by reference to a discussion of distinctions within late-classical philosophy of language. Creuzer is drawn to two ancient sources, which he to some extent conflates: one from the fifth/sixth-century Alexandrine lexicographer and Aristotelian commentator Ammonius (a student of Proclus) and a passage in Diogenes Laertius’ account of the Stoic philosopher Zeno of Citium.8 Both passages concern the distinction (presumably originating in Zeno) between a question (ero ¯t¯esis) and a query or interrogation (pusma or peusis in Greek, which Creuzer translates as Erkundigung). According to this distinction, the answer to a question can be given briefly and “all at once,” as Creuzer says, because it can be given “symbolically” (symbolikôs)—i.e., by using the signs of a bodily gesture (a nod or shake of the head), as opposed to the “nonsymbolic” answer in words which is the appropriate response to a query or interrogation. (Zeno’s example is the difference between the question “is it daytime?” which can be answered “symbolically,” as he says, with a nod or shake of the head, whereas the query “Where does Ariston live?” is one which cannot be answered in the same “symbolic” manner but requires the use of speech [alla dei eipein].)9 Nods and gestures in Zeno’s “symbolic” sense of response to a question are thus, Creuzer says, “representations of a bodily language of signs [Zeichensprache] whose essence is to be brief [kurz] and to abbreviate [abkürzen].” The importance of this for his larger discussion of brevity and concision in symbolic speech is quickly evident. First, nods and gestures are of course precisely the kind of phenomenon Creuzer has in mind in his emphasis on what the eye can take in “all at once,” as in his recounting of the experience of a lightning flash.10 Secondly, as Creuzer’s account of symbolism emphasizes throughout, there is an importance in physical or bodily motions that contain in themselves something assertoric (as in the Zeno passage, where a judgment or response to a question has truth value). The relation between the two experiences of oscillation and concision—one tentatively escaping specific shape and the other (even if still darkly) coalescing around a sudden and illuminating appearance—may be read as setting up a further distinction that is of particular importance for Creuzer’s later readers and that will underlie the discussion of modes of artistic origin in the last section of this chapter as he takes up what he calls the “intensification” of the symbol in its “higher uses”—namely, the distinction between what Creuzer terms “mystical” and “plastic” symbols. As he portrays this distinction, the symbol either “follows its natural direction, which is directed toward the infinite” (“in this striving it is not satisfactory for it to say many things; it wants to say everything”) or the symbol “limits itself and holds itself humbly at the tender middle-boundary between spirit and nature” (Creuzer 1819–1821, I:62–63; emphasis mine). The first case produces

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mystical experiences of the “inexpressible,” whereas the second is connected with the plastic embodiment of the divine as, say, in ancient Greek sculpture. Although he does not emphasize the point, Creuzer’s duality here represents a tension between the aesthetic appeal of the beautiful and the sublime within Idealist/Romantic thought—and more broadly, one might say, between Christian and Hellenic elements within the larger religious culture of the West. In Hegel, as we will see, it is precisely the contrast between what he will term the “symbolic” (thus narrowing Creuzer’s definition to one of his two categories) and the “classical”; it is also the tension between the two sides of the famous epitaph memorializing St. Ignatius of Loyola that Hölderlin employs in the published preface of Hyperion: non coerceri maximo, contineri minimo, divinum est (“not to be constrained by the greatest and to be contained by the smallest is divine”), which likewise suggests a double line of aesthetic exploration for Hölderlin in the writing of his novel. And, although the terminology will again change, the contrast between an “inexpressible” side and a concrete side can also be seen in Benjamin’s discussion of allegory. The following section will examine four figures who remain important for the afterlife of Creuzer’s account of the symbolic, across several disciplines from Creuzer’s time to the twentieth century: his philosophical Heidelberg colleague Hegel, whose appropriation of the symbolic became central for the structure of his philosophy of art; the critic Walter Benjamin, who poses a new and post-Hegelian question about the relation between allegory and symbol; the art historian E. H. Gombrich, who asks about the relation between art and the symbolic; and finally the poet Goethe, whose remarkable poem including hope among the primal Urworte was prompted in part by Creuzer.

3 THE RECOVERY OF ANCIENT WISDOM, THE TASK OF HISTORY AND THE EMERGENCE OF HOPE Creuzer’s duality of mystic and plastic symbols has an important influence on a number of thinkers, from his contemporaries Hegel and Goethe to twentieth-century figures such as Walter Benjamin and E. H. Gombrich. This final section will trace the vestiges of that distinction in the work of these four figures, with an eye on issues such as the historicity of philosophical reflection about culture and the methodological approaches to the origins and status of art as well as to the status of hope in the post-romantic age. Although Hegel’s interest in the artistic and religious accomplishments of pre-Greek civilizations preceded his encounter with Creuzer, nonetheless the well-known tripartite organizational scheme that emerges in his lectures on aesthetics—the symbolic, classical and romantic—took the form it did in no small part because of the impact of Creuzer.11 Hegel’s notion of “symbol” in the lectures rests on a distinction and relation between meaning (Bedeutung) and expression or shape (Ausdruck or Gestalt).12 In general, it can be said that Hegel took the rationalist rather than the romantic side of Creuzer’s work, claiming that Creuzer got at a “deeper and rational meaning to ancient myths” (while still acknowledging that the ancients may not have thought about them as we do). A crucial point of agreement between Hegel and Creuzer seems to be that, even if ancient peoples were not aware of the symbolic content in their religious mythology, they nonetheless employed such images “because they were still in a poetic condition; they were habituated to becoming aware of what is inward in the mode of fantasy, not in the mode of thought” (Hegel [1835–1837] 1970, 13.404). As Hegel cites Creuzer, this does

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not mean that the symbolism of ancient religions is a (mere) poetic fabrication [keine Erdichtung] but rather something that is “embedded or concealed [verhüllt] therein” (GW 28.1:334). If Creuzer yokes “mystical” and “plastic” modes together under the common term of “symbol,” Hegel separates the two more sharply, assigning to the symbolic the preclassical experience that involves sublimity in Creuzer’s sense of mystical symbolism, but saving the term “classical” for the plastic encounter with art that was characteristic of ancient Greece. In fact, any understanding of Hegel’s notion of the symbolic must derive backwards from his notion of classical or “true” art, which “consists precisely in the kinship, relation and concrete interpenetration of meaning and shape” (in der Beziehung, Verwandtschaft und dem konkreten Ineinander von Bedeutung und Gestalt) (Hegel [1835– 1837] 1970, 13.395). Despite the terminological difference, it is clear that Hegel retains a sense of Creuzer’s mystical/plastic duality, even as he changes the larger historical context in which preclassical symbology is viewed: while Creuzer’s Neoplatonic approach led him to search for a kind of “original” wisdom among pre-classical civilizations, Hegel’s attempt to incorporate the more sublime notion of symbolic art within a larger account of the modes of art is part of a dialectically unfolding account that both (a) moves forward to the more complete connection between meaning and shape in classical art, thus leaving the symbolic behind as a clear mode of what Hegel calls “proto-art” (Vorkunst), and at the same time (b) suggests a sort of “return” to the sublime in Romantic and post-Romantic art.13 There are many important points of comparison to consider in Hegel’s shift,14 but one element he clearly retains from Creuzer that will be important for our later authors is a notion of the role of the unconscious in symbolic representation: in Indian and Egyptian art, each work is symbolic in expressing what Hegel follows Creuzer in calling “fermentation” (Gärung), which is “directed toward a not yet-existent art form: everywhere something is sought that is not yet the free concept . . . something is sought that is still natural or is only intended as spiritual” (GW 28.1:338). Another “remnant” of Creuzer’s duality can be found in Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of German Tragic Drama), whose concluding discussion of allegory is deliberately cast as an attempt to get beyond what Benjamin sees as the confines of the Idealist/Romantic perspective on symbolism lying behind an account like Hegel’s. Benjamin attributes the root of this perspective ultimately to Goethe’s contrast between symbol and allegory (which in this shape clearly influenced Hegel, as well as Schelling): on this conception, Benjamin claims, the notion of symbol was sketched by using allegory as a sort of “dark background against which the bright world of the symbol might stand out.”15 Benjamin sees in Creuzer both the “banal older doctrine” of allegory as symbol’s dark shadow but also the roots of a more interesting notion whose “epistemological elaboration could have led Creuzer far beyond the point he actually reached”: what is interesting, Benjamin thinks, can be found in Creuzer’s distinction between the totality-in-themoment that is the experience of the symbol, as opposed to the temporal unfolding that characterizes allegory (as well as epic and baroque poetry). Allegory in this sense is (like Creuzer’s mystical symbol) “beyond beauty” and able to open up considerations of decline and death, as well as what Benjamin seems to see as a kind of anti-freedom to be found (contra the Romantic and classical ideals) in some of the pre-classical experiences Creuzer championed the most—for example in the “hiddenness” of meaning in Egyptian hieroglyphics.16

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The third of the figures who have continued to find resources in Creuzer’s account of the symbol is E. H. Gombrich, who looked in his remarkable essay “The Use of Art for the Study of Symbols” to connect the notion of the symbol to a new way of conceiving of art’s origins and nature in the post-Romantic artworld. Gombrich offers a way of seeing the “hieroglyphic” as more important to art than is often thought, and suggests an importance of the kind of work Creuzer did with symbols not only for the larger project of coming to terms with the role of the unknowable in art’s earliest history but with contemporary art as well: Art, as we know it, did not begin its career as self-expression, but as a search for metaphor commanding assent among those who wanted the symbols of their faith to make visible the invisible, who looked for the message of the mystery. Nobody who remembers the enigmatic hieroglyphs of our contemporary art can overlook the continued force of this longer. — Gombrich 1965, 49 Taking these three figures together, one might ask whether Creuzer’s duality of “plastic” and “mystical” symbols did not frame an inescapable question about the relation of the unconscious/unknown to artistic shaping that remains—much like Hölderlin’s dual-sided Loyola quotation—a crucial tension for the post-Idealist/post-Romantic world.17 If so, an approach to the relation between symbol and art that continues to ponder that tension might be useful in a contemporary context in a number of ways. In particular, if one shears away some of the now-dated commitments to the developmental account that Creuzer gives, the “post-Romantic” in the sense that concerns both Benjamin and Gombrich is one that would seem particularly open to a new exploration of art’s connections with the religious as well as aware of the centrally human question of meaning and interpretation that art in its connection with the symbol raises from the earliest times.18 Such considerations also play a role for a fourth and final figure influenced by Creuzer’s discussion of symbol: the poet Goethe, who also takes up explicitly the connection of these issues to the post-romantic status of the notion of hope. Creuzer had sent Goethe in September 1817, a copy of his ongoing dispute about symbol and myth with the Leipzig classical philologist Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann (1772–1848). Goethe’s reading of the letters from the dispute, together with another work by the Swedish archeologist George Zoëga (1755–1809), prompted his initial draft of a remarkable poem now known as “Urworte. Orphisch” (Original Words. Orphic) which stands in the mythological background of several of his later works.19 Goethe draws on the supposedly “Orphic” source of four primal forces that influence an individual’s life—in Greek, daemon (which Goethe transliterates into German), tych¯e (das Zufällige in Goethe’s translation: “the incidental”), erôs (love), and anankê (die Nöthigung or necessity).20 Goethe ultimately gave the final published shape of the poem a commentary on each of these forces, but not on the fifth, elpis (Hoffnung or hope): A being arises lightly, without reins, Out of the clouds’ cover, fog and rainfall, It lifts us up, with her, by her wings, You know her well, she swarms toward every zone; A wing flap! and behind us lie the eons.21 Although the final shape of the poem and the choice of the five forces that Goethe includes apparently came more from Zoëga’s discussion (and ultimately the late Roman

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writer Macrobius), the relation of the dispute between Creuzer and Hermann to his thinking is clearly important. At issue between them is the proper methodological stance on how to read Hesiod’s account of mythological figures present at the origin of the world—figures like Hesiod’s Chaos, Night and Eros. Goethe’s own predilections led him closer to Hermann’s stance than to Creuzer’s, but the central questions of the dispute— how to understand poems of origin like Hesiod’s—were shaped in a way which broadened certain Creuzerian themes that remain in Goethe’s writing: Creuzer’s stress that it was anachronistic to view Hesiod as a philosopher when he was in fact a poet whose imagination was moved by a sense of the bildlich, working from material that only a religious view of the early world could have shaped; the wider and genuinely cosmopolitan interest in the “Oriental”; and perhaps above all Creuzer’s appreciation of the sense of the “mysterious” in his later literary practice, from specific invocations of figures like the gods of Samothrace to certain pieces of imagery that Goethe and Creuzer shared (the reflection of light into rainbow colors, for example).22 It is this Creuzerian appreciation for the mysterious, for example, that ultimately offers the most important connection for Benjamin’s writing on Goethe, particularly in his essay on Die Wahlverwandschaften (Elective Affinities), where Benjamin situates an account of hope within the larger range of “mythical” forces of nature that he sees Goethe taking up. The notion of hope that emerges in this context is one which does not privilege coherence or reconciliation at the expense of resistance, loss or failure (Benjamin’s dialectical vision connecting hope ultimately with a notion of disenchantment). The final words of the Elective Affinities essay—“Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope” (Benjamin 1996, I:356)—open up a set of questions that cannot be fully addressed here. But the key point of Benjamin’s interpretation with respect to the Urworte—why elpis rightly remains not only the last of Goethe’s primal words but the only one for which Goethe preferred to leave his poetry without commentary—might be taken as a fitting consideration on which to end. Benjamin seems to have taken the fifth of Goethe’s series of primal words to offer the possibility of a transition away from the heroic and mythic world of the first four.23 He thereby poses most starkly a question that all of the figures we have seen influenced by Creuzer in this section wrestle with: namely, how we as historically-aware contemporaries are to understand the inheritance of the ancient world in a way that has a bearing on the hopes of our lives for the future. Karl Ameriks has recently suggested that beside traditional images of history as cyclical (the ancients) or linear (the Enlightenment rationalist), the Romantics added the notion of “elliptical history”—that is to say, history tracing a figure with reference to plural foci that allows for the possibility of “returning to one’s original place in a way that involves development through off-center movements” (Ameriks 2019, 171). Creuzer was of course regarded as a figure (perhaps, historically, the last) attempting to straddle the rationalist and romantic paradigms, sharing on the one hand with Hegel a sense of the importance of the search for meaning across cultures but also with many of the Romantics a sense of the distinctly imaginative and poetic contribution of ancient art and literature in a wider sense than had been possible for generations up to his own. His sense of the primacy of the symbol and of its ramifications in plastic and mystical senses did not give in the end the sort of neat divisions employed by others of his contemporaries (the clear distinctions of the opposition between Greek/polytheistic and Hebraic/ monotheistic, as in Hegel, for example). Perhaps the best way to characterize Creuzer’s sense of relation to history and openness to the future in the end is in the image that we have seen that he and Goethe shared: the multiplicity of the rainbow’s colors that emerge

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from the singularity of light, offering a symbol of “superabundance [Überfülle] of content in comparison with its expression.”

NOTES 1.

The French translation is by Joseph-Daniel Guigniaut (1794–1876), which came, among other things, to have an effect, through Pierre Leroux, on Baudelaire and French symbolist poetry (Guigniaut 1825–1851; see Dorra 1994, 8–11).

2.

Among recent work placing Creuzer in the academic and political context of his time, see Blok 1994; Marchand 2009; Williamson 2004; and Germana 2009.

3.

For Creuzer’s own account of his early intellectual encounters at Jena, see his memoir Aus dem Leben eines alten Professors (From the Life of an Old Professor) (1848) and Paralipomena der Lebenskizzen eines alten Professors (Paralipomena to the Biographical Sketch of an Old Professor) (1858).

4.

Günderrode’s philosophical influence on Creuzer in this regard is a topic worthy of a fuller-length study. Some, like Momigliano, attempt to sharply distinguish Creuzer’s earlier work on the Greeks from that on mythology as inspired by Günderrode (for Momigliano’s view of Günderrode’s influence, see Momigliano 1966). For a more careful discussion of their relation, see Becker-Cantarino 2008 and Anna Ezekiel’s introduction to Karoline von Günderrode, Poetic Fragments (2016). Letters and source materials in Rohde 1896 and Preisendanz 1912.

5.

Johann Heinrich Voss (1751–1826) (see Voss 1824–1826); K. O. Mueller (1797–1840) (see Mueller 1847–1848); and Christian August Lobeck (1781–1860) (see Lobeck 1829). See also the collection of documents in Howald 1926.

6.

On Creuzer’s relationship with Hegel, see among others: Hoffmeister 1930; Gadamer 1971; Pöggeler 1971; Jamme 2013; Donougho 1992; Stewart 2013; Germana 2019.

7.

“Es ist wie ein plötzlich erscheinender Geist, oder wie ein Blitzstrahl, der auf einmal die dunkele Nacht erleuchtet. Es ist ein Moment, der unser ganzes Wesen in Anspruch nimmt, ein Blick in eine schrankenlose Ferne, aus der unser Geist bereichert zurückkehrt. Denn dieses Momentane ist fruchtbar für das empfängliche Gemüth, und der Verstand, indem er sich das Viele, was der prägnante Moment des Bildes verschliesst, in seine Bestandtheile auflöset, und nach und nach zueignet, empfindet ein lebhaftes Vergnügen, und wird befriedigt durch die Fülle dieses Gewinns, den er allmählich übersiehet.”

8.

Creuzer (1819–1822, I:37) says that “both passages must be linked by me here, because one is first understandable through the other.”

9.

The Zeno passage in Diogenes Laertius (VII.66) is as follows: “There is a difference between judgement, interrogation, and inquiry, as also between imperative, adjurative, optative, hypothetical, vocative, whether that to which these terms are applied be a thing or a judgement. For a judgement is that which, when we set it forth in speech, becomes an assertion, and is either false or true: an interrogation is a thing complete in itself like a judgement but demanding an answer, e.g., ‘Is it day?’ and this is so far neither true nor false. Thus ‘It is day’ is a judgement; ‘Is it day?’ an interrogation. An inquiry is something to which we cannot reply by signs (symbolikôs), as you can nod Yes to an interrogation; but you must express the answer in words, ‘He lives in this or that place.’ ”

10. As he explains in a footnote which immediately follows the discussion of the Ammonius and Zeno passages, “its recognition is thus a prosbolê [originally “attack” or “assault”], or

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thea¯, as is so indicated by thea¯sthai, ‘to see all at once and as a whole’ ” (Creuzer 1819–1821, I:38n68). Interestingly, Creuzer’s use of this Stoic distinction is one of the several parts of the discussion of symbolism that finds its way almost verbatim into Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notebooks from his reading of Creuzer: Coleridge puts it under the heading of “The simplest use of Symbolic” (see Coleridge [1819–1826] 2003, 207). 11. As I have argued elsewhere, Hegel already employed a tripartite scheme similar to that of the later Aesthetics in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, almost a decade before he was Creuzer’s colleague in Heidelberg (see Speight 2017), but it is ascribing the term symbolic to the initial phase that Hegel owes to Creuzer (see Speight 2018). Hegel made clear his debt to Creuzer in a letter: “Besonders . . . kam mir die Milderung ansprechend entgegen in Ansehung der Art und Weise des Gegensatzes von bestimmtem Bewußtsein eines Theorems, der herausgehobnen gewußten Bedeutung des Symbols und dem Gefühl der Sache, dem instinktartigen Produzieren, noch mehr notwendigen Treiben der Vernunft in den mythologischen symbolischen Religionen” (Hoffmeister 1930, 267; see Jamme 2013; “It has seemed to me that what is especially appealing was the mitigation with respect to the mode of opposition between [on the one hand] definite consciousness of a theorem—i.e., the articulately cognized meaning of the symbol—and [on the other hand] the feeling of the matter, the instinctive production and, what is more, inevitable germination of reason in the mythological symbolic religions” [transl. Butler and Seiler 1984, 466–467]). 12. The official definition runs as follows: “Symbol überhaupt ist eine für die Anschauung unmittelbar vorhandene oder gegebene äußerliche Existenz, welche jedoch nicht so, wie sie unmittelbar vorliegt, ihrer selbst wegen genommen, sondern in einem weiteren und allgemeineren Sinne verstanden werden soll” (“Symbol in general is an external existence that is immediately present in intuition or given, but which is not taken as it is immediately present, but is to be understood in a broader and more universal sense”) (Hegel [1835– 1837] 1970, 13.393). 13. This means I have a somewhat different take than Hoffmeister: “for Creuzer the original truth of the symbol is hidden with time, needing to be rediscovered; for Hegel, the (absolute) truth was never to be found in the symbol itself, but only in the fully realized concept that emerges with the progression of Spirit and reason” (Hoffmeister 1930, 271). 14. There is a nice summary of these in Donougho 1992. 15. Benjamin quotes Goethe’s contrast between the two in terms of the poet’s seeking the particular in the general and seeking the general in the particular: “The former gives rise to allegory, where the particular serves only as an instance or example of the general; the latter, however, is the true nature of poetry: the expression of the particular without any thought of, or reference to, the general. Whoever grasps the particular in all its vitality also grasps the general, without being aware of it, or only becoming aware of it at a late stage” (Benjamin 1998, 161). 16. This is also a topic much larger than can be discussed in the present context, but a fuller account would need to link Benjamin’s famous notion of allegory as revealing the facies hippocratica of history alongside his reading of Giehlow’s Hieroglyphenkunde. 17. Again a further study might examine how this is a topos for both sides of the Idealist/ Romantic traditions: Dieckmann (1959) has pointed it out nicely in discussion of Creuzer’s connection to Schlegel, and I have made a similar suggestion on how this might be explored more fully in Hegel (Speight 2019).

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18. For an account which explores these Creuzerian/Hegelian questions about art’s origin with an eye to more recent discoveries of the earliest art, see Speight 2013. 19. The dispute was published with the title Briefe über Homer und Hesiodus vorzüglich über die Theogonie (Letter on Homer and Hesiod, Especially on Theogony) (Creuzer and Hermann 1818). Goethe’s diary entries show that the dispute, together with Zoëga’s work, occupied his thoughts for several days, during which time the first draft of the “Urworte” was written. The importance of these influences and the subsequent development of Goethe’s poem are discussed in Buck 1996, Wetters 2014, and Nicholls 2006. 20. These stanzas and Goethe’s paragraphs of commentary on them have been much discussed—an object, as Hans Blumenberg called it, of perennial “interpretive desire” (Deutungslust) (Blumenberg 1979, 437). 21. “Ein Wesen regt sich leicht und ungezügelt, / Aus Wolkendecke, Nebel, Regenschauer / Erhebt sie uns, mit ihr, durch sie beflügelt, / Ihr kennt sie wohl, sie schwärmt nach allen Zonen; / Ein Flügelschlag! und hinter uns Aeonen” (transl. Wetters 2014). 22. Frederick Amrine (2016) has suggested that, despite Goethe’s official comments that sided with Hermann’s more Hellenically-centered interests in this dispute, his own artistic practice—for example the role of the mysteries in Faust, Part II—was much more indebted to a reading of his friend Creuzer. 23. This point is nicely discussed in Wetters 2014, Chapter 5.

REFERENCES Ameriks, Karl (2019), Kantian Subjects: Critical Philosophy and Late Modernity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Amrine, Fredrick (2016), “Goethe as Mystagogue,” Goethe Yearbook, 23: 19–40. Becker-Cantarino, Barbara (2008), “Mythos und Symbolik bei Karoline von Günderrode und Friedrich Creuzer,” in F. Strack, (ed.), 200 Jahre Heidelberger Romantik. Heidelberger Jahrbücher, 51: 111–124, Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer. Benjamin, Walter (1996), “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, (eds.), Selected Writings, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, Walter (1998), The Origin of German Tragic Drama, transl. John Osborne, London: Verso. Blok, Josine A. (1994), “Quests for a Scientific Mythology: Friedrich Creuzer and K. O. Müller on History and Myth,” History and Theory, 32 (4): 26–52. Blumenberg, Hans (1979), Arbeit am Mythos, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Buck, Theo (1996), Goethes “Urworte. Orphisch,” Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Butler, Clark and Christiane Seiler (1984), Hegel: The Letters, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor ([1819–1826] 2003), The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Notebooks 1819–1826, ed. Merton Christensen and Kathleen Coburn, New York: Routledge. Creuzer, Friedrich (1806), “Idee und Probe alter Symbolik,” Studien, 2, Carl Daub and Friedrich Creuzer, (eds.), 224–324, Frankfurt and Heidelberg: J. C. B. Mohr. Creuzer, Friedrich (1810–1812), Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, 4 vols., Leipzig and Darmstadt: K. W. Leske. Creuzer, Friedrich (1819–1821), Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, 2nd edn., 6 vols., Leipzig and Darmstadt: Heyer und Leske.

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Creuzer, Friedrich (1836–1843), Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, 3rd edn., 4 vols., Leipzig and Darmstadt: C. W. Leske. Creuzer, Friedrich (1848), Aus dem Leben eines alten Professors, Leipzig: C. W. Leske. Creuzer, Friedrich (1858), Paralipomena der Lebenskizzen eines alten Professors, Frankfurt: J. Baer. Creuzer, Friedrich and Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann (1818), Briefe über Homer und Hesiodus vorzüglich über die Theogonie, Heidelberg: August Oswald. Dieckmann, L. (1959), “Friedrich Schlegel and Romantic Concepts of the Symbol,” Germanic Review, 34 (4): 276–283. Donougho, Martin (1992), “Hegel and Creuzer: or, Did Hegel Believe in Myth?” in David Kolb, (ed.), New Perspectives on Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion, 59–80, Albany: SUNY Press. Dorra, Henri (1994), Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology, Berkeley: University of California Press. Ezekiel, Anna, (transl.) (2016), Karoline von Günderrode, Poetic Fragments, Albany: SUNY Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1971), “Hegel und die Heidelberger Romantik,” in Hegels Dialektik. Fünf hermeneutische Studien, 71–81, Tübingen: Mohr. Germana, Nicholas (2009), The Orient of Europe: The Mythical Image of India and Competing Images of German National Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars. Germana, Nicholas (2019), “The Creuzerstreit and Hegel’s Philosophy of History,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 80 (2): 271–288. Gombrich, E. H. (1948), “Icones Symbolicae: The Visual Image in Neo-Platonic Thought,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 11: 163–192. Gombrich, E. H. (1965), “The Use of Art for the Study of Symbols,” American Psychologist, 20: 34–50. Guigniaut, Joseph-Daniel (1825–1851), Religions de l’antiquité, considérées principalement dans leurs formes symboliques and mythologiques, Paris: Treuttel et Würtz. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich ([1835–1837] 1970), “Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. Herausgegeben von H. G. Hotho,” in G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden. TheorieWerkausgabe, vols. 13–15, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2015), Gesammelte Werke [GW], vol. 28.1, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst. Nachschriften zu den Kollegien der Jahre 1820/21 und 1823, ed. Niklas Hebing, Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Hoffmeister, Johannes (1930), “Hegel and Creuzer,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 8: 260–282. Howald, Ernst (1926), Der Kampf um Creuzers Symbolik; eine Auswahl von Dokumenten, Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr. Jamme, Christoph (2013), “ ‘Göttersymbole.’ Friedrich Creuzer als Mythologe und seine philosophische Wirkung,” in Christoph Jamme, (ed.), Mythos als Aufklärung. Dichten und Denken um 1800, 199–210, Munich: Brill. Lobeck, Christian August (1829), Aglaophamus; sive, De theologiae mysticae Graecorum causis libri tres, Regimontii Prussorum, Borntraeger. Marchand, Suzanne (2009), German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Momigliano, A. D. (1966), “Friedrich Creuzer and Greek Historiography,” Studies in Historiography, 75–90, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Mueller, Karl Otfried (1847–1848), “Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker besonders der Griechen, von Dr. Friedrich Creuzer, Professor der alten Literatur zu Heidelberg. Zweite vollig umgearbeitete Ausgabe. Dritter und Vierter Theil,” in K. O. Mueller, Kleine deutsche

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Schriften über Religion, Kunst, Sprache und Literatur, Leben und Geschichte des Althertums, nebst Erinnerungen aus dem Leben des Verfassers, ed. E. Mueller, 2 vols., Breslau: Josef Max und Komp. Nicholls, Angus (2006), Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic: After the Ancients, New York: Camden House. Pöggeler, Otto (1971), “Hegel und Heidelberg,” Hegel-Studien, 6: 65–133. Preisendanz, Karl (ed.) (1912), Die Liebe der Günderode. Friedrich Creuzers Briefe an Caroline von Günderode, Munich: Piper & Co. Rohde, Erwin (1896), Friedrich Creuzer und Karoline von Günderrode, Briefe und Dichtungen, Heidelberg: Winter. Speight, Allen (2013), “Artisans, Artists and Hegel’s History of the Philosophy of Art,” Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 34 (2): 203–222. Speight, Allen (2017), “Religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit,” in Dean Moyar, (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Hegel, 148–154, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Speight, Allen (2018), “Hegel on the Symbolic Form of Art,” in Birgit Sandkaulen and Niklas Hebing, (eds.), G. W. F. Hegel: Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst: Klassiker Auslegen, 73–97, Berlin: De Gruyter. Speight, Allen (2019), “Art, Imagination and the Interpretation of the Age,” in Gerad Gentry and Konstantin Pollok, (eds.), The Imagination in German Idealism and Romanticism, 225–240, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, Jon (2013), “Hegel, Creuzer, and the Rise of Orientalism,” The Owl of Minerva, 45 (1/2): 13–34. Voss, Johann Heinrich (1824–1826), Antisymbolik, Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler. Wetters, Kirk (2014), Demonic History: From Goethe to the Present, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Williamson, George S. (2004), The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“When My Heart Says So . . .” Hope as Delusion in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy MARIE-MICHÈLE BLONDIN (Collège Montmorency, Laval)

1 INTRODUCTION Our world is “the worst of all possible worlds,” (Schopenhauer [1859] 2018 [hereafter “WWR II”], ch. 46, 598) which is to say that, in this life, there is nothing to be hoped for. For Schopenhauer, human life indeed is something that should not be. He argues that “it would be better for our situation not to exist” and so “everything around us bears the trace of this—just as everything in hell reeks of sulphur” (WWR II, ch. 46, 592). This sort of radical pessimism shapes Schopenhauer’s portrayal of the world and of human life to such an extent that all hope for a happy or better life is vain. To the Kantian question “What may I hope?” Schopenhauer answers: nothing, except for the “hope for the end of hope.”1 This is what Schopenhauer’s metaphysics teaches us. And yet hope exists, and so the question remains: how can we explain the persistence of this phenomenon despite the fact that there is no “rational” explanation for it? It is particularly in chapter 19 of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation), vol. 2, as well as in paragraphs 312 and 313 of the Parerga und Paralipomena (Parerga and Paralipomena), vol. 2, that Schopenhauer provides an answer. For the most part, hope is an illusion that results from an unconscious but embodied will that causes the intellectual faculties to deviate from their usual function of cognition and representation. Therefore, having hope means being fooled by our deep and unconscious inclinations and desires. While understanding hope merely as foolishness, Schopenhauer offers a marginal perspective on what makes people believe in some good to come. Certainly, Schopenhauer takes up some elements of the classical definitions of hope. For instance, he conceives of hope as an affective state in which an individual rejoices, driven by the conviction in advance that a desired object will be obtained. In this sense, Schopenhauer’s position is close to that found in Descartes’ Les passions de l’âme (The Passions of the Soul), where “Hope is a disposition of the soul to be convinced that what it desires will come about. It is caused by a particular movement of the spirits, consisting of the movement of joy mixed with that of desire” (Descartes [1649] 2012, §165, 389). Referring to the classical opposition of the head and the heart, Schopenhauer sees hope as the result of an internal “power game” induced by an unconscious will rather than as 269

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the result of a belief in a better life, an afterlife, or any kind of holy salvation. Thus, unlike such thinkers as Kant, Schopenhauer does not refer hope either to God or morality. And while for Schopenhauer the intellect plays a crucial role in the analysis of hope, it does so only insofar as the intellect is falsified, deceived, and truncated by an internal force. Because Schopenhauer’s explanation of hope is mostly a description of how the metaphysical will that we all embody influences the human mind, this explanation could in no way fit into the classical tradition of hope, which is linked to a form of optimism. As Ortrun Schulz has very well demonstrated—taking up part of Arthur Hübscher’s argument—Schopenhauer’s radical pessimism is a critique of optimism and an anti-utopia (Schulz 2002, 83–89).2 In this sense, as Schulz has pointed out, Schopenhauer is less the “destroyer of hope” that he is often thought to be than a critic of hope searching for objectivity and lucidity in the face of the human condition. In this paper we will bring to light the unconscious struggle between the will and the intellect that is central in the phenomenon of hope. In so doing, we will focus on the psychological and physiological implications of Schopenhauer’s account of the “foolishness of the heart” in the Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2. Finally, we will examine the nothingness announced as salvation in Schopenhauer’s philosophy and see how it might constitute the only true source of human hope. But first, it is important to better understand how hope appears in Schopenhauer’s philosophy as impossible, vain and foolish.

2 A WORLD AS WILL IS HOPELESS The dark vision of the world that Schopenhauer offers us in his work depends upon the primary metaphysical principle around which his entire philosophy is articulated: the will to life (Wille zum Leben). This will, which Schopenhauer understands as the essence of all things, or the thing-in-itself of all phenomena in the world, is described as blind, incessant and insatiable. The will is a driving, instinctive and, for the most part, unconscious force. It is an inexorable impulse. As such, it is amoral and arational. It has no purpose or end, other than self-affirmation in the world and, more particularly, in life.3 The inevitable and direct consequence of this conception of the world as the self-affirmation of the will is perpetual misery (Jammer), pain (Schmerz) and suffering (Leiden), because the will keeps the individual in an endless and incessant quest, sentencing the living to endless struggle, to fighting, to repeated work, to waiting; even to boredom. Thus, because the will never finds true satisfaction, it condemns humans to the condition of perpetually disappointed hopes.4 As Schopenhauer says, “each human life, surveyed as a whole, displays the qualities of a tragedy and we see that life as a rule is nothing more than a series of dashed hopes, thwarted plans and errors recognized too late” (Schopenhauer [1851] 2015 [hereafter “PP II”], §172a, 289). In a world as will, any hope inevitably is suffering. Not only does hope generally lead to disappointment, but the lack and the need experienced in the quest for some desired object likewise causes suffering. What is more, if by some miracle our hopes were to be fulfilled, boredom5 (see Schopenhauer [1859] 2010 [hereafter “WWR I”], §57, 339) would ensue; otherwise, the vicious circle keeps on spinning as we find ourselves hoping and therefore suffering again for not having that which we desire. As Schopenhauer says: “The nature of every desire is pain” (WWR I, §57, 340; see also §57, 344–345). All this is because the world has as its first metaphysical principle an impetuous and unrestrained will, so everyone remains constantly in an endless struggle without any possibility of experiencing either hopes fulfilled or happiness.

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Indeed, any hope of a happy life is vain. Schopenhauer clearly claims that: “human life is dispositionally incapable of true happiness, that it is essentially a multifaceted suffering and a thoroughly disastrous condition” (WWR I §59, 349). In this way, and throughout his work, Schopenhauer presents life as inseparable from suffering. Life itself is the embodied phenomenon of the unceasing will to life and, as such, living means suffering and nothing else.6 Thus, there is no reason to expect a happy life. And even if some happiness were ever actually to be found, we would not know how to experience it, other than as the absence of suffering. It is in this sense that Schopenhauer affirms that happiness is negative and suffering positive. What we feel, positively, is unhappiness, and happiness is nothing but “non-suffering” (see WWR II, ch. 46, 590). Happiness annihilates suffering without letting itself be felt. This would explain, for instance, why time seems so long when we experience something painful and why it passes too quickly when we are living happy moments: happiness cannot be experienced. Only pain is positive, and so can be felt. Since happiness is not felt at all, we can only recognize it when we have lost it, when the suffering has come back. But then it is too late! Schopenhauer therefore sees the notion of a “happy life” as a contradiction in terms: human life is inseparable from suffering and happiness nothing but a chimera—hence the tragedy of living denounced by Schopenhauer in his work. Moreover, this human tragedy is always and unceasingly repeated, from generation to generation and from century to century. As Schopenhauer says: “They [human beings] are like mechanical clocks that are wound up and go without knowing why; whenever someone is begotten and born, the clock of human life is wound again so it can play the same hurdy-gurdy that has already been played countless times, movement by movement, beat by beat, with insignificant variations” (WWR I, §58, 348). Not only is betterment impossible for an individual human being; it is likewise impossible for the whole of humanity. Whether we like it or not, and so long as the world is the self-affirmation of the will, this world is put to fire and sword. This is why any hope, understood as the belief in a possible future happiness, cannot be justified in life itself, neither for oneself nor for the generations still to come. Therefore, authors like Ugo Batini (2016, 138) understand that there is no real becoming in Schopenhauer’s system, but always only a repetition of the same suffering. Neither can hope be explained by a belief in an afterlife or in some better life after death, since Schopenhauer develops a metaphysical system in which there is no direct reference whatsoever to religion or God. Although Schopenhauer’s system precludes any idea of an afterlife, he does defend the thesis of metempsychosis, which usually means the return of souls to the earth in bodies (see WWR II, ch. 41). For Schopenhauer, this idea refers above all to the fact that the will to life that we embody will always be embodied, as one and the same, in all objects in the world to come, both living and not. However, far from offering any sort of guarantee of a better life, the concept of metempsychosis only reinforces the argument that our essence is imperishable and that the will to life never ceases to assert itself in the world despite our individual deaths. Some consolation may be found, perhaps, in the fact that, as long as the will is the metaphysical principle of the world, for now and for the centuries to come, we may like to think that there is a part of us that will never die, despite our own death. Our true essence (the will to life) remains the essence of every other phenomenon in the world. Thus, our essence is eternal. This is not much consolation though; it brings no real promise of change for the better. On the contrary, this only ensures the perpetuation of

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misery. But still, hope remains, and Schopenhauer’s main account of that fact relies on the primacy of the will over the intellect.

3 THE HEART ABOVE ALL: THE INFLUENCE OF THE WILL OVER THE INTELLECT Schopenhauer compares hope to what Plato describes as the “dream of someone who is awake” (WWR II, ch. 19, 228): a phenomenon which consists in making a desired object glimmer as if it were indeed within our reach and close at hand, regardless of the fact that it is only a mirage, a reverie, a lie. The person who is filled with hope is convinced that what is wished for will happen, or that dreams have a good chance of coming true. Such a person goes through life with a heart full of joy, carried along by the idea that what they aspire to is destined to be. As Schopenhauer tells us: “Hope lets us see what we want, and fear lets us see what we are afraid of as both are probable and close at hand, and both magnify their objects” (WWR II, ch. 19, 228). In the case of hope, the magnification of the desired object is the result of a perturbing or paralysis of the intellect’s functions, which provokes the obscuring of objects that the intellect would normally have to consider. Suddenly, a particular scenario appears to us as possible and plausible, while all other scenarios that contradict our desire (Wunsch) are discarded. This phenomenon is explained by the domination of the blind will over the human intellect. Thus, hope is largely the result of the unconscious influence that the will exerts over the intellect. To understand how this all takes place, it is necessary to review briefly the objectivation (Objektivation) of the will in the world and, more precisely, in the human body. For Schopenhauer, if every object in the world is the appearance of one and the same will to life, all such objects manifest different degrees of objectivation of the will. For instance, there is a higher degree of objectivation in living beings than in inanimate nature, and a higher degree again in human beings than in plants. There is a process of increasing gradation (Stufen) from the inanimate to the human mind, the latter being the culmination of the objectivation of the will.7 There is also a difference in the degree of objectivation of the will within a single body. For example, the vegetative functions of the human body are the primal and unyielding forms of the affirmation of the will to life, and as such the heart goes on beating while we sleep, unlike the intellectual faculties, which therefore represent a secondary form of the objectivation of the will. Thus, if the intellect may be considered the most complex affirmation and the highest efflorescence (höchste Efflorescenz) of the objectivation of the will to life in the body, it remains nevertheless a secondary element, relative to the will which is primary (see WWR II, ch. 19, 250). This thesis marks a turning point in the history of ideas. Instead of seeing the human being first and foremost as a “cognizing being,” Schopenhauer describes a “willing being,” i.e., a human being dominated by a blind, incessant and impulsive will.8 This is also why Schopenhauer states that “man lies in the heart, not in the head” (WWR II, ch. 19, 251). What is essential and primary in the human being is the will, that which affirms itself in the most elementary, immediate and spontaneous way. Thus, all cognition, indeed every intellectual faculty, is relegated to a secondary position. Indeed, the intellect is only a derivative element, produced from the will, and so remains at the service of the will itself.9 And it is precisely this fact, that the intellect is secondary and subordinate to the will, that allows Schopenhauer to explain the phenomenon of hope; otherwise, our understanding of the world as perpetual misery would prevent us from deluding ourselves about the future.

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Therefore, the distinction between will and intellect leads back to the figurative and physiological distinction between heart and head.10 This is why Schopenhauer does not hesitate to say that hope is a “foolishness of the heart” (Narrheit des Herzens) (PP II, §313, 525): what the heart wants, the head will have to make appear, to create the illusion of. Schopenhauer uses this figure of speech of the “foolishness of the heart” to designate the will to life that manifests itself and imposes itself in the body directly, rather than by way of the light of knowledge or the intervention of the intellect, i.e., the brain.11 All “willing of cognition” is non-essential and secondary to the instinctive and impulsive will. This is also why Schopenhauer states unequivocally that “the brain and its function, cognition, and thus intellect, belong indirectly and secondarily to the appearance of the will; the will objectifies itself in the intellect, and indeed as the will to perceive the external world, and thus as a willing of cognition” (WWR II, ch. 20, 272). As a secondary element, the intellect—or the brain and its functions—remains a “servant” of the will in its primal and largely unconscious form in the body, i.e., a servant to the deep inclinations, to the unacknowledged desires or moral tendencies. Thus, the intellect bends to what “the will” wants,12 and to what it does not want, without necessarily being expressly conscious of it (see HN III, §204, 332–335). Now, if in its normal activity, uncorrupted by the will, the intellect should be able to discern the true from the false, reality from dream and the probable from that which isn’t, it can no longer do so when the will masters and “imposes” a hope upon it. Thus, the intellect, which usually allows the human being to produce abstract representations and “correct” cognitions of the world, is forced instead to produce false or incorrect judgments upon which hope depends. This is how the will forces the intellect “to treat as true things that are neither true, nor probable” (WWR II, ch. 19, 228). The will then does violence to the intellect by distorting the exercise of its functions. Clearly, hope results from the perturbation of intellectual functions and the falsification (Verfalschung) of judgments that desires depend on, none of which the intellect is necessarily conscious of.13 Schopenhauer then concludes that hope is a confusion: “Hope is confusing the wish for an event with its probability. But perhaps no one is free from the foolishness of the heart that so strongly distorts the intellect’s correct assessment of probability that it regards one in a thousand as an easily possible case” (PP II, §313, 525). But again, for this “trick” to work, a part of reality must remain invisible to the intellect. In other words, the intellect must remain incapable of catching sight of any possibly unpleasant scenario that would only obscure the picture of the desired object. The intellect must be censored: “We are often quite unable to grasp or conceive anything that stands in opposition to our cause, our plan, our wish, our hope, even though it is obvious to everyone else: on the other hand, anything favorable strikes the eye, even from a great distance. What goes against the heart, the head does not admit” (WWR II, ch. 19, 229–230; see also HN III, §134, 255) or even, for that matter, notice: “And so, our intellect is daily duped and corrupted by the trickery of inclination” (WWR II, ch. 19, 230). However, even if in hope a part of the intellect is “paralyzed” by such censorship, the intellect must maintain its activity enough to create the mirage of the object that is desired. Indeed, when the will fails to obtain the object of its desire “the will compels the intellect to at least picture it to the will” (WWR II, ch. 19, 228). It is in this sense that Schopenhauer speaks of a “secret and direct power” of the will and even of an “unconscious tendency” (WWR II, ch. 19, 230). This is also why Schopenhauer asserts, for instance, that the scientist finds everywhere signs of validation of their hypotheses and ignores anything

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that might invalidate them. What is to our advantage tends to impose itself, spontaneously and “naturally,” whereas what is displeasing is ignored.14 Schopenhauer even goes so far as to say that we secretly entertain desires that are only revealed to us much later, and all because: “the will shows itself as the primal forcefulness against which the intellect can achieve nothing” (WWR II, ch. 19, 239).15 In the case of hope, the intellect is reduced to being a “function” of the will in the service of its deep desires, however crazy and impossible they may be. And it is only in this way that the miracle of illusion takes place. In short, hope depends much more on our heart than our head, on our unconscious will more than our intellectual faculties: “Everything that in the broadest sense is the business of the will, such as wishes, passion, joy, pain, goodness, evil, as well as what people tend to understand by ‘someone’s nature’ and what Homer expresses as philon êtor is attributed to the heart” (WWR II, ch. 19, 249–250). Hope could therefore be summarized in this formula: When my heart says so, I wish and I hope so. . . . We understand from all this that hope has nothing to do with morality, God or freedom. As long as the will can act without hindrance on our intellect, the illusion of hope, sometimes strong and sometimes weak, will occur, whether we like it or not. As Schopenhauer puts it: [B]ut then we are quickly enmeshed in the delusion of appearance once more, and its motives put the will back into motion: we cannot tear ourselves away. The temptations of hope, the flatteries of the present, the sweetness of pleasure, the well-being that falls to our personal lot amid the distress of a suffering world ruled by chance and error, all this pulls us back and fastens our bonds once more. — WWR I, §68, 406 All this is because in our heart there is a blind, incessant and ungovernable will. Therefore, in order not to be “trapped” by this will, which forces itself upon us whether we want it to or not, our only hope is to no longer give in to the illusion of hope: to free ourselves from the will by a negation of the will. To do this, we must reverse the order of things. We must make the intellect triumph over the will; our head over our heart. Until then, we are carried along by the movements of the will, and therefore more or less inclined to hope.

4 THE AFFECT OF CONSOLATION The disturbances that the will imposes on the intellect, when there is hope, refer to what Schopenhauer understands, more generally, as affect (Affekt). For Schopenhauer, affects are the manifestation of the will in its perpetual ebb and flow. In other words, they are the movements of the will as they appear to our inner sense of our body (see Schopenhauer [1860] 2009 [hereafter “FW”], 38–39). Thus, all affect reveals an agitation and an intensification of the will that is felt as an alternation of willing and not-willing, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, or pleasure and displeasure (see WWR II, ch. 19, 213). In this sense, hope is a state like anger, joy, love or hate; indeed, it is like any state in which the will affirms itself directly according to its preference. Often, affects invade us and for a time take up every available space, hindering the work of the intellect. As Schopenhauer says: The affect is an equally irresistible but only temporary excitation of the will by means of a motive that gets its force not from a deeply rooted inclination, but only because it arises suddenly and thus momentarily excludes the counter-effects of all other motives;

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this is due to the fact that it consists of a representation which, through its excessive liveliness, leaves the others completely in the dark or hidden (through being, as it were, too close), so that they do not enter consciousness and cannot act on the will, and so the ability to deliberate, and with it intellectual freedom, is annulled to a certain degree. — WWR II, ch. 47, 608 This is precisely what happens in the case of hope: the desired object comes to eclipse all others. The vivacity of the will momentarily prevents the intellect from acting correctly. This is also why, for the most part, the affects blind us: “All rage, boundless joy, all hatred and fear, in short, every affect is common, i.e., every movement of the will when it becomes so strong that in consciousness it decisively outweighs cognition and allows someone to appear more as a willing than a cognizing being” (PP II, §336, 536). Schopenhauer explains in many places in his work that we are rather subjects of willing (Subjekt des Wollens) than subjects of cognition (Subjekt des Erkennens). We are, very thoroughly, the will to life that is constantly affirming itself. Introspection shows us to ourselves as subjects of willing, to the extent that what there is to know about our own essence is the will (see Schopenhauer [1847/1864] 2015, §42). And because this will is primary, it dominates and very often imposes itself on the subject of cognition. Certainly, our will is not always affected with the same intensity or vehemence. There are degrees. As Schopenhauer tells us: “these affects and passions are simply movements, more or less weak or strong, now violent and stormy, now gentle and calm, of one’s own will that is either restrained or released, satisfied or unsatisfied, and they all relate in multiple variations to the attainment or non-attainment of what is willed” (FW, 38). This explains why Schopenhauer notes that there are hopes that are “worse” than others. Namely, the more the will is agitated, and the more it forces the intellect to take as plausible what is not, the worse it will be for the hope, while, on the other hand, as the will exerts less force on the intellect, the hope grows less tragic and increasingly legitimate. More precisely, Schopenhauer admits in a footnote that “Hope is a state to which our whole being, namely will and intellect, concurs; the former in that it desires the object of hope, the latter in that it calculates it to be probable. The bigger the share of the latter factor and the smaller the former, the better things will be for hope; in the opposite case, the worse” (PP II, §313, 525). These are the words that lead Schulz to understand Schopenhauer more as a critic than a destroyer of hope. Schulz sees in this specific explanation of hope the moment when Schopenhauer proposes a distinction between what might be more justified and what would not be justified at all, between what would be a better and a worse hope (see Schulz 2002, 14). A hope could be understood as more legitimate to the extent that the intellect has been less hindered by the will because the possibilities of its realization are greater, although still never completely realistic. Let us not forget that if the intellect operates correctly and its judgments are not falsified by the will in the name of hope, then it is no longer a question of hope but of a simple, but correct, calculus of probability. One could perhaps even speak of reasonable and justified expectations, rather than of hope, strictly speaking. As Schopenhauer describes it, hope remains an imposition of the will upon the intellect which can no longer fulfill its functions at all correctly. The worst of all hopes would therefore be that which has no chance of being realized, regardless of the fact that the intellect may make it seem possible. For better or for worse, we must remember that for Schopenhauer, hopes are always going to be disappointed: “we are deceived now by the hope and now by what we had

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hoped for” (WWR II, ch. 46, 588). Either hope is disappointed because we fail to reach the object of our desire, or, in rare cases, hope is satisfied but we are not able to really enjoy the desired object in any lasting way because satisfaction is, in the end, for Schopenhauer, only either the starting point of a new desire or the dead point of boredom.16 Either way, as Schopenhauer remarked, the simple fact of maintaining a hope generates suffering (see WWR I, §16, 114). Why, then, continue to hope, if, in the end, the affect leads us to disappointment? Why all this stratagem of the will to distort the intellect, if it is only to find disappointment and generate suffering? First, Schopenhauer suggests, because it is a natural inclination.17 It is even instinctive: “we are instinctively more inclined to hope than to worry, just as our eyes turn by themselves to light, not to darkness” (PP II, §312, 525). Hope occurs spontaneously and immediately: we want the object of our desire to be attained and we believe that our desire will come true. “It is natural for human beings to easily believe in what they desire, to believe in it because they desire it” (HN III, §111, 43; my translation). It is as if there is in us a spontaneous “optimistic” tendency which we give in to without resistance. As Schulz notes: “In the human affective system, the tendency to hope is primary” (Schulz 2002, 85; my translation). In this sense, hope is almost metaphysical: it happens spontaneously according to our primary nature. But still, and despite our natural inclinations (and the suffering it causes), we hope because hope comforts us. Hope also has a psychological function.18 Schopenhauer is brief on this point, but the fact remains that he claims hope plays a fundamental role as “consoler” (see WWR II, ch. 19, 228). By making the object of desire appear, hope calms the will. No matter that it is an illusion, hope momentarily soothes the will. The belief in the possibility of obtaining the desired object comforts the will as a “nursemaid” does a child (WWR II, ch. 19, 228). As we cling to hope, we experience some joy, however false.19 Hope therefore enables us to move forward in life despite the difficulties that present themselves. Perhaps hope blinds us and prevents us from seeing reality as it should be, but perhaps also it is because hope blinds us that we are able to move forward with drive and determination in the face of the difficulties we encounter.

5 THE ONLY POSSIBLE HOPE: THE END OF HOPE AS NOTHINGNESS Nevertheless, for Schopenhauer there remains one hope that could be realized: the hope of escaping the dominating grip of the will to life. We can hope not to be deceived by our deepest inclinations which sometimes force us to believe in the improbable, the impossible, the false, and which then inevitably plunges us into disappointment and misfortune. We can “hope for the end of hope.”20 This hope is based on the possibility of overthrowing the hegemony of the will through its negation. This is the only way to salvation, the only path toward freedom in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Indeed, it is possible for a human being to comprehend the essence, in itself, of all things and of all beings, and so to recognize its own essence, and that of any other object in the world, as one. Once this highest level of recognition of the will is reached, we find the key to our liberation: we are finally able to choose to affirm or to negate the will (see WWR I, §68, 405f.).21 While Schopenhauer does not suggest either of these two paths, he does assert that the negation of the will (Verneinung des Willens) is the only path to salvation (see WWR I, §68, 424), the only way to end the suffering and misery of existence. To negate the will, one must silence it, break it. One must refuse to submit to

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it, and so “want” not at all, which is to say abandon all hope. An example of someone who negates the will is the ascetic, the person who represses sexual desires, lives frugally, does not give in to the joys of existence and so no longer expects or hopes for anything from life (see WWR I, §68, 407–409). Contrary to the process that operates in hope, in this process of negation of the will it is the intellect that prevails over the will; the head over the heart and knowledge over the unconscious. Thus, consciously and deliberately, day after day, the individual who practices the negation of the will strives to mortify what is most essential in order to be freed from the sufferings and illusions of the will. A metaphysical reversal is then produced which opens up a new way of being in the world. As such, the end of all hope is above all the end of life as will, the end of life as we know it. But if our only hope is to leave the world of the will and join a new horizon in which we might be freed from the will to life, what can we expect from this new horizon? Nothing, except the end of the will. By negating the will, all that we can really hope for is nothingness. As Schulz has noted, there is a kind of transcendent hope in Schopenhauer that allows us to move towards liberation “from an evil world” and into “a better nothingness” (Schulz 2002, 128; my translation). And of this world, we cannot say much. As Batini has pointed out regarding this nothingness of which Schopenhauer speaks: we cannot define it (Batini 2016, 133). At most, we can name it as nothingness, but since it means the abolition of this world (and even of our own subjectivity), we don’t have the concepts that might allow us to think it further. This “great nothing” would basically be our “great good.” The nothingness promised by the negation of the will to life is a world of suns, exactly unlike the world of darkness that Schopenhauer consistently describes. In fact, “for those in whom the will has turned and negated itself, this world of ours which is so very real with all its suns and galaxies is—nothing” (WWR I, §71, 439). Only the one who has the courage to fall into nothingness will have the chance to leave the darkness and advance towards the light.

6 CONCLUSION: THE IN-BETWEEN WORLD AS A PRACTICAL HOPE On the question of hope, Schopenhauer’s philosophy offers an answer that is essentially metaphysical, but also psychological: hope is caused by the corruption of the intellect that is subjected to the unconscious will, which always remains primary in the explanation of living beings and the world. Thus, hope could be summarized as a momentary illusion caused by a dominant will and a weakness of the mind. In sum, Schopenhauer’s philosophy seems to leave anyone who wants to live and affirm the will to life at a dead end. Besides the path of salvation that offers liberation of the will at the cost of a life fully lived, are there other possible hopes that neither deceive nor lead inevitably to suffering? Yes. And, as Sandra Shapshay’s work suggests, while Schopenhauer is often portrayed as the “Knight of Despair,” it is now time to open up the horizon of new interpretations of his philosophy, directing our reading to those passages where it is possible to see Schopenhauer as a “Knight with Hope” (Shapshay 2019, 2).22 It is therefore important to remember the treatise of practical wisdom that Schopenhauer’s philosophy also offers us in Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life (see Schopenhauer [1851] 2014, 273–436). This is his eudaimonology. Although Schopenhauer does not admit the possibility of happiness here, more than elsewhere in his work he does propose maxims for suffering less and therefore living better, or rather for living “less

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badly.” Basically, these maxims consist of advice on how to avoid any situation that is conducive to great suffering, such as love, hatred, the quest for glory, too great an attachment to the opinions of others, to money, etc. Schopenhauer therefore invites us to cultivate our strengths, what we have within us, and to limit our interactions with others, taking care, for example, to choose friends that would make good enemies, should things go wrong. It is therefore possible to hope to live a life without too much suffering. And this would be a legitimate hope. In order to avoid suffering, we must nevertheless remain vigilant in the face of the traps that the will could set for us, such as love or hope, and thus remain lucid in the face of the conditions of human life induced by the will to life. Finally, it is necessary to refuse any emotional excess by avoiding any situation likely to raise passions. Schopenhauer’s eudaimonology is neither a complete affirmation of the will to life nor its total negation; it is a careful and enlightened navigation of the space between the two. This in-between, as an existential and rational compromise, would thus constitute a legitimate practical hope in Schopenhauer’s eyes and could be summarized as follows: if one wishes to live “less badly,” one must keep the will to life on a leash. Only by doing so could someone avoid being blinded by the will. Thus, between the light of nothingness promised by the negation of the will and the darkness of a life that spontaneously and unreservedly affirms the will to life, we would be left with this gray area of practical hope: the moderate mixture of an affirmation and a negation of the will to life.

NOTES 1.

I borrow this expression from Claudia Blöser’s discussion of Schopenhauer in Blöser 2017.

2.

Since very few studies present any kind of complete or systematic analysis of the concept of hope in Schopenhauer, Ortrun Schulz’s book is an essential reference.

3.

It is important to remember that Schopenhauer’s will does not refer to the classical concept of will, which is often linked to the freedom of choice as a capacity, i.e., a faculty related to reason, or to morality and freedom, as is the case with Kant. Instead, the will, as Schopenhauer conceives it, imposes itself as a blind and mostly unconscious force.

4.

On the question of freedom in Schopenhauer’s philosophy see Zöller 2017.

5.

It should be noted that for Schopenhauer boredom remains a great evil which could bring someone into true despair.

6.

The French commentator Alexis Philonenko even went so far as to use Descartes’ famous quote “I think, therefore I am” to assert that in Schopenhauer’s case, it would rather be a question of “I suffer, therefore I am,” so inseparable is suffering from existence on Schopenhauer’s account (Philonenko 1999, 232–237). This position is similar to the one defended by Rudolf Malter, who asserted that suffering is inherent in the process of individuation, of the appearance of phenomena in the world (Malter 1991, 280–281).

7.

On the degrees of the objectivation of the will see WWR I, §25.

8.

By admitting that the intellect is something secondary in human beings, Schopenhauer admits that his position is marginal in the history of ideas (see WWR II, ch. 19, 209–210).

9.

Since the intellect does not interfere “directly in the organism’s inner workings,” Schopenhauer even considers it a “parasite” of the human organism (WWR II, ch. 19,

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212). Nevertheless, we might remember that the intellect plays an important role in self-preservation since it regulates our relations with the external world. 10. Note that, if the intellect is presented by Schopenhauer as a function of the brain, then the intellect, as it is itself intuited objectively, is the brain. The two concepts are therefore inseparable (on this subject, see Brunner 2021 and Batini 2020). Moreover, Schopenhauer clearly associates the heart with the will and the head with the intellect: “It is entirely accurate for the heart, this first mover [primum mobile] of animal life, to be chosen as the symbol, indeed synonym for the will, the primal core [Urkern] of our appearance, and that it should signify this in contrast to the intellect, which is identical with the head” (WWR II, ch. 19, 249; see also WWR II, ch. 19, 250; and Schopenhauer [1818–1830] 1985, vol. 3 [hereafter “HN III”], §23, 78–79). 11. The choice of heart and head is relevant, since for Schopenhauer the heart is essential in the affirmation of the human will to life, whereas the head is not. As a vital organ whose activity does not result from a deliberate choice—and which remains for the most part unconscious (as is also the case with breathing)—the heart can never cease its activity without death ensuing: the heart is therefore primary. However, the head, which is linked to cognition, can break off its activity without the will ceasing to affirm itself in the body: it is secondary. On the distinction between the head and the heart see WWR II, ch. 19–20. 12. Of course, once the metaphysical will of the world is individuated, objectified in our phenomenon (our body; ourselves), we have “our” will. But “our” will means nothing more than a specific way in which the metaphysical will is objectified in us, which in Schopenhauer’s case refers to the idea of character. The nuances of character that make one individual or another want this object or another remain superficial. In essence, we are all subject to what the metaphysical will wants, that is, life, and thus the preservation of the self and the species. When Schopenhauer evokes this will that wants in us, he refers indeed to the will as the essence of all things, which tends towards life. We can only free ourselves from the will through the negation of the will. So, if we don’t all have the same hopes (which could be explained by difference of character), we all have hopes, because the will as the essence of all humans tends to prevail over the intellect, regardless of the individuals. 13. It is not only hope that can distort our judgment. Schopenhauer tells us that love and hate can produce the same effect and thus prevent us from seeing clearly. In fact, Schopenhauer would totally agree with the common saying that “love is blind” (see WWR II, ch. 19, 229). 14. Schopenhauer even mentions the influence of the will on our memory (see WWR II, ch. 29). In this respect, the case of madness (Wahnsinn) is relevant. Schopenhauer describes madness as a process of censorship and repression: traumatic memories are buried and kept away from the intellect and are replaced by others, by inventions (see WWR I, §36, 213–218; WWR II ch. 32). On the idea of repression (Verdrängung) in Schopenhauer, Michel Henry’s text remains highly relevant (Henry 1989). 15. Indeed, Schopenhauer will clearly say that it is often only a posteriori that the intellect discovers the real motives of the will since it is not informed from the start of its “secret resolutions.” In the case of hope, it may happen that the intellect discovers the “projects” of the will along the way, but it does not have access to them beforehand and remains totally excluded from the “decision-making” process of the will in the “choice” of the object of desire. The question of how the will “knows” what it wants before we can know

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the object of our desires remains unanswered, as does the question of how the will “knows” which scenarios to discard in order to give us hope, before these scenarios become present to our consciousness, to the intellect. While Schopenhauer clearly raises the question of the unconscious and reveals its importance, this part of his philosophy did not translate into a clear system (see WWR II, ch. 14). 16. For Schopenhauer, satisfaction has no duration: “no satisfaction is lasting; instead, it is only the beginning of a new striving” (WWR I, §56, 336). And let’s remember this famous quote: “Thus, its life swings back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom; in fact, these are the ingredients out of which it is ultimately composed” (WWR I, §57, 338). 17. Schopenhauer is not explicit about the primary reasons for the advent of hope in human beings. He explains the “mechanism” of hope without elaborating further on the reasons for the existence of this phenomenon. However, we have good reasons to think that he believes it is a trick of the will to life to keep us alive. Indeed, there are several affects and even feelings that Schopenhauer describes explicitly as tricks of the will to keep us alive and preserve the life of the species. For example, the fear of death. If we are afraid to die, it is because the will in us seeks to affirm itself in life (WWR II, ch. 41). Another example would be romantic love, which Schopenhauer calls “sexual love”: we may believe that we are in love while we are only really being compelled to serve the reproduction of the species (WWR II, ch. 44). Hope may well be another ploy of the will to keep us alive, like the feeling of attachment to life. Not all feelings have such “psychological functions,” but this is certainly the case with love and the fear of death, and probably also with hope. 18. Schopenhauer himself recognizes as psychological phenomena those moments when the will prevails over the intellect. And among these phenomena, Schopenhauer also includes hope (see HN III, §134, 255). 19. It should be noted that the joy linked to hope remains deceptive for Schopenhauer: “In the same way, every lively pleasure [Freude] is also an error, a delusion [Wahn], because getting what you want can never be permanently satisfying, as well as because possessions and happiness are on indefinite loan to us from chance, and can therefore be recalled at a moment’s notice” (WWR I, §16, 115). 20. It is in this sense that I borrow the expression from Claudia Blöser quoted in the introduction. 21. However, in paragraph 68 of The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, Schopenhauer indicates that “despair” can also be a way to salvation, which shows the extent to which the loss of hope is necessary for salvation (WWR I, §68, 419–420). It is, moreover, very great suffering that acts most often, suddenly and directly, as a tranquilizer (Quietiv), and that leads to the sudden, but accomplished, negation of will. This is precisely why Schopenhauer sees suffering as a sanctifying force: great suffering can liberate us all at once. This is what he calls the “silver gleam” (Silberblick) of suffering (see WWR I, §68, 419). 22. Shapshay considers that Schopenhauer is not simply a “resignationist,” that his ethics of compassion is just as important as his resignationism, and that between the two different positions there is less a hierarchy than a tension or antagonism. Therefore, it is clear to her that “there are good grounds for hope” in Schopenhauer’s philosophy (Shapshay 2019, 34) and that it is time to read Schopenhauer also for what he offers for hope, starting, for instance, by measuring our chances of happiness, however thin, through his eudaimonology (93).

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REFERENCES Batini, Ugo (2016), Schopenhauer. Une philosophie de la désillusion, Paris: Ellipses. Batini, Ugo (2020), “Cerveau,” in Dictionnaire Schopenhauer, 76–80, Paris: Ellipses. Blöser, Claudia (2017), “Hope,” in Edward N. Zalta, (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring Edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hope. Brunner, Jürgen (2021), “Gehirn,” in D. Schubbe and J. Lemanski, (eds.), Schopenhauer Lexikon, 115–116, Paderborn: Brill Fink. Descartes, René ([1649] 2012), “The Passions of the Soul,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, transl. C. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 325–404. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/philosophical-writings-ofdescartes/passions-of-the-soul/BC0E116C92B0863FA1CAD5117D451E02. Henry, Michel (1989), “La question du refoulement,” in R.-P. Droit, (ed.), Présences de Schopenhauer, 296–315, Paris: Grasset. Malter, Rudolf (1991), Arthur Schopenhauer. Transzendentalphilosophie und Metaphysik des Willens, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog. Philonenko, Alexis (1999), Schopenhauer. Une philosophie de la tragédie, Paris: J. Vrin. Schopenhauer, Arthur ([1818–1830] 1985), “Berliner Manuskripte (1818–1830)” [HN], in A. Hübscher, (ed.), Der handschriftliche Nachlaß, vol. 3, Munich: DTV. Schopenhauer, Arthur ([1847/1864] 2015), “On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason,” revised edn., in On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and Other Writings, ed. and transl. D. Cartwright, E. Erdmann and C. Janaway, 1–198, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur ([1851] 2014), Parerga and Paralipomena. Short Philosophical Essays, vol. 1 [PP I], ed. and transl. C. Janaway and S. Roehr, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur ([1851] 2015), Parerga and Paralipomena. Short Philosophical Essays, vol. 2 [PP II], ed. and transl. A. Del Caro and C. Janaway, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur ([1859] 2010), The World as Will and Representation, revised edn., vol. 1 [WWR I], ed. and transl. C. Janaway, J. Norman and A. Welchman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur ([1859] 2018), The World as Will and Representation, revised edn., vol. 2 [WWR II], ed. and transl. C. Janaway, J. Norman and A. Welchman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur ([1860] 2009), “Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will” [FW], revised edn., in The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, transl. C. Janaway, 31–112, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schulz, Ortrun (2002), Schopenhauers Kritik der Hoffnung, Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Shapshay, Sandra (2019), Reconstructing Schopenhauer’s Ethics: Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zöller, Günter (2017), “Schopenhauer’s System of Freedom,” in S. Shapshay, (ed.), The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook, 65–84, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Hope and Faith Kierkegaard’s Call for the Self to Develop its Relationship to Itself ESTHER OLUFFA PEDERSEN (Roskilde University)

1 INTRODUCTION With a quick overview of the works of Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) hope does not take center stage; however, hope does play a crucial role in his understanding of what it is to become a full self. Kierkegaard wrote volumes to scrutinize concepts such as irony, anxiety, despair, and love.1 As an integral part of these thematic explorations Kierkegaard comprehended hope as the attitude with which the individual meets the world. So, for example, he examined Christian neighborly love in Kjerlighedens Gerninger. Nogle christelige Overveielser i Talers Form (Works of Love: Some Christian Deliberations in the Form of Discourses), and as an element of this investigation wrote a subchapter entitled “Love Hopes All Things—and Yet Is Never Put to Shame.” Hope, Kierkegaard emphasized, is subordinated to love, while “love takes upon itself the work of hope, or takes upon itself hope, hoping for others, as a work. It is itself built up and nourished by this hope of eternity and then in turn deals lovingly with others in this hope” (KW 16:239; SKS 9:248). The relational interdependence between love and hope displays how hope, as attention in the moment towards eternity, is enabled by love. As the subsequent analysis of hope will elaborate, Kierkegaard also discussed hope in connection to faith. In Works of Love Kierkegaard defined hope in this manner: “To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good is to hope, which for that very reason cannot be any temporal expectancy but is an eternal hope” (KW 16:249; SKS 9:249). This definition only pertains to the specific form of hope which is dependent upon love and includes eternity in its expectation. This eternal hope is different from temporal and mundane hope which, according to Kierkegaard, should rightly be understood as “a wish, a longing, a longing expectation now of one thing, now of another, in short, an expectant person’s relationship to the possibility of multiplicity” (KW 16:239; SKS 9:250). This separation between eternal hope and mundane hope is crucial, as I shall argue in the following. When it comes to offering interpretations of Kierkegaard there are broadly speaking two possible routes. The first consists in rational reconstruction, with the aim of exposing, in clear philosophical language, what Kierkegaard really meant (see, e.g., Bernier 2015). The other, which I will pursue, insists that Kierkegaard’s style of writing carries philosophical insights that are negatively affected if reconstrued into a consistent 283

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philosophical theory (see, e.g., Kosch 2008). Notably, Kierkegaard insists that we may only access the insights presented in his writings by actively engaging ourselves and our own existence. The performativity of the texts implies that Kierkegaard’s primary aim is to appeal to individual readers to reflect upon their way of leading their life in order to undergo a real change in self-understanding. This is prominent in his considerations on hope. Firstly, to learn about Kierkegaard’s understanding of hope we are forced to dig into various texts with complicated narrative structures that influence the views asserted. Secondly, the fact that we only come to learn about hope in Kierkegaard’s authorship by following scattered discussions in disparate writings, I believe, amounts to an appeal from Kierkegaard to his reader to examine one’s own life situation in light of the aspects of hope he discusses. Thus, Kierkegaard does not present us with a systematic explanation of what hope is; rather, he invites his readers to reflect on their own manner of hoping as they consider the performativity of Kierkegaard’s narratives. My argument relies on the following texts by Kierkegaard: the upbuilding discourse “At bevare sin Sjel i Taalmodighed” (To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience) (1844); Works of Love (1847); the Christian discourse “Det Glædelige i: at Trængslen ikke berøver men forhverver Haab” (The Joy of It: That Hardship Does Not Take Away But Procures Hope) (1848)—all published in Kierkegaard’s own name—as well as Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift til de philosophiske Smuler (Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments) (1846), published by Kierkegaard but attributed to the pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus; and the pseudonymous writings Enten – Eller. Et Livsfragment (Either/Or. A Fragment of Life) (1843) by Victor Eremita; Frygt og Bæven. Dialektisk Lyrik (Fear and Trembling. Dialectical Lyric) (1843) by Johannes de Silentio; and The Sickness unto Death (1849) by Anti-Climacus. I start with an outline of Kierkegaard’s stylistic experiments and the ensuing model of the self. From the notion of the self follows Kierkegaard’s criticism of hope, if “hope” simply denotes a wish for a change of fortune or for some future worldly result. The critique of hope as a phenomenon in the sphere of temporality and mundane life is contrasted with Kierkegaard’s description of hope permeated by faith and love. By way of eternal hope, Kierkegaard argues, the self gains an openness to life and a meaningful existence.

2 THE APPEAL TO THE SELF IN KIERKEGAARD’S STYLE OF WRITING Kierkegaard publicly acknowledged and was acknowledged as the author of all his pseudonymous writings. Beyond the obvious stylistic décor of Romanticism, the hermeneutical difficulties set up by means of the pseudonymous voices force the reader to ponder the question of interpretational strategies. Kierkegaard produced ambivalent texts that invite the reader to delve into the layers of meaning and orient herself in the choir of voices. Either/Or, Kierkegaard’s first publication as an independent writer, also instigates his use of pseudonyms and the indirect speech of the pseudonyms. Victor Eremita is the editor and publisher of a compilation of papers by an aesthete, “A,” as well as a diary by the seducer Johannes and letters written by Judge Wilhelm to “A.” The stylistic strangeness arising from the polyphony of voices and variety of genres mirrors our everyday encounter with a plurality of people with different opinions, encouraging the reader to evaluate the existential value and soundness of each pseudonymous voice. Either/Or is the most radical example, but all Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings challenge our interpretational strategies. The imbalance within the texts creates an ambiguity that affects our

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interpretations. As readers we must not only understand what each pseudonym states, but also assess whether these views merit approval or reproach, and we are thereby invited to mirror our own existential situation in the texts. In the discourses and books Kierkegaard published in his own name, we are not confronted with the hermeneutical instability of the pseudonyms. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard insists that the reader engages existentially with the communicative messages. In Works of Love Kierkegaard addresses “that single individual who first deliberates with himself” (KW 16:7; SKS 9:11). In this address the concept of hope is central, as it displays the existential wrestling with oneself that Kierkegaard demands from his readers. Consequently, Kierkegaard never only or simply argues for a position within the philosophical landscape;2 nor is he primarily seeking to develop and defend his own philosophical position. The central objective is to direct the reader towards the task of becoming a human being with a genuine self-relation.3 Kierkegaard insists that his texts may performatively assist the reader to see the possibility of achieving a change in self-understanding and life conduct. In a closing Appendix to Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard reflects on his use of pseudonyms: My pseudonymity or polyonymity has not had an accidental basis in my person . . . but an essential basis in the production itself, which, for the sake of the lines, of the psychologically varied differences of the individualities, poetically required a disregard for good and evil, contrition and exuberance, despair and arrogance, suffering and rhapsody, etc., which are limited only ideally by psychological consistency, which no actual factual person dares allow himself or wishes to allow himself in the moral limitations of actuality. — KW 12:625; SKS 7:569 By means of the voices of the pseudonyms Kierkegaard magnifies the struggles of human existence as they have perpetually unfolded in the history of humanity. As such, he does not claim originality as a creator of new theories. Rather, he insists that the importance of the pseudonymous writings “does not consist in making any new proposal, some unheardof discovery, or in founding a new party and wanting to go further, but precisely in the opposite . . . in wanting . . . to read . . . in a more inward way . . . the original texts of individual human existence-relationships” (KW 12:630; SKS 7:572–573). By contrast, Kierkegaard underlines that the discourses published in his own name express his opinions in a more conventional manner: “I am very literally and directly the author of, for example, the upbuilding discourses and every word of them” (KW 12:629; SKS 7:572). As such, they can guide us in understanding the rest of his authorship. Kierkegaard’s style of writing hurls the reader into reflections concerning the significance and values of the utterances in the sheer act of reading. He demands that the reader involve her or his personal standards of judgment to assess the prudence and insight of the views put forth by the pseudonyms and to read the discourses as exemplifications of struggles to attain a genuine self-relationship. This convoluted communication and appeal to the reader as a self are at the core of Kierkegaard’s view on hope. A direct consequence is that he does not present his readers with a philosophical theory of hope.4 Kierkegaard looks at philosophical treatises as devised by the understanding, which, he claims, too neatly deliver straight explanations that turn out to be “only a deception” (KW 5:164; SKS 5:202).5 A philosophical theory of hope would, according to Kierkegaard, deceive the reader by claiming to be able to

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explain hope as an objective phenomenon. Kierkegaard explicitly avoids systematic philosophical theories because he thinks they propose manuals for understanding life that function perfectly in the abstract but do not relate to a living subject.6 The philosophical system describes all elements of life in their graduations and differentiations, but only from a third-person perspective. Also as part of his alternative to systematic philosophy, Kierkegaard advances different tableaux of individuals ranging from figures taken from the Bible through classical literature and folktales to self-devised personalities who strive to come to terms with their lives. In these tableaux he examines ways of living as illustrations of genuine selfhood as well as expressions of anxiety and despair. Thus Kierkegaard seeks to turn the attention of his readers towards their conduct of life and question whether, in despair, they are avoiding confronting themselves with the significance of their lives. This insistence on addressing the reader as a self who ought to ruminate about what is important in life plays directly into Kierkegaard’s discussions of hope. The hope of mundane ordinary life is, from the existential perspective, despair as long as it does not rest in a genuine selfhood. On the other hand, the hope for one’s existence as a self, which also is a hope for eternity, is inwardly founded in a relationship to one’s self. Although this hope might not have any outward characteristics, it is a complete change in the self ’s relation to itself.

3 THE SELF AS A RELATION THAT RELATES ITSELF TO ITSELF AND TO TRANSCENDENCE Kierkegaard’s discussion of different forms of hope in human life is closely related to his understanding of the self, the term Kierkegaard employs to denote the human subject. Arguably, subjectivity is the major and hope the minor topic, and the question of how to become one’s self is at the core of all of Kierkegaard’s works.7 In The Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard outlines a model of the self. This notion of the self is crucial for understanding his analysis of hope, which in turn is central for understanding how Kierkegaard tries to illustrate the difference between despair and true selfhood. In the opening paragraph Kierkegaard, under the disguise of Anti-Climacus, asks and answers the questions: But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self. — KW 19:13; SKS 11:129 The self is, first and foremost, a reflective self-relation in which the comprehension of itself is at stake. Relating to itself, the self is opaque for itself. For what is it in the self that relates to which relation in the self? And what happens to these relations as they relate in new ways? The opacity of the relations increases the difficulty of coming to grips with one’s self. There is no foundation on which a self can stand and observe itself without relating to itself and thus changing itself. As a relation that relates to itself, the self is stretched out between opposites as a synthesis of infinite and finite, of temporal and eternal, of freedom and necessity. It can only become a self by acknowledging that it is not self-reliant but “established by another” (KW 19:13; SKS 11:127). The self as a synthesis has the “task to become oneself, which can only be done through the relationship

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to God” (KW 19:31; SKS 11:146). At the core of becoming a self, Kierkegaard thus finds the self ’s relation to God as a transcendent power beyond the reach of any human being. The divided nature of the human being complicates the self ’s relation to itself because the self is required to relate to its own inherent opposites. I may disregard one side of the synthesis or feel uneasy being stretched out between opposites that I cannot contain and, as a result, I may try to turn a blind eye to one or the other. Anti-Climacus examines such failings in the self ’s relation to itself as a plurality of different ways that the self despairs.8 Basic despair consists in simply not recognizing that one’s relation to oneself is a task. It ensues from the self attempting to live only in the outward world and is characterized as being “in despair not to be conscious of having a self ” (KW 19:13; SKS 11:129). The self tries to avoid its reflective and relational nature in order to live in an unreflective immediacy of mundane tasks and demands, and as such it develops into one of the two other types of despair as soon as the subject acknowledges its own reflective capacities. The first reflective despair takes the form of “in despair not to will to be oneself ” (KW 19:13; SKS 11:129). In the other the self is “in despair to will to be oneself ” (KW 19:13; SKS 11:129). In attempting not to be itself, the subject seeks to avoid taking itself seriously—a form of fleeing the actual and factual life situation in order to live in more interesting settings, which amounts to an aestheticization of life. It is mirrored by the other type of despair, in which the self seeks to be a correct self struggling to meet external standards and act in accordance with conventions. Whereas the first type of despair points to the potential threat of nihilism, the second draws attention to the actual threat of orthodoxy. In order for the self to gain a genuine relation to itself as an established relation it needs to steer between these two opposing threats.9 In the threat of orthodoxy, outer regulations given by social structures are allowed to take the upper hand and determine how the self relates itself to itself and to the God who has established it. The social order takes up the task of defining what responsibilities, duties and objectives should be accepted as ambitions of the self, who then in despair wills to be aligned with the social structures. Nihilism, on the other hand, is a worldview that scorns all values. Kierkegaard lets Johannes de Silentio describe the threat from nihilism in the beginning of Fear and Trembling: If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair? If such were the situation, if there were no sacred bond that knit humankind together, . . . if an eternal oblivion, perpetually hungry, lurked for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrench that away from it—how empty and devoid of consolation life would be! — KW 6:15; SKS 4:112 The double bind of the self-relation that transpires from the synthesis between opposites in the human being poses a challenge to every human being. Neither delving into socially created forms of meaning nor embracing nihilism can form the basis of a genuine self-relationship. Rather, the individual is thrown back upon itself in the task of coordinating the opposites of the synthesis as well as its relation to the power that has established it. The task of becoming myself solely depends on how I, as an individual, relate to myself, and whether I manage to steer free, on the one hand, from nihilism and,

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on the other, from orthodoxy. Kierkegaard describes this difficult navigation in the upbuilding discourse “To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience”: Not only did he lose his soul who was infatuated with temporality and worldly desires, but also the one who, indeed moved in spiritual concern, nevertheless energetically created only an illusion. . . . Not only did he lose his soul who callously seized the certainty of the moment, but also the one who ran aimlessly [paa det Uvisse] because he began with the uncertainty [det Uvisse] and shadowboxed in the air, since he himself was a fleeting wind. Not only did he lose his soul who danced the dance of pleasure until the end, but also the one who slaved in worry’s deliberations and in despair wrung his hands night and day. — KW 5:187; SKS 5:191 This outline of the task of gaining a genuine self-relationship provides the intellectual means to grasp Kierkegaard’s dialectical view on hope. On the whole, Kierkegaard underlines that articulations of hope stemming from a self who has not gained a genuine self-relationship, amount to different kinds of despair. The hopeful attitude of a person with a genuine self-relation, on the other hand, reveals exactly the value of such selfrelation as well as the value of eternal hope.

4 HOPE AND THE FICTIONALIZED TEMPORAL WORLD As a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, the human being is not a closed form but open towards the opposites of the synthesis. Becoming oneself implies being able to grasp this open form as a unity around the self. It is a constant struggle which cannot be halted by any outward means. Kierkegaard emphasizes that it is a significant achievement of the individual to accept the struggle of becoming oneself as one’s life task. It implies moving one’s awareness from worldly affairs to turn it inwards and read “the original texts of individual human existence-relationships” (KW 12:630; SKS 7:573). Hope in all its mundane forms is opposed to taking upon oneself this task of becoming oneself. If hope is merely a wish for new worldly possibilities, it exemplifies the basest form of despair—“in despair not to be conscious of having a self.” In The Sickness unto Death Anti-Climacus describes how the individual loses its sense of self in imitation of others: Surrounded by hordes of men, absorbed in all sorts of secular matters, more and more shrewd about the ways of the world—such a person forgets himself, forgets his name divinely understood, does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too hazardous to be himself and far easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, to be a number, a mass man. — KW 12:34; SKS 11:149 Such a person can very well be deemed a success in life: “he has gained an increasing capacity for going along superbly in business and social life, indeed, for making a great success in the world” (KW 12:34; SKS 11:149). According to Anti-Climacus this kind of despair is invisible from the perspective of social life because it “does not cause any inconvenience in life but makes life cozy and comfortable” (KW 12:34; SKS 11:150). It is the basest form of despair, as the individual who aptly adapts to all social conditions

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and criteria of success does not even notice that he or she is without a self. Such an individual can: be absorbed in all the temporal goals. In fact, what is called the secular mentality consists simply of such men who, so to speak, mortgage themselves to the world [forskriver sig til Verden]. They use their capacities, amass money, carry on secular enterprises . . . perhaps make a name in history, but themselves they are not; spiritually speaking, they have no self, no self for whose sake they could venture everything, no self before God—however self-seeking they are otherwise. — KW 12:34; SKS 11:150 Living with worldly success as the standard of one’s life nourishes a form of hope which aims at future possibilities that feed one’s social esteem. If things do not go as well as one had wished, wild hopes for changing one’s preceding life situation arise. One might hope to change one’s life by winning the lottery or by hoping that all plans for the future are accomplished without further ado. In The Sickness unto Death Anti-Climacus identifies this type of hope with youth and calls it “the illusion of hope. . . . The youth has illusions, hopes for something extraordinary from life and from himself ” (KW 12:48; SKS 11:170).10 Its counterpart is the adult who “is often found to have illusions about his memories of his youth” (KW 12:48; SKS 11:170). The illusions of recollection concern the lost happiness of youth, the good old times which are gone in seemingly illusion-free old age: “This fuimus, which is common to older people, is just as great an illusion as the illusions of young people about the future: they both lie and fictionalize” (KW 12:48; SKS 11:170). The illusions of hope and recollection are mirror images as both express a manner of fleeing from living in the moment. The individual flees the actuality of life either in the possibilities of the future or in the remembered bliss of old times. In such illusions the tension of the synthesis of the temporal and the eternal is dismissed by an imagined life in a fictionalized temporal world—the wished-for possibilities are thought up as evasions of the actual conflicts and problems in one’s life. An individual who lives in the illusions of hope or the illusion of recollection avoids the serenity of his life situation as he evades the actuality of life by means of the hopeful thought of the future or the wishful recollection of the past. Accordingly, Kierkegaard points out that if we are hoping for a future as a way of dispensing with our life history or a way of skipping the actuality of life we are indeed living in illusion. In the discourse “To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience,” Kierkegaard unmasks the youthful hope expressed in wishes for worldly success as a form of despair: Do we not scorn the person who sneaks his way ahead by unworthy means to power and might, the person who gathers gold and goods by gambling—if so, should we not also scorn a person if he became what he is by means of a wish? Youth is certainly commended for manifesting its boldness by its bold wishing, but this in truth would be the only wish worthy of praise: if the youth’s soul had the depth to wish that no wish might disturb his struggle in life with its humbling obligingness. — KW 5:190; SKS 5:193–194 Kierkegaard disdains the individual who wishes solely for betterment, worldly success and future achievements. He rejects mundane hopes if they are wishes that amount to

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fleeing from the moment and the struggle to relate to oneself. In the discourse “The Joy of It: That Hardship Does Not Take Away But Procures Hope,” Kierkegaard underscores how mundane hopes are a means to evade this struggle of self-relating selfhood: People continually think that it is the world, the environment, the circumstances, the situations that stand in one’s way, in the way of one’s fortune and peace and joy. Basically it is always the person himself who stands in his way, the person himself who is bound up too closely with the world and the environment and the circumstances and the situations so that he is unable to come to himself, to find rest, to hope. He is continually too much turned outward instead of being turned inward; therefore everything he says is true only in an illusion. The person himself maintains connection with the enemies, and the connection is: the hope of youthfulness. — KW 17:109–110; SKS 10:120–121 Kierkegaard aims to describe how we may try to flee the struggle with our self by dismissing ourselves as the locus and root of this exact struggle. In the Danish original Kierkegaard is using the pronoun man, which could be translated as “one” in English. The Danish original thereby underlines the anonymity of the description—it points to all humans and, reading the description, the reader must ask herself whether her life is captured by this description. The assumption that the outward state of affairs is to blame is a fictionalization that hinders us from realizing the genuine problem. We set ourselves an obstacle in the act of hoping to realize mundane ambitions. Instead of taking the task of attaining a genuine self-relationship seriously, we evade this struggle by filling life with mundane tasks established within the circuits of social life. As such, it is all of us, individually, who create, maintain and further develop the struggle and despair of the self. By hoping for outward success as a solution to inward tension we immerse ourselves even deeper in despair. Seen from this perspective, Kierkegaard’s focus on self-relation appears to only recognize the interior world of the self and reject any and all preoccupation with the worldly success in which most of us take an interest. However, such a reading would only capture half of Kierkegaard’s analysis of hope. It highlights the culture critique that permeates Kierkegaard’s writings as he strives to reveal the superficiality and insincerity of majority culture. This is an enduring theme, and arguably in the development of his authorship Kierkegaard turned his attention ever more to the critique of culture, as his ambition to disclose variations of mundane hope behind culturally accepted social roles became more and more uncompromising.11 An important part of this critique is the scorn of mundane hopes for outward success and ease of life. However, his separation of eternal from mundane hope is not created by differentiating between the objects of mundane and eternal hope but solely by the self ’s relation to itself in the act of hoping. Kierkegaard repeatedly accentuates how we must hope for this life, and as such eternal hope entails hopes with worldly content.

5 HOPE FOR THIS LIFE In the words of Judge Wilhelm in Either/Or, and in order to open a path for comprehending genuine hope, Kierkegaard exposes the incongruity of hopes which are only directed at worldly affairs. Wilhelm asks the receiver of his letter, the aesthete “A,” to consider what a vain deed it would be “if a person married only in the hope of a silver wedding and consequently hoped and hoped again for twenty-five years, when the twenty-fifth year

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came around he would have no right to celebrate a silver wedding, for he would have nothing to remember, since everything would have fallen apart in this continual hoping” (KW 4:142; SKS 3:141). The message is plain: if we only live in hope for possibilities that must be actualized in future situations then life itself is shunned, and even if the future possibilities are attained they will have no inner worth as they are only a husk of success in life. Wilhelm is seeking to convince “A” that in a marriage the couple acquires a relationship to time by living in recollection of life lived together and in hope of a shared future. He underlines how past and future experiences are intertwined in a marriage as lived life: “the individuals [in the couple] do not live only in hope; at all times they have hope and recollection together in the present. At the first wedding, hope has the same effect as recollection at the last [silver wedding]. Hope hovers over it as a hope of eternity that fills out the moment” (KW 4:142–143; SKS 3:141). Thereby Wilhelm highlights a manner of taking one’s existence seriously as a life that unfolds in actuality permeated by hopes for the future and recollection of the past. In such a marriage the individuals live their lives in the moment as though it was of eternal duration. Wilhelm’s ideal marriage exemplifies how the individuals in the couple achieve a genuine self-relationship in their relation to each other and to the synthesis of the eternal and the temporal. Their life together is satiated by hopes for their shared future that build upon their common past experiences and recollections and make the present stand out as a moment filled by eternity. This romantic description of marriage captures the positive value of hope. In contrast to the merely temporal hope of attaining good fortune in the future, Judge Wilhelm underlines that the individual who can let hope hover over her life as “a hope of eternity” in the present relates to herself as a self who can handle the synthesis of the eternal and the temporal in the actuality of living. The description of the content married couple is an ideal of a genuine self-relationship accomplished by two individuals in their relation to themselves as selves and as parts of the marriage. Judge Wilhelm underlines the importance of existing in temporal life as it is reflected in eternity by the self-relation, and he advises the aesthete “A” to turn to marriage in order to acquire such a relationship to time. As this description is made by the pseudonymous Judge Wilhelm, it could arguably just be a possible perspective on life which Kierkegaard himself does not endorse. More textual evidence is required to substantiate that Kierkegaard believes that hope pertaining to temporal worldly life is valuable. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard gives voice to Johannes de Silentio, who analyses the biblical story of the birth of Isaac and Abraham’s subsequent willingness to sacrifice him. Abraham is described as the father of faith and the book circles around the question of what it means to have faith. In the “Eulogy on Abraham,” Johannes de Silentio proclaims: Abraham had faith, and therefore he was young, for he who always hopes for the best grows old and is deceived by life, and he who is always prepared for the worst grows old prematurely, but he who has faith—he preserves eternal youth. So let us praise and honor that story! For Sarah, although well advanced in years, was young enough to desire the pleasure of motherhood, and Abraham with his grey hair was young enough to wish to be a father. Outwardly, the wonder of it is that it happened according to their expectancy; in the more profound sense, the wonder of faith is that Abraham and Sarah were young enough to desire and that faith had preserved their desire and

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thereby their youth. He accepted the fulfillment of the promise, he accepted it in faith, and it happened according to the promise and according to his faith. — KW 6:35; SKS 4:115 The faith of Abraham and Sarah kept their hope of becoming parents alive while they grew old. And Abraham had faith, as Silentio underlines, “for this life. In fact, if his faith had been only for a life to come, he certainly would have more readily discarded everything in order to rush out of a world to which he did not belong” (KW 6:36; SKS 4:116). Faith means to will to live the life given to one—and any claim that faith could be equated with wishing for an afterlife is dismissed: “actually it is not faith but the most remote possibility of faith that faintly sees its object on the distant horizon but is separated from it by a chasmal abyss in which doubt plays its tricks” (KW 6:36; SKS 4:116). Silentio rejects the idea that the content of faith amounts to wishing for a blissful afterlife in a similar manner as, in The Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus rejected the illusion of hope as a hope for the extraordinary to take place in one’s life by chance.12 Both are fictionalizations of one’s life. Thus, eternal hope, in order to hope for this life, takes its starting point in the acceptance of one’s actual life situation and is founded in faith as the individual’s basis for all beliefs, actions and expectations. The amalgamation of lived life, future hope and the momentary life situation makes up the core of faith which is reflected in the inner attitude of eternal hope. The faith of Abraham and Sarah made them open to the possibility of the good as a hope for the extraordinary, namely the hope to bear a child in old age. And this wonder, which outwardly is truly amazing, has its basis in the attitude of Abraham and Sarah who were young enough to keep their hope for parenthood alive. Though they hoped for something which, mundanely speaking, was impossible, they showed no surprise as it came true because, according to Silentio, they had faith that for God everything is possible. Their hope was eternal in the sense that in faith they related themselves expectantly to the possibility of the good in all moments of life. Thus their hope for the possibility of the good was equally active in all moments, before as well as after Isaac was born. There is a crucial understanding of hope at stake here. According to Silentio, Sarah and Abraham hope to become parents in old age. They have kept their hope young by virtue of the absurd, defying natural possibilities in the hope for parenthood in old age and thus defying human understanding. The content of their hope, to become parents, is worldly, and the fulfillment of their hope, the birth of Isaac, is a wonder. Eternal hope as the hope of Sarah and Abraham cannot be put down by worldly calculations. Nevertheless, when fulfilled against all odds it is accepted as the most natural occurrence. That this is an important aspect of eternal hope becomes even more palpable as Abraham is tested again by God. Bringing up Isaac, Sarah and Abraham take upon themselves the “duty to love the son” (KW 6:36; SKS 4:116). Nevertheless, God demanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac as a test of Abraham’s faith. Silentio makes every effort to describe the depth of Abraham’s love of Isaac and concurrently how Abraham hopes, as he embarks on the road to Moriah, to sacrifice Isaac. He hopes to fulfil his duty as a father to love Isaac while he also hopes to fulfil the demand from God to sacrifice Isaac. As such, his hopes are internally contradictory and cannot be upheld simultaneously as human possibilities in the understanding. This is central to Kierkegaard’s exposition of faith and the ability to hope eternally. The faith and hope of Abraham rest in a confidence “that for God all things are possible” (KW 6:50; SKS 4:141). Abraham’s twin hopes to fulfil his duty as a father towards Isaac and

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simultaneously to fulfil his duty towards God’s demand to sacrifice Isaac defy reason. He hopes eternally that his actions will be expressions of faith in God. While acting with the will to sacrifice Isaac and fulfil his duty towards God, he also loves Isaac and hopes to fulfil his duty as a father to protect him. Silentio struggles to describe how Abraham hopes by virtue of the absurd to keep the outcome of the situation open in his display of faith in God, namely “that for God all things are possible.” The intervention of God is seemingly no different to the wonders taking place in fairy tales, as the protagonist meets someone who, with the flick of a magic wand, eradicates all hardship. But this is not what Silentio tries to capture. On the contrary, he underlines that it is not the lucky result of the occurrences that assures him of Abraham and Sarah’s faith and ensures eternal hope. Rather, it is their ability to relate themselves expectantly to the possibility of the good—that is, their hopeful attitude in each lived moment—which discloses that their hopes are saturated by faith. We, who contemplate the story after it has taken place, can reassure ourselves by the result. But this retrospective assurance that the hoped-for result came true cannot be part of the actual living of Abraham and Sarah as they act. Silentio puts great emphasis on the chronology of the events and the subsequent narration: “if one is truly going to learn something from greatness one must be particularly aware of the beginning. If the one who is to act wants to judge himself by the result, he will never begin” (KW 6:60; SKS 4:155). While this might not be entirely evident in the narrative of Abraham’s and Sarah’s hope for parenthood in old age, it is explicitly underscored by Silentio in his contemplation on Abraham’s hope while he is prepared to sacrifice Isaac. The story cannot be explained outwardly as a wonder, as it is Abraham himself who is willing to sacrifice Isaac.13 Silentio writes: Many a father has thought himself deprived of every hope for the future when he lost his child, the dearest thing in the world to him. . . . Many a father has lost his child, but then it was God, the unchangeable, inscrutable will of the Almighty, it was his hand that took it. Not so with Abraham! A harder test was reserved for him, and Isaac’s fate was placed, along with the knife, in Abraham’s hand. And there he stood, the old man with his solitary hope. But he did not doubt, he did not look in anguish to the left and to the right . . . he knew it was the hardest sacrifice that could be demanded of him; but he knew also that no sacrifice is too severe when God demands it—and he drew the knife. — KW 6:36; SKS 4:118 How can we understand this? The outward explication will point out that it was only a test and Isaac was saved. Thus, we have a story of the fairy tale type. There is some intervention which prevents the terrible event from occurring. According to Silentio, this would not suffice to understand Abraham as he was keeping two possibilities open at one and the same time—his faith in God and his solitary hope for his life with Isaac.

6 THE DOUBLE MOVEMENT OF FAITH, ETERNAL HOPE AND THE POSSIBILITY OF THE GOOD In the first instance, Abraham and Sarah hope for a son in old age and their hope is fulfilled. In the second instance, Abraham hopes for his son to live while he is on the brink of sacrificing him in his hope to thereby serve God. Both hopes are fulfilled. The narrative of the first instance of Sarah and Abraham hoping to become parents in old age can be

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understood as a fulfillment of a wish, but the hope of Abraham to retain Isaac while being ready to sacrifice him cannot be comprehended in this manner. However, both instances are examples of the paradox of faith. Abraham’s faith as well as Sarah’s keeps hope alive despite its seeming impossibility. The double movement of faith enables such hope: Abraham had faith. He did not have faith that he would be blessed in a future life, but that he would be blessed here in this world. God could give him a new Isaac, could restore to life the one sacrificed. He had faith by virtue of the absurd, for all human calculation ceased long ago. . . . Indeed, if Abraham, the moment he swung his leg over the ass’s back, had said to himself: Now Isaac is lost, I could just as well sacrifice him here at home as ride the long way to Moriah—then I do not need Abraham, whereas now I bow seven times to his name and seventy times to his deed. This he did not do, as I can prove by his really fervent joy on receiving Isaac and by his needing no preparation and no time to rally to finitude and its joy. If it had been otherwise with Abraham, he perhaps would have loved God but would not have had faith, for he who loves God without faith reflects upon himself; he who loves God in faith reflects upon God. — KW 6:44; SKS 4:131 The paradox of faith is displayed here. It is a completely inward self-relationship in which Abraham at one and the same time relates to the infinite and the finite. He simultaneously fulfils an infinite demand from God and hopes for the finite life in a double movement of faith. The first movement is infinite resignation to the demand to fulfil to a duty. This first movement, as Silentio does not tire of highlighting (KW 6:42, 44, 45; SKS 4:129, 130, 133), is comprehensible by means of human understanding. In the second movement, Abraham leaves the understanding and its human calculations behind in order to reflect upon God. This, Silentio cannot do or understand and, meditating upon Abraham’s faith, his awe grows. Attempting to illustrate the paradox of Abraham’s faith, Kierkegaard lets Silentio deliver an ironic critique of Hegelian philosophy: To go beyond Hegel is [said by contemporaries to be] a miraculous achievement, but to go beyond Abraham is the easiest of all. I for my part have applied considerable time to understanding Hegelian philosophy and believe that I have understood it fairly well; I am sufficiently brash to think that when I cannot understand particular passages despite all my pains, he himself may not have been entirely clear. All this I do easily . . . . Thinking about Abraham is another matter, however; then I am shattered. I am constantly aware of the prodigious paradox that is the content of Abraham’s life, I am constantly repelled, and, despite all its passion, my thought cannot penetrate it . . . . I stretch every muscle to get a perspective, and at the very same instant I become paralyzed. — KW 6:42; SKS 4:128 There is no human yardstick to help comprehend how Abraham can simultaneously hope for Isaac and his life with Isaac and hope to fulfil God’s demand to sacrifice Isaac. Silentio describes the second movement of faith as a leap back into finitude by virtue of the absurd: “The absurd does not belong to the differences that lie within the proper domain of the understanding. It is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen” (KW 6:50; SKS 4:141). Eternal hope is living with “the paradox of existence” (KW 6:50; SKS 4:141) while relating oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good.

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The story of Abraham does not expose an ideal to be followed but illustrates the passions at work in faith.14 As such, the eternal hope of parenthood of Sarah and Abraham is similar to the hope of Abraham as he rides with Isaac to mount Moriah. The double movement of faith, Silentio explains, consists of infinite resignation and the leap back into finitude. With guidance from the understanding, we can perform the movement of infinite resignation: “what I gain in resignation is my infinite consciousness” (KW 6:35; SKS 4:142). The first movement of infinite resignation is “a purely philosophical movement” and, as Silentio explains: “Through resignation I renounce everything. I make this movement all by myself, and if I do not make it, it is because I am too cowardly and soft and devoid of enthusiasm and do not feel the significance of the high dignity assigned to every human being, to be his own censor” (KW 6:35; SKS 4:142). The first movement is thus a movement which we can perform while sticking to our human understanding. The second movement, on the contrary, is returning to finitude in order to receive that which, at the same moment, one has resigned. This is the movement of faith and the movement in which hope is kept alive by virtue of the absurd. The hope of Sarah and Abraham to become parents in old age is permeated by the double movement of faith. It is a hope which we can align with Kierkegaard’s description in the discourse on “Hope and Hardship.” Here he underlines how hardship in life procures eternal hope founded in faith. In such hope “the pressure continues but continually makes itself known inversely as hope, converts itself into hope: the pressure is concealed underground; what is manifested is the hope. . . . [T]here is . . . a pressure that elevates. The only person hardship can depress is the person who refuses to be helped eternally; hardship presses into the heights the person who wants it” (KW 10:118; SKS 10:123). Hoping eternally implies a readiness to accept hardship as a means to uplift life, and in the biblical story of Sarah and Abraham, the pressure that uplifts is palpable in the gift of parenthood in old age. The faith of Sarah and Abraham involves their readiness to accept the uplifting in temporal life. They rest assured in the possibility of the good.

7 HOPE AS THE SUBLIME IN THE PEDESTRIAN Faith in God is a basis for all beliefs, actions and expectancies. Faith makes eternal hope possible. Hope, on the other hand, is an attitude towards possible outcomes of situations and, as such, points to finitude as its arena. Mundane hope can be likened to a wish. We wish that specific events will take place to bestow us with socially accepted signs of personal advantage (e.g., a silver wedding, wealth, success). In eternal hope, on the other hand, one rests assured that one’s expectations will be met so that what happens is in accordance with the possibility of the good as expression of one’s faith “that for God all things are possible.” All singular hopes—if they are to be more than mundane hopes and thus versions of despair—are dependent on the ability to hope eternally, which can be likened to a generalized attitude of hope towards all situations that they contain the possibility of the good. As already noted, this possibility of the good depends on faith and the double movement of faith: resignation from one’s individual will and a leap into the finitude of actual life as the place to realize the possibility of the good. Intimately intermingled faith makes up a basis for beliefs, actions and expectations while hope pertains to one’s attitude towards the future. However, it is not discernable from the outside whether an individual’s hope

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is founded in faith or is a mundane hope for personal advantage. Even the person hoping cannot rest assured in any signs or warrants that her hope and her faith in God are genuine. Exactly this aspect of the self ’s opacity to itself is explored by Silentio as he repeatedly emphasizes that he himself is not able to perform the double movement of faith: As soon as I want to begin, everything reverses itself, and I take refuge in the pain of resignation. I am able to swim in life, but I am too heavy for this mystical hovering. To exist in such a way that my contrast to existence constantly expresses itself as the most beautiful and secure harmony with it—this I cannot do. — SKS 4:144; KW 6:50 While the first movement of faith implies resigning to a clear comprehension of one’s situation, the second movement is a manner of opening oneself up to the possibility of the good in spite of all impossibilities. In his explication, Silentio underlines that, as he cannot point to any “single authentic instance” besides Abraham, he “may just as well imagine him” (KW 6:45; SKS 4:133). This refuge in imagination, I believe, is Kierkegaard’s manner of pointing out that, however much we ponder examples, we will not learn to hope eternally or to have faith by contemplation. We must engage ourselves in the leap into the paradox of existence that is without theoretical reassurance and worldly aid. As Silentio points out that he does not know of anyone who has performed the double movement of faith he also highlights that there are no outer traits that will ensure us of anybody’s faith. Furthermore, the question of whether I have faith and therefore am able to hope despite the seeming impossibility of realizing my hope is an entirely inward relation which will have no noticeable worldly consequences. It is a matter of gaining a self-relationship in which I am able to bridge the gap between the infinite and the finite in a manner that makes me hope, all the while that I am firmly planted in the temporal. It is grasping the moment as the possibility for the good. The person imagined by Silentio is a “tax collector,” and though Silentio examines him “from top to toe to see if there may not be a crack through which the infinite would peek” (KW 6:39; SKS 4:133) he finds no such trait. “He belongs entirely to the world; no bourgeois philistine could belong to it more” (KW 6:39; SKS 4:133). Only his walk and manner of movement disclose him: “to be able to come down in such a way that instantaneously one seems to stand and to walk, to change the leap into life into walking, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian” (KW 6:41; SKS 4:136) is the mark of faith and eternal hope. The leveling of opposites so that these elevate the ordinary into the sublime is the mark of the tax collector. This corresponds nicely with the image of the pressure of hardship which uplifts the person who hopes eternally given by Kierkegaard in the discourse on “Hardship and Hope.” With this imagined example, Silentio makes clear that we do not have any criterion that would allow us to assert that certain types are lacking faith or are less prone to have a rich and profound self-relationship. The tax collector is a penniless man and still he “believes that his wife has this delectable meal waiting for him. If she has, to see him eat would be the envy of the elite and an inspiration to the common man, for his appetite is greater than Esau’s. His wife does not have it—curiously enough, he is just the same” (KW 6:39; SKS 4:134). He is able to hope for the good without regretting when his hopes are not fulfilled. And his hope for a great meal is completely worldly. In this manner, he contains in himself the opposites of the synthesis of the infinite and the finite without being torn in one or the other direction. He has managed to relate himself to himself in a manner in which he can endure the

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oppositions of the synthesis as two equal outcomes. These outcomes or possibilities of the future are given to him as his worldly life established by God. Silentio points out: “Most people live completely absorbed in worldly joys and sorrows” (KW 6:47; SKS 4:136). The ones who have only performed the first movement, the movement of infinite resignation, are “aliens in this world” (KW 6:47; SKS 4:136) because they live for the infinite. Their aspirations are for acquiring the content of their infinite ideals—and as such they are “in despair wanting to be oneself.” In contrast, the person who performs the double movement of faith is able “to change the leap into life into walking” (KW 6:47; SKS 4:136). The complete interrelatedness between ordinary temporal life and eternal splendor is stretched out in the double movement of faith by virtue of the absurd, as the tax collector with hope and confidence lives in actuality. The tax collector is open to the opposite possibilities in the moment in a manner similar to Abraham on Mount Moriah. When the expressed hope of the tax collector, that he will be served a wonderful meal, is not fulfilled, it does not taint his contentment. He is open to the possibility of the good in the moment without clinging to a certain result.

7 CONCLUSION The strength in the self to keep the possibilities open in spite of the sound estimates of the understanding, in spite of the infinite resignation and renouncement of what is desired, is what makes up the paradox of faith. In such a faith, hope is a crucial part of the person’s manner of relating to her own life situation, and this hope lingers on regardless of whether it is fulfilled. In the upbuilding discourse To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience Kierkegaard explains: So it was, then, that the young person went out into life. Fortunate the young person who did that! He went with the help of patience, not rich in wishes, not intoxicated with purpose, but in faith’s covenant with the eternal, in hope’s covenant with the future, and love’s covenant with God and human beings. And patience blessed the covenant and promised not to forsake him. Even though he lost the wish and the youthful purpose, he still would not lose his soul; if a person does not believingly aspire to the eternal, is not hopefully tranquil about the future, is not lovingly in peace and unity with God and human beings, then he has lost his soul. However lowly he is, however small in stature, however poor in talents, whatever his soul is more specifically, in itself and in its difference from everyone else’s, his soul nevertheless is preserved in whatever he lost and whatever he was denied. — KW 5:192; SKS 5:195

NOTES 1.

Kierkegaard’s first book and concluding thesis at the university of Copenhagen in 1841 is translated into English as The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (Om Begrebet Ironi med stadigt Hensyn til Socrates). In 1844 Kierkegaard published his sixth book under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufiensis, titled, in English translation, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin (Begrebet Angest. En simple psychologisk-paapegende Overveielse i Retning af det dogmatiske Problem om Arvesynden). In 1849 Kierkegaard, writing as Anti-Climacus, published Sygdommen til Døden. En christelig psychologisk Udvikling til Opbyggelse og

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Opvækkelse (The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening). References to Kierkegaard are given first to the volume and page number of the English edition of Kierkegaard’s Writings (Kierkegaard 1978–1998; abbreviated as “KW”) followed by the volume and page number of the Danish edition Søren Kierkegaard Skrifter (Kierkegaard 1997–2013; abbreviated as “SKS”). 2.

It is a remarkable trait of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre that he only discusses other philosophers in an indirect manner. Exceptions to this are The Concept of Irony, which was handed in as Kierkegaard’s final thesis at the University of Copenhagen in 1841 and had Socrates as its starting point, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. In both, Kierkegaard discusses Hegel’s philosophy at length and in the latter also Lessing’s aesthetics.

3.

In Works of Love Kierkegaard repeatedly underlines that this task is the most important and that it is a task set for each of us in our worldly lives (e.g., KW 16:151, 154; SKS 9:158, 162).

4.

Interpreters such as Bernier claim that it is possible to extract a philosophy of hope from Kierkegaard’s writings and have effectively done so. Bernier (2015, 88) underlines that he “will go further than what Kierkegaard intends and suggest that this definition [of hope] can be thought of as applicable to hope in general.” It is ironic that Bernier employs the phrase “to go further.” Kierkegaard himself applies exactly this wording in scorn for his contemporaries as they attempt to explain everything philosophically (see, e.g., KW 12:630, SKS 7:572–573). I believe such reconstructions miss the intention behind Kierkegaard’s authorship as he continually strives to distance himself from rational philosophical explanations.

5.

In the compilation of fragments called “Diapsalmata” in the first volume of Either/Or, Kierkegaard gives this demeaning description of the philosopher’s ability to write about life: “What philosophers say about actuality [Virkelighed] is often just as disappointing as it is when one reads on a sign in a secondhand shop: Pressing Done Here. If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed, he would be duped, for the sign is merely for sale” (KW 3:16; SKS 2:41).

6.

The critique of systematic philosophy is persistent throughout all of Kierkegaard’s writings. For a detailed analysis of Kierkegaard’s critique of philosophy, see Schwab 2015.

7.

Strokes (2010) offers a comprehensive interpretation of Kierkegaard as a philosopher of subjectivity.

8.

In The Concept of Anxiety (1844), the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis unfolds a similar analysis of the struggle of becoming oneself with focus on anxiety as the experience of sin.

9.

According to Rasmussen (2015, 236), this should be understood “as the overall agenda of Kierkegaard’s thinking.” Kierkegaard’s critique of nihilism and religious orthodoxy aligns him with classical German philosophy from Kant to Hegel, as Kierkegaard joins them in the “struggle to escape the dilemma between nihilism, produced by radical Enlightenment thinkers such as Spinoza, and anti-modern religious orthodoxy.”

10. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard as self-acclaimed author conducts a similar discussion (see KW 16:250; SKS 9:250). 11. Kierkegaard’s last writing project was the journal Oieblikket (The Moment), published the last year of his life. Here Kierkegaard attacked the Danish church and its preaching for superficiality and an insincere relationship to the truth of Christianity. The most detailed

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analysis of Kierkegaard’s cultural critique is, in my opinion, Nordentoft 1973, unfortunately only published in Danish. 12. My emphasis on hope as a hope for this life stands in contradiction to Fremstedal (2012, 53), who underlines that “Kierkegaard agrees with Kant, as well as with traditional Christian theology that the proper object of (general) hope is the Kingdom of God.” 13. Silentio is very explicit on exactly this point as he asks: “should Abraham’s receiving Isaac by a marvel be able to prove that Abraham was justified in relating himself as the single individual to the universal? If Abraham actually had sacrificed Isaac, would he therefore have been less justified?” (KW 6:60; SKS 4:156). 14. Numerous interpreters of Fear and Trembling have argued that Kierkegaard here promotes a divine command theory and, as such, Abraham is an ideal to follow as he shows obedience to God’s command (see Green 1998, 266; Tilley 2012, 146–147; Westphal 2014, 67). My interpretation is in line with Kosch (2008, 69) who underlines that “both sorts of reasons—inductive and phenomenological—for believing one has received a command from God are dismissed.” According to Kosch, what is at stake in Fear and Trembling is that we cannot learn faith from other persons but must invest ourselves. Silentio “has (unwittingly) conveyed the message that in order to survive the terrain of faith the reader must eliminate him [Abraham], along with every other example” (Kosch 2008, 77).

REFERENCES Bernier, Mark (2015), The Task of Hope in Kierkegaard, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fremstedal, Roe (2012), “Kierkegaard on the Metaphysics of Hope,” The Heythrop Journal, 53: 51–60. Green, Ronald M. (1998), “ ‘Developing’ Fear and Trembling,” in A. Hannay and M. Gordon, (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, 257–281, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kierkegaard, Søren (1997–2013), Søren Kierkegaard Skrifter [SKS], Copenhagen: Gad. http:// sks.dk/forside/indhold.asp. Kierkegaard, Søren (1978–1998), Kierkegaard’s Writings [KW], transl. Edward V. Hong and Edna Hong, (eds.), Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kosch, Michelle (2008), “What Abraham Couldn’t Say,” Supplementary Volume: Aristotelian Society, 82 (1): 59–78. Nordentoft, Kresten (1973), Hvad siger Brandmajoren?: Kierkegaards opgør med sin samtid, København: Gad. Rasmussen, Anders Moe (2015), “Self, Hope and the Unconditional,” in Sune Liisberg, Esther Oluffa Pedersen and Anne Line Dalsgård, (eds.), Anthropology and Philosophy: Dialogues on Trust and Hope, 228–242, London: Berghahn Press. Schwab, Philipp (2015), “Critique of ‘the System’ and Experimental Philosophy: Nietzsche and Kierkegaard,” in Katia Hay and Leonel R. dos Santos, (eds.), Nietzsche, German Idealism and Its Critics, 223–245, Berlin: De Gruyter. Strokes, Patrick (2010), Kierkegaard’s Mirrors: Interest, Self and Moral Vision, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tilley, Michael J. (2012), “Rereading the Teleological Suspension: Resignation, Faith and Teleology,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, (1): 145–170. Westphal, Merold (2014), Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith, Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans.

300

INDEX OF NAMES

Adams, R. M. 49f. Albrecht, Andrea 197, 199 Alciato, Andrea 196, 200 Allison, Henry E. 33, 237 Ameriks, Karl 263, 266 Amrine, Fredrick 266 Anderson-Gold, Sharon 67f. Anonymous 83, 90, 102, 149, 151 Anrich, Ernst 213, 220 Aquinas, Thomas 2, 22, 39f., 49, 51 Arnauld, Antoine 41 Arnim, Achim von 256 Arnim, Bettine [Brentano-] von 20, 239, 252 Augustine, Aurelius 39, 41, 51, 66, 120f. Autenrieth, Johann Heinrich Ferdinand 20 Auxter, Thomas 73f., 85 Azadpour, Lydia 225, 237 Bacin, Stefano 129, 138 Batini, Ugo 271, 277, 279, 281 Battersby, Christine 240, 252 Battiste, Marie 205, 209, 220 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 21f. Bear Nicolas, Andrea 209, 220 Beck, Jakob Sigismund 16f., 21, 71–86, 149 Becker-Cantarino, Barbara 264, 266 Beiser, Frederick 109, 113, 119, 121, 185, 195, 197, 199f., 240, 252 Benatar, David 49, 51, 120f. Benjamin, Walter 19, 121, 201, 256ff., 260–3, 265f. Berger, Benjamin 236ff. Bernier, Mark 283, 298f. Beyleveld, Deryck 196f., 200 Bidmon, Agnes 190, 196f., 200 Blenke, Erna 199f. Bloch, Ernst 45 Blok, Josine A. 257, 264, 266 Blöser, Claudia 9, 11, 21f., 48–52, 278, 280f. Blumenberg, Hans 266 Bobier, C. 49, 51 Boden, Margaret 109, 113, 121 Böhme, Jakob 170, 180 Bolzano, Bernard 20, 22,

Bonham, Louis K. 205, 220 Bowman, Curtis 85, 120, 122, 127f., 130–3, 135f., 138 Brand, Steward 43f., 50f. Breazeale, Daniel 121–3, 135, 138, 237 Brei, A. 49, 51 Brentano, Clemens 256 Brunner, Jürgen 279, 281 Buck, Holly Jean 44, 47f., 51, Buck, Theo 266 Buddeus, Johann Franz 4, 22 Butler, Clark 265f. Calvin, Johannes 39 Carus, Friedrich August 20, 22, 141, 151 Cassirer, Ernst viii, 199ff. Cataldi Madonna, Luigi 150f. Chance, B. 49, 51 Chateaubriand, François-René 219f. Cicero, Marcus Tullius 49 Chignell, Andrew 11, 16, 21, 37, 39, 46, 48–51, 67f., Clem, Stewart 66, 68 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 265f. Cone, James 50f. Couenhoven, Jesse 66, 68 Creuzer, Friedrich 19, 251, 255–68 Crusius, Christian August 41 Crowe, Benjamin D. 121 Dalferth, Ingolf 3, 22 D’Allessandro, Guiseppe Carmine 102, 105 De Boer, Karin 150f. De Vos, J. M. 43, 51 Descartes, René vii, 3, 6, 39, 269, 278, 281 De Sousa, Ronald 153, 162, 164 DiCenso, James 66, 68 Dieckmann, L. 265, 267 Di Giovanni, George xiv, 68, 85, 127, 138, 164, 237 Döderlein, Johann Christoph 95, 104, 106 Donndorff, Johann August 199f. Donougho, Martin 264f., 267 301

302

Dorra, Henri 264, 267 Dormann, Helga 241, 251f. D’Souza, J. M. 52 DuJardin, T. 48, 51 Eagleton, Terry 109, 121 Ebels-Duggan, K. 49, 51 Eckardt, Georg 197, 200 Eckel, M. D. 48, 51 Eckermann, Johann Peter 219f. Ersch, Johann Samuel 23f., 141, 151 Eschenmayer, Adam Karl August von viii, 18, 165–81, 224f., 235, 237f. Eschenmayer, Carl August (see Eschenmayer, Adam Karl August von) Estes, Yolanda 119–22, 127f., 130–3, 135f., 138 Ezekiel, Anna 241, 246, 250–3, 264, 267 Farrer, Austin 111, 120, 122 Feder, Johann Georg Heinrich 101, 105 Fénelon, François 3f., 23 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb viif., ix–xi, 12, 17, 21f., 101, 107, 109–23, 125–39, 201, 203, 209, 213, 223, 228f., 234f., 237, 240, 250 Flikschuh, Katrin 84f. Förstermann, D. Karl Eduard 101, 105 Forberg, Friedrich Karl 15, 17, 125–30, 132–8 Forschner, Maximilian 11, 22 Frankfurt, Harry G. 125, 138 Freier, Hans 236f. Fremstedal, Roe 49, 51, 299 Friedrich II 40f. Fries, Jakob Friedrich 14, 18, 21, 23, 183–201 Fugate, Courtney 49, 51 Gadamer, Hans Georg 206ff., 215, 220, 264, 267 Gallagher, M. 49, 52 Gava, Gabriele 41, 52 Gebhard, Walter 20f., 198, 200, 220 Gerber, Simon 21, 23 Germana, Nicholas 264, 267 Giesbers, Tom 198, 200 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 19, 25, 191f., 199, 212, 218, 231, 235, 239, 256, 260-3, 265f. Goldman, Loren 9, 23, 249, 253 Gombrich, E. H. 19, 256f., 259f., 262, 267 Gottsched, Johann Christoph 21, 23 Grafton, Anthony 206, 220 Grant, Iain Hamilton 223, 225, 237 Gravlee, S. 38, 52

INDEX OF NAMES

Green, Ronald M. 299 Grier, Michelle 252f. Griffero, Tonino 196, 200 Grimm, Jacob 33, 48, 195, 199 Grimm, Wilhelm 33, 48, 195, 199 Grossmann, Jeffrey 220 Gruber, Johann Gottfried 23f., 141, 151 Günderrode, Karoline von vii, 15, 19, 239–53, 255, 257, 264, 266ff. Gueroult, Martial 33 Guigniaut, Joseph-Daniel 264, 267 Gundling, Nicolaus Hieronymus 7, 23 Gutekunst, Katharina 163 Hailwood, Simon 235, 237 Hajduk, Stefan 196, 200 Hall, Götz 149, 151 Haller, Albrecht von 191f., 199f. Hamilton, C. 50, 52 Hanley, Ryan Patrick 4, 23 Hanson, Erin 214, 220 Haraway, Donna 49, 52 Hare, John. E. 50, 67f., 134, 138 Harrelson, Kevin 17, 126, 138 Harris, Roy 204, 220 Hartmann, Eduard von 17, 109ff., 116, 119, 122 Hartmann, Franz 149ff. Hass, Andrew W. 235, 237 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich viiff., xii, 12, 15, 19f., 41, 45ff., 109, 121, 165, 170, 177ff., 181, 207f., 212, 216, 235, 237, 255ff., 260f., 263–8, 294, 298 Heimerl, Joachim 241, 253 Heineccius, Johann Gottlieb 4f., 23 Heller, Friedrich Wilhelm 199f. Henry, Michel 279, 281 Herbig, Johann Christian Karl 21ff. Herder, Johann Gottfried 18, 184, 187, 190–93, 195–202, 250, 252f., 256 Herrmann, Kay 197, 201 Hobbes, Thomas 39 Höwing, Thomas 52, 149, 152 Hoffbauer, Johann Christoph 15, 17, 22f., 141, 144–52 Hoffmeister, Johannes 264f., 267 Hogrebe, Wolfram 197, 201 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe 202, 217, 220 Howald, Ernst 264, 267 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 18f., 203–21, 250, 252 Hume, David 26, 33, 39, 84f., 133, 192f., 201 Hunter, Ian 127, 138

INDEX OF NAMES

Insole, Christopher 10, 23 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich xi, 12, 26, 33, 138, 187, 190, 192f., 197f., 201, 210, 220, 223, 237 Jahr, Gottlieb Heinrich Georg 149ff. Jakob, Ludwig Heinrich 104f, 149 Jamieson, D. 50, 52 Jamme, Christoph 264f., 267 Jeffrey, Anne 117, 121f John, Matthias 149, 152, 200 Jorgenson, Allen 121f. Kanelos, Pano 205, 220 Kang, Ji Young 143, 152 Kant, Immanuel vii–xi, 1f., 7–19, 21–38, 40–5, 47–9, 51–69, 71–107, 113–17, 119–22, 125–46, 148–67, 169, 173, 175, 183–7, 189–91, 193–202, 209, 223, 231f., 234, 236f., 240, 242–6, 249–253, 266, 269f, 278ff. Kelsey, David 46ff., 52 Kerz, Gustav 102, 105 Kierkegaard, Søren xiif., 20, 49, 51f. 163f., 283–92, 294–99 Kleingeld, Pauline 9f., 23, 67f., 126, 139, 249, 253 Kloos, Ingomar viii, 17, 21, 90, 101, 105 Kneller, Jane 243, 247, 253 Knöpfler, Alois 12, 23 Korsgaard, Christine M. 82, 85f. Kosch, Michelle 116, 122, 284, 299 Koselleck, Reinhard 199, 201 Krug, Wilhelm Traugott 20, 22f., 198 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 242, 253 Lehner, Ulrich L. 102f, 105 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm x, 6f., 23f., 40, 101, 112, 117, 120, 122, 128, 160 Lenhossék, Michael von 20, 22f. Licher, Lucia Maria 240f., 253 Lindau, Hans 128, 132f., 135f., 139 Lobeck, Christian August 255, 257, 264, 267 Locke, John 39f., 52 Lohse, Bernard 116, 121f. Lüth, Christopher 218, 220 Luther, Martin 55, 66f., 116–19, 121f., 193 Lutz, Ralf 196f., 201 Maaß, Gebhard Ehrenreich 20–3 Maertens, [Carl Andreas August?] 21, 23

303

Malter, Rudolf 278, 281 Marchand, Suzanne 264, 267 Mariña, Jacqueline 66, 68 Marx, Karl 41 Matussek, Peter 199, 201 McCarty, Richard 155, 164 McGrath, Alister 66, 68 McKaughan, Daniel 50, 52 McKibben, Bill 44 Meyer, Regina 105, 141, 152 Michalson, Gordon E. 67f. Millán-Zaibert, Elizabeth 243f., 253 Moltmann, Jürgen 43–6, 50, 52 Momigliano, A. D. 264, 267 Moore, George Edward 131, 139 Morus, Samuel Friedrich Nathanael 95, 102, 105f. Moxter, Michael 163f. Muchnik, Pablo 68 Mueller, Karl Otfried 264, 267 Mueller-Lauter, Wolfgang 225 Müller-Vollmer, Kurt 225 Murphy, Jeffrie G. 73ff., 85 Muthu, Sankar 252f. Nadzam, B. 50, 52 Nancy, Jean-Luc 242, 253 Nassar, Dalia vii, 235, 238, 240, 243, 246f., 252f. Nees von Esenbeck, Christian Gottlieb Daniel 252, 254 Nicholls, Angus 266, 268 Nicole, Pierre 41 Noller, Jörg 162, 164 Nordentoft, Kresten 299 Novalis 19, 233, 239–44, 246–51, 253f. Nozick, Robert 113, 122 O’Neill, Onora 75, 81f., 84, 86 Otto, Rudolf 163f. Pace, Michael 50, 52 Palmquist, Stephen 68 Parthey, Gustav 93, 105 Pascal, Blaise 41 Pasternack, Lawrence 21, 49, 50f., 66–9, 76, 86, 129, 139 Paul, St. 41 Philonenko, Alexis 278, 281 Pinsent, A. 49, 52 Plantinga, Alvin 115, 122 Pöggeler, Otto 264, 268

304

Preisendanz, Karl 264, 268 Prunea-Bretonnet, Tinca 150f. Pulte, Helmut 197, 201 Quinn, Philip 67, 69 Rasmussen, Anders Moe 298f. Rawls, John 75, 81f., 86 Reath, Andrews 67, 69, 75ff., 86 Recki, Birgit 33, 196, 201 Reil, Johann Christian Reil 144, 150, 152 Reinhard, Franz Volkmar 14, 20, 23f. Reinhold, Ernst Christian Gottlob 20ff., 24, 126, 135, 231 Richards, Robert J. 235, 238 Richardson, A. 52 Richardson, J. 83 Robespierre, Maximilien de 41 Rohde, Erwin 264, 268 Roinila, Markku 6, 24 Rossi, Philip 52, 67, 69 Rüdiger, Andreas 5, 20, 24 Rydberg, Andreas 150, 152 Salat, Jakob 12f., 23f. Saul, Nicholas 239f., 254 Scarantino, Andrea 153, 162, 164 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph ix, xiii, 12, 19, 126, 166f., 171, 178, 181, 202, 213, 223–238, 255, 257, 261 Schenk, Günter viii, 105, 141, 152 Schiller, Friedrich von 202, 204, 209f., 221, 233–6, 238, 245, 250, 254, 256 Schlegel, August 256 Schlegel, Friedrich 250, 252, 254–57, 267 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 17f., 23, 153f., 157–61, 163f., 186, 188, 197, 199, 201, 213, 244 Schneider, Jost 190, 201 Schopenhauer, Arthur vii, 17, 20, 109f., 112ff., 119–22, 198, 269–81 Schreger, T. 13f., 21, 24 Schulz, Ortrun 270, 275–8, 281 Schulze, Gottlob Ernst 20f., 23 Schwab, Johann Christian 93 Schwab, Philipp 298f. Seban, Jean Loup 102, 105 Seel, Martin 184, 201 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 38, 40, 52 Sensen, Oliver 129, 138 Shapshay, Sandra 277, 280f. Silber, John R. 73f., 83, 86

INDEX OF NAMES

Smart, J. J. C. 113, 122 Smith, Adam 175, 181 Soret, Frédéric Jacob 220 Sorkin, David 212, 218, 220 Spalding, Johann Joachim xf. Speight, Allen 251, 265f., 268 Sperber, Peter 185, 197, 201 Spinoza, Benedict 38, 40, 129, 134, 230, 238, 298, Spranger, Edouard 212, 221 Stäudlin, Carl Friedrich 23, 87, 100, 103, 105f. Stewart, Jon 264, 268 Strokes, Patrick 298, 299 Sweet, Paul 210, 212f., 218f., 221 Szerszynski, Bronislaw 43, 52 Tieftrunk, Johann Hinrich 16f., 21, 87, 89–107, 149 Tillerson, Rex 44 Tilley, Michael J. 299 Tillich, Paul 107, 235f., 238 Thomas, Kerstin 195, 201 Thomasius, Christian 5ff., 24 Trabant, Jürgen 221 Unzer, Johann August 152 Urban, Wilbur Marshall 119f., 123 Vaihinger, Hans 101, 107, 135, 139 van Peursen, C. A. 198, 201 van Zantwijk, Temilo 152, 197f., 200f. Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August 150, 152 Voss, Johann Heinrich 255, 257, 264, 268 Walch, Johann Georg 4, 20, 22, 24 Wallner, Ingrid M. 77, 83, 86 Weischedel, Wilhelm 213, 221 Wenz, Gunther 102, 107 Wesenfeld, Arnold 4, 24 West Cornel 50, 52 Westphal, Merold 299 Wetters, Kirk 266, 268 Wheatley, J. M. O. 49, 52 Whistler, Daniel 225, 236–8 Wiggermann, Uta 139 Willaschek, Marcus 33, 48, 52 Willer, Stefan 190, 197, 199, 202 Williamson, George S. 264, 268 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 256

INDEX OF NAMES

Winter, Aloysius 99, 102, 107, 164 Wolf, Christa 239, 254 Wolff, Christian 6f., 21, 24, 151 Wolterstorff, Nicholas 49, 52, 67, 69 Wood, Allen 48, 50, 52, 65–9, 85, 121, 123, 137f., 162ff., Wood, David W. xiv, 119 Wübben, Yvonne 149, 152 Wuerth, Julian xiv, 83, 86

305

Yglesias, M. 49, 52 Zaborowski, Holger 120, 123 Zammito, John H. 149, 152 Zedler, Johann Heinrich 5, 24 Ziche, Paul 192, 196–200, 202 Zimmermann, Klaus 214, 221 Zöller, Günter 10, 16, 21, 24, 33f., 48, 85, 122, 211, 221, 278, 281

306

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

ability 1, 3–5, 13f., 21, 39, 54, 58, 75, 79, 116, 120, 132, 144–6, 148, 150f., 173, 191, 193f., 214, 236, 275, 292f., 295, 298 action xi, 2f., 7, 9–11, 14–19, 26–32, 35, 42f., 46, 48, 50, 62–4, 71f., 74f., 78f., 81–4, 89, 93, 95, 114f., 117f., 121, 125–37, 145, 149, 155, 157, 159, 161, 169f., 174f., 178, 184, 189, 194–6, 203, 209–12, 217, 219, 247, 255, 278, 292f., 295 moral/autonomous xi, 17, 29, 32, 74, 79, 89, 115, 125–8, 130, 132f., 135f., 155, 157 political/coercive 117 rational 26 of the soul 3 virtuous 10 affect 3–6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 17, 46–8, 50, 83, 91, 112, 118, 141–3, 148f., 155, 160, 189, 224, 269, 274–6, 280 aid 11, 16, 53–7, 59–67, 296 aim 2–4, 8f., 27, 29, 36–8, 47, 54, 59, 74, 79, 80f., 87, 89, 94, 100, 125, 130, 147, 165f., 173, 180, 206, 211, 213, 249, 288f. animals 12, 77, 150, 225 apathy 12, 43, 143 duty of 143 moral 12, 143 appetite 39, 49 see also desire asceticism xi, 116, 119, 121, 277 assurance 7, 17, 47, 81, 92f., 99, 249, 293, 296 atheism 17, 125–7, 130–2, 138, 190 attention 97, 110, 112, 146f., 151, 174, 283 attitude 5, 15, 18, 20, 30–2, 37, 39, 45–7, 97, 100, 109, 112, 115, 118f., 143, 156, 160, 162, 170, 176–80, 183, 187f., 195, 207, 233, 236, 283, 288, 292f., 295 autonomy 11, 74, 87, 89, 91, 116, 118, 125f., 149, 154f., 161, 173, 191, 204, 207, 211, 213, 215

beauty 7, 168–70, 176, 186f., 189, 246f., 261 belief xi, 6f., 11, 16–18, 21, 30f., 36–42, 44f., 47–9, 54, 65, 72, 76, 80–4, 110, 114f., 125–36, 147, 162, 190, 193, 198, 212, 224f., 255, 270f., 276, 292, 295 benevolence 14, 91, 98f., 186, 250 capacity xi, 1, 5, 13, 19, 54, 78, 92, 101, 145, 158–61, 167, 173–5, 180, 211, 220, 236, 244, 278, 288 causality 11, 17, 36, 72, 76, 79, 88f., 158, 160, 162, 170, 189, 192 certainty 3, 10, 13f., 16f., 19, 21, 30, 32, 37, 41, 45f., 50, 65, 100, 135f., 187, 190, 192, 197, 248, 288 epistemic 41, 187 moral 32, 65 theoretical 135 see also uncertainty choice 30, 55, 58, 82, 112, 114, 116, 119, 149, 156, 173–6, 179, 234, 278f. Christianity 41, 87, 90, 92–4, 248–50 circulus volitionis 16, 53, 57f., 61 citizen 82, 173, 213, 245 cognition 4, 6, 8, 18f., 26–8, 30, 39, 47, 56, 74, 76, 87–9, 91, 93, 97, 101, 145, 155, 163, 184, 186–8, 190–4, 197, 216, 242–4, 251, 269, 272f., 275f., 279 commensurability 9f., 17, 91, 96 of virtue and happiness 9 common sense xf., 155 community xii, 16, 53, 59–64, 67, 168, 174, 176, 209, 213, 215, 245f., 249f. ethical 16, 53, 60–3, 67 confidence 5–7, 14, 18, 21, 31, 37–40, 46f., 63f., 125f., 180, 183, 186–90, 192, 196, 292, 297 conflict 8, 10, 29, 72, 77, 81, 83, 133f., 136, 143, 171–3, 176f., 179, 208, 216, 245, 289 conscience 7, 71, 77–81, 83, 117f., 209 consciousness 6, 16, 25, 32, 88, 96, 154, 160–3, 172f., 177, 195, 199, 207f.,

307

308

216, 226–30, 233, 241–4, 251f., 265, 275, 280, 287, 295 moral 16, 25, 32 conviction 30, 32, 91, 93, 130, 135, 180, 239, 250, 269 cosmopolitanism 176 courage 6, 117, 226, 277 culture 12–14, 19, 21, 38, 43, 170–2, 174, 176–8, 203–8, 211f., 214, 217, 249f., 252, 256f., 260, 263, 278, 290 curiosity 6 death xif., 2f., 5, 15, 19, 98, 110, 142, 190, 239–44, 249, 261, 271, 279, 280 deception 9, 14, 20, 37, 101, 147, 270, 285 see also self-deception deficiency 188, 248 delusion 20, 65, 110f., 205, 269, 274, 280 demand x, xiii, 1, 4, 20, 31, 62, 79, 88f., 94–7, 100, 116f., 119f., 125, 135, 157, 161, 206f., 227, 235f., 149, 264, 285, 287, 292–4 dependence 17f., 31, 143, 153f., 160f., 167, 188 see also feeling, of dependence; independence; interdependence desire xf., 2–6, 10, 14, 20, 28, 38f., 46f., 49, 59, 63, 65, 72, 78f., 110f., 135, 142f., 145, 147f., 151, 155, 157f., 162, 172, 194f., 205f., 208, 216, 239, 246, 248, 266, 269f., 272–7, 279f., 288, 291, 297 despair xi, 2, 4f., 12, 20, 41, 43, 45, 49, 110, 117, 119, 240, 277, 278, 280, 283, 285–90, 295, 297 despotism 172f. disappointment 5, 13f., 38, 40, 148, 223, 270, 275f. see also hope, disappointed disposition 6f., 14, 46, 55f., 59, 64, 74f., 77, 79, 83, 205, 216, 259, 269 effort x, xif., 7, 10f., 20, 35, 42, 45, 47f., 53, 55f., 59–64, 67, 73, 112f., 175f., 179f., 191, 134, 145 cognitive 191 moral 56, 60, 63, 113, 118 political 45, 113 egoism 114, 120, 176 elpis 37–9, 43, 45, 47, 262f. see also hope emotion xiii, 3, 13f., 18, 22, 44, 66, 143, 146–8, 150, 153f., 158f., 161f., 164,

INDEX OF SUJECTS

170, 185–9, 193f., 196f., 210f., 215, 219, 278 end 8, 10–14, 18, 21, 31, 35f., 41f., 44–5, 57, 59–61, 63, 65, 71, 73–5, 77, 79, 81–4, 114f., 120, 125, 128–31, 136f., 144–6, 148–50, 156f., 165, 168, 173, 175, 207, 210, 270 common 59, 61 final 21, 41, 73, 79, 137, 156, 174 moral 41, 75, 83, 114 possibility of 35, 115 eschatology 16, 19, 37, 46, 120, 125 esteem 4, 147, 176, 289 evaluation 3, 13f., 94, 97, 104, 111, 240 evidence 33, 36, 38f., 42, 47, 50, 67, 71, 92f., 111, 121, 126, 235, 258, 291 evil 40f., 46, 54–6, 58f., 61f., 67, 109, 112–14, 116f., 120, 128, 133f., 166, 172, 176, 178f., 212, 274, 277, 278, 285 disposition 55 moral 59 natural 56, 58 propensity to 61 radical 46, 54, 117 excellence 7, 213, 217, 246 existence x–xii, 8, 11, 13, 16f., 26, 28f., 31f., 35f., 38, 40–2, 46–8, 51, 71, 73, 79, 83, 91–4, 98f., 102f., 109–14, 116, 118, 127, 134, 141, 159, 162, 166, 173, 177–9, 183f., 187, 191, 195, 225, 242–4, 246, 265, 276–8, 280, 284–6, 288, 291, 294, 296 expectation 2, 6, 10, 13–18, 20–2, 36, 37–41, 43–5, 47f., 50, 83, 91–3, 95, 99, 141, 179, 183, 194, 199, 224f., 251, 275, 283, 292, 295 experience x, xiif., 3f., 11, 14–16, 18, 21f., 26, 28, 30, 71, 73, 78, 80, 82, 84, 88, 113, 120, 145–7, 149f., 160f., 163, 183, 188, 192, 194, 80, 145, 194, 196, 210, 212, 229, 232, 234, 236, 240, 243–5, 247, 258–61, 270f., 276, 291, 298 failure 13f., 40, 60f., 117, 129, 263 faith 2f., 7, 9f., 14, 16–21, 25f., 30–3, 36, 38f., 45, 48f., 54, 56, 62–6, 80, 84, 88–96, 98, 100, 102, 104, 110–12, 115–19, 121, 127, 130, 132f., 160, 165, 167, 170, 183, 184–90, 192f., 197–9, 210, 235, 239f., 249, 251, 262, 283f., 291–7, 299

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

fatalism 115 fear 3, 5, 7f., 13, 22, 38, 40f., 44, 47, 59, 61, 65, 80, 83, 93, 117f., 143, 151, 155, 158, 162, 188, 194f., 212, 226, 241, 272, 275, 280, 284, 287, 291, 299 see also feeling feeling 6, 13, 15, 17f., 39, 113, 142f., 145, 149f., 153–6, 158–62, 167, 169, 172, 183, 185–90, 193–7, 199, 207, 215f., 236, 239, 241, 243, 259, 265, 280 of the beauty/sublime 186, 189, 197 comprehensive 18, 183, 187, 195f. of deficiency 188 of dependence 17, 153f., 161, 186, 188; see also dependence empirical/non-empirical 18, 153f. of freedom 161 of hope 153f., 159, 161 of the infinite 160 meta-feelings 194f. moral 143, 155f., 159, 162 rational 155 of reason 154 of religion 157, 160 of respect 18, 153–5, 158, 161f., 186 of self 172 of trust 39; see also confidence see also respect force 8, 17, 19, 43, 59, 62f., 79f., 94, 98f., 118, 120, 129, 141, 148, 155, 166f., 171f., 178, 185, 191–3, 208f., 211, 215–19, 226, 230–2, 235, 242f., 245–8, 262f., 270f., 273–6, 278, 280, 284 fortune 11, 126, 128, 138, 143, 148, 257, 276, 284, 290f. friendship 7, 60, 176, 240 fulfillment 80, 92, 95, 97–9, 131, 176, 205f., 208 future 1f., 4–10, 13f., 16–21, 29–32, 38–45, 47–9, 71, 94, 96, 98f., 109–12, 117, 129, 131, 136, 141–3, 146, 165, 170, 176f., 183–5, 188–98, 205, 223–5, 230–2, 234, 247, 249, 251, 263, 271f., 284, 289, 291, 293–5, 297 good xf., 2–9, 11, 16f., 20f., 23, 29, 31f., 36–48, 50, 53–8, 60f., 65f., 71–84, 89f., 92, 98f., 111–13, 116–21, 125–30, 132–7, 143f., 154, 156f., 161,

309

166, 172, 176, 178–80, 183, 186f., 192, 197, 245, 269, 272, 274, 277f., 280, 283, 285, 289, 291–7 complete 11 highest 5, 7, 9, 16, 23, 29, 31f., 36, 38, 40–2, 44f., 48, 53, 60–2, 65f., 71–84, 89f., 92, 96, 125, 128–30, 135, 137, 143f., 154, 156f., 161 happiness xi, 2–5, 7–11, 13f., 17, 26, 28f., 31, 35f., 40, 44, 72–7, 79f., 83f., 87, 89, 91–6, 99f., 103, 110–13, 128, 142–4, 146–50, 156–8, 173, 176, 180, 210f., 215, 270f., 177, 280, 289 health 13f., 22, 49, 57, 59f., 63, 99, 176, 199, 211, 216f., 236, 246 history xii, 2, 12, 17–19, 21, 40–3, 46, 75, 112f., 118, 131, 133, 165–71, 173–5, 177–80, 199, 206f., 210, 214, 246, 248f., 252, 256, 260, 262f., 265, 289 natural 43, 199, 246 universal 133, 171, 173f. hope x–xiii, 1–22, 25, 27–31, 35–50, 53, 56–8, 60, 62–7, 71, 80–4, 87, 89–103, 109–21, 130, 133, 135–7, 141–4, 146–51, 153–62, 165f., 173f., 178–80, 183–6, 188–90, 192–8, 203–6, 208, 211, 213f., 116–18, 223–5, 228, 230, 234f., 239f., 242–6, 248–51, 256, 260, 262f., 269–80, 283–6, 288–99 absolute 62 conditional 57 degree of 6f., 21 disappointed 5, 13, 148, 270, 276; see also disappointment driving/resting 20 for education 205f. epistemological 240, 242f. eternal 186, 283f., 288, 290, 292–6 euphoric 46 for future life 99 genuine 20, 290 grounds for 112 irrational 5 moral 11f., 44, 48f., 116, 240, 245f. mundane 284, 290–3; see also marriage nature of 60, 153 ontological 240, 246–8 as passion 2f. political 240, 248–50 rational 10f., 44 religious 11, 14, 21, 48, 53f., 59, 62, 64f.

310

as theological virtue 2f. true 7 hopelessness 263, 270–2 human being xi, 1, 7f., 12–14, 17f., 43, 47, 55–62, 64f., 71–3, 75, 77–9, 81–4, 87, 91–5, 97–100, 129, 133, 136, 144f., 150, 153–5, 159f., 162, 165f., 168, 170, 172–7, 179f., 186–8, 191, 193–5, 207f., 211, 215–19, 240–2, 244–7, 250f., 271–3, 276, 278, 280, 285–8, 295, 297 humanity 19, 43, 48, 59f., 67, 73, 77, 81, 98, 114, 176f., 203, 205–8, 217f., 246, 271, 285 humankind x, 18, 77, 174, 205–8, 211, 216, 218, 246, 287 identity x, xii, 28, 167, 178, 208, 229, 240, 255 ignorance 57, 135, 190, 243 imagination 5f., 8, 15, 142, 144–8, 150, 194, 208, 215, 233, 263, 296 immaturity 17, 146 improvement 1, 9, 13–15, 17, 35f., 40, 55f., 66f., 95f., 99, 103, 113, 142, 174, 176, 180, 189, 191, 207, 240 imputation 64, 149 incentive (Triebfeder) 10, 57, 80, 128, 142, 153–7, 162f., 216 inclination 9, 11, 41, 59, 61, 78, 134, 142, 149, 155f., 158f., 162, 218, 269, 273f., 276 malignant 59 independence 104, 172, 211 injustice 42, 5, 133f. see also justice instinct 8, 10f., 21, 113, 136, 137, 142, 207, 265, 270, 273, 276 intellect xi, 1, 3f., 6, 13f., 17, 20f., 72, 78, 103, 126, 136, 155, 160, 162f., 166–9, 172, 203–9, 211, 213, 215, 217, 227f., 236, 255f., 264, 269f., 272–80, 288 interdependence 150, 283 interest 1, 8–11, 15–17, 27–32, 40–2, 44, 53–62, 66, 72, 76f., 87–9, 92f., 97f., 100, 109, 117, 120, 125–7, 141–4, 147, 149, 153, 156, 162, 165, 183f., 195, 203–10, 212, 216, 218, 223, 236, 244f., 255–7, 260f., 263, 265f., 287, 290 intuition 21, 26, 88, 145, 154f., 158–60, 163, 199, 227, 228, 243f., 253, 265

INDEX OF SUJECTS

illusion 20, 63, 65, 88, 101, 110, 230, 245, 269, 273f., 276f., 288–90, 292 irony xiii, 228, 234, 283, 297f. joy 1–3, 6, 9, 13f., 39, 45–7, 50, 76, 118, 142, 172, 216, 233f., 243, 249, 252, 269, 272, 274–7, 280, 284, 290, 294, 297 justice 36, 40–2, 45, 50, 81f., 84, 95, 98, 119, 133f., 136, 158f., 206, 246f. see also good, highest love 2–5, 7, 12, 14, 17, 19, 41, 50, 91f., 94–7, 99f., 102, 104, 112f., 119f., 147f., 160, 184–6, 188f., 197, 239–43, 246f., 251, 262, 274, 279f., 283–5, 292–4, 297f. madness 17, 141, 143–8, 150, 279 marriage 20, 60, 210, 291 maturity 17, 143, 146, 149 means 2f., 5, 10f., 14, 20f., 28, 31, 35, 47, 64, 80, 112, 115, 145f., 150, 157, 207, 210, 290 memory xii, 21, 146, 150, 230, 236, 244, 279 mood 17, 73, 75, 195, 231 nature 1, 7–19, 21, 28f., 32, 43f., 54, 60f., 65, 66, 71, 76–81, 83, 91f., 98f., 110, 114–16, 119–21, 132–4, 136, 142, 144, 153, 155, 159f., 162, 166–72, 174, 176f., 180, 184, 191f., 194f., 197, 199, 208, 210f., 215, 217–19, 223–37, 240f., 245f., 248f., 256–9, 262f., 265, 270, 272, 274, 276, 287 objectivity 8, 82, 129, 141, 270 optimism 5, 16f., 36–41, 43–5, 50, 72, 109–11, 113f., 116, 118, 125, 128, 134, 232, 240, 270 outcome x, 2, 11, 15, 17f., 20, 25, 27–9, 31, 35–40, 42, 45f., 48, 50, 58, 88, 136, 172, 204, 212, 247–9, 293, 295, 297 pain 17, 78, 84, 112–14, 116, 131, 142, 147, 195, 242, 270f., 274, 280, 294, 296 passion 2–4, 6, 39, 48f., 142f., 148, 206, 209, 245, 269, 274f., 278, 280, 287, 294, 295 peace 61, 110, 134, 142, 172–4, 179f., 188, 249f., 290, 297 perfection 3, 6f., 10, 13, 19, 21, 73, 81f., 84, 89, 97, 142, 144–6, 189, 203, 205, 207, 210, 216f., 242, 248

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

divine 7 moral 10, 16, 21, 73, 81f., 84, 89, 97, 142, 144, 146, 189, 203 physical 142, 146 personality xii, 77, 93, 96, 114, 175, 241, 245 pessimism 16f., 19f., 35–7, 42–4, 109–13, 116–19, 126, 128, 133, 136, 269f. piety 56, 62–4, 92, 99, 103, 160f., 186, 193, 197 pleasure 4, 6, 13f., 17, 22, 57, 78, 84, 113f., 116, 118, 142, 149, 150, 155, 162, 172, 186, 192, 195, 245, 252, 273f., 280, 288, 291 possibility xf., 6, 10f., 14f., 20, 35, 38–40, 42, 46–9, 58, 62, 67, 71, 73, 75f., 80–3, 88f., 93, 96, 103, 110, 115, 117, 129, 134, 136, 137, 145, 150, 154, 161, 166–70, 173–5, 178–80, 191, 203, 205, 209f., 215f., 223, 225, 227, 230, 232–4, 236f., 240, 242–5, 263, 270, 276, 277, 283, 285, 292–7 probability 5, 31, 37–9, 45f., 151, 273, 275 progress 2, 10–12, 14f., 18f., 41–4, 59, 75, 81, 84, 97, 113, 116, 133, 167f., 170, 174–6, 179f., 189, 206f., 216, 219, 223, 228, 246, 249, 251, 265 providence 18, 54, 92f., 114–16, 118, 165f., 173f., 179f. reality 5, 7, 14, 22, 49, 88f., 96–8, 111, 132, 145–7, 154, 158, 166f., 170, 189, 210, 228, 233, 273, 276 reliability 4, 8, 145f., 191 reward 10, 74, 93, 98, 128, 130, 132, 134, 157 sadness xiii savior/salvation 7, 46, 59, 110, 112, 117f., 120, 127, 251, 270, 276f., 280 satisfaction x, 5f., 8, 10f., 64, 77, 110f., 142f., 147f., 159, 184, 224, 246, 270, 274, 276, 280 security 59, 172f. self-cognition 186 self-consciousness 160f., 163, 172f., 199, 208, 216 self-control 6, 143, 148 self-cultivation 19 self-deception 14, 37, 44, 101, 147, 205 self-interest 10, 54f., 57–62, 61, 93, 209, 245 self-legislation 87f., 91f., 173 self-love 3f., 92, 147 self-relation 285–8, 290f., 294, 296

311

sensation 4, 18, 21f., 84, 117, 142f., 172, 194f., 241f. senses 4, 22, 71, 144–8, 150f., 155, 158, 162, 170, 229, 243, 258, 263 skepticism 5, 40, 126, 133, 136, 190 state/status xi, 2–4, 6–11, 13f., 17f., 22, 25, 28, 30, 36, 38, 40, 44–6, 55, 57, 59, 61f., 64, 66f., 96f., 104, 112–15, 117, 141–50, 155f., 162, 171, 183, 186f., 189f., 193–7, 230, 233, 240, 244, 269, 274f. striving 4, 6f., 28f., 42, 61, 73f., 79, 83, 98f., 110, 117, 156, 245, 247, 259, 280 sublime 136, 186f., 189, 197, 260f., 295f. success 20f., 28, 45, 47, 59–61, 117, 119, 121, 131f., 168, 171, 174f., 179, 187f., 204f., 210, 248, 250, 288–91, 295 suffering 15, 45, 113, 120, 147, 240, 270f., 274, 276–8, 280, 285 symbol 19, 66, 255–65, 279 trust xif., 6, 17, 36f., 39f., 48, 50, 61, 92f., 98f., 115, 117f., 166, 179, 186f. truth 57, 80, 90, 96, 102, 111, 114, 130–2, 135, 145, 160, 168–71, 173, 176, 187–7, 189, 197, 207, 219, 231, 235, 246f., 259, 265, 289, 298 uncertainty xi, 1, 9, 49, 83, 165, 183, 192, 247, 249–51, 288 understanding 2–9, 12, 14–16, 18–21, 25f., 45, 65, 67, 72, 80, 88f., 92, 101, 110, 128, 141–50, 155, 166, 170, 174, 176, 180, 184f., 189–91, 193–7, 206–8, 215f., 218, 223, 240f., 249, 257, 259, 261, 269, 272, 283, 284–6, 292, 294f., 297 see also intellect value x, xiif., 3, 17, 38, 56–8, 64, 82, 111, 113f., 120, 173, 176, 179, 203, 207, 225, 241, 249, 259, 284f., 287f., 291 virtue 2f., 6–10, 16, 36, 39, 45, 50, 62, 72–6, 79f., 83f., 92, 113, 115, 117, 120f., 125f., 128, 132, 143–5, 149f., 168–70, 172, 176, 179, 185f., 192f., 210, 236, 245–7, 252, 292–5, 297 see also apathy, moral wellbeing 1, 49, 60, 92, 173, 274 willing/will 3–11, 14, 20f., 26, 28–32, 40, 47f., 54f., 62–4, 71, 73, 76, 78f., 81,

312

84, 88, 91, 93f., 96, 104, 112, 119, 129, 143, 149, 155–8, 162, 169, 170, 270–80, 291, 293 world xi, 2, 7, 9–12, 16–18, 20f., 26, 28–31, 40–3, 45f., 48, 57, 60, 72, 74f., 77, 79f., 82–4, 88–91, 93, 97f., 109–16, 118–21, 125–38, 145f., 165–71, 173–80, 189, 196, 207–9, 211, 213–15, 219, 223f., 226–30, 233f.,

INDEX OF SUJECTS

237, 239–52, 255–8, 261–3, 269–74, 276–80, 283f., 287–94, 296f. worth 11, 14, 26, 28, 40f., 45, 49, 53, 59, 63, 67, 72f., 75, 79f., 84, 89, 91–3, 95f., 98f., 103, 109, 113, 126, 128, 146, 156, 157, 162, 174, 179, 216, 243, 249, 255, 257, 259, 264, 289, 291 worthiness 11, 26, 40, 45, 67, 72, 75, 79, 89, 91–3, 95f., 98f., 156f.